Re:Statistical Lies...
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've heard of the book, but have not actually read it personally. I remember reading something in 4th grade or thereabouts that talked about how advertisers used numbers to make their product seem better with things like 3 out of 4 doctors surveyed, etc.
Also, there is a popular quote that goes "Lies, damn lies, and statistics".
Similar to the article, there is a strange number game that was done a while back when the SARS "epidemic" hit the world. A total of about 850 people died from the thing, yet annually 10,000 or so people die from influenza. SARS is an epidemic, influenza not.
However, people have heard of influenza and not SARS, so I guess it makes for better headlines.
i really would like to have a chance to confront these disguisting people and try to make sense of their thought process...
feel free to do a whois query or whatever and if they are in the US and you have free long distance or whatnot, give them a call. They really appreciate the feedback:)
Actually, the gotcha with the gateway is the $100 rebate and the $99 shipping (no shipping with the Apple). So the grand total for that gateway will be $598.99 w/o the $100 you get back after a while to make the total of $498. Back to the Mac price.
Pluses with Gateway:
- A huge ass bulky monitor.
minuses with Gateway:
- Windows XP home edition, a more reasonable version of XP will cost you extra - You need to buy extra software to make it work (virus scanner, and whatever else, don't use Windows) - Its a gateway
Faking was unnecessary. The public was already emotionally distressed after 9/11, and as your sig implies, the popular opinion was that the war was due to 9/11.
Wow. Even if that were true, which I wouldn't know because I didn't read it, nor will I
Interesting.
it would only be relevant to the conversation currently underway if you'd presented it to Bush two and half years ago and he'd used it as the justification then.
Its easiest to think of nations as if they were individuals. So a war is like a fight between individuals. What do most fights that you know of happen over? Property disputes, money disputes, and ideology disputes (religion, politics, all that jazz).
Now I believe that Bush had been told about this little incident. I'm sure that Clinton knew it while he was still in office.
Now lets think rationally about what reasons we had to go to war with Iraq. The WMD thing. Sounds good, I almost bought it, especially after Blaire's comments on the matter at the time (honestly, I did buy the "reasons" but I did not believe that they warranted a war). I mean come on, these WMDs, if they did exist had existed for many years in many different countries. Many are sold by either America, or American companies, but that is a different story (yes I know that China and Russian weapons are popular as well). I mean, a war against a country half way around the world to prevent possible terrorist attacks, being that the previous terrorist attack was accomplished with airplanes and box cutters. Does this at all make sense? Keep in mind, that the previous major terrorist attack in this nation was done with diesel fuel and fertilizer (Oklahoma City bombing). To my knowledge, I've never heard of a WMD attempted to be used in a terrorist attack, and I've heard of plenty of car bombs, pipe bombs, airplane hijackings, etc, etc. But, sure, if these bad people got hold of a WMD, I guess that is the logical progression from all of the previous attacks.
Now, still keep in mind that we are simplifying a nation as an individual. Lets think of "liberating" Iraq as a reason. That sounds noble. But I cannot think of a single example where an individual has physically beat the shit out of someone else with great suffering to themselves in the process in order to be a nice guy and help them out. Maybe I'm wrong. A parent can physically punish its child which causes some distress to the parent as well, but this does not really happen when the child is grown and can and will physically retaliate.
Now lets consider the economic edge. Hmm, this makes a little more sense. If someone is doing something to me to fuck me out of money from now to the end of the foreseeable future, I would kick some ass. Especially if others know of what is going on, and could do the same thing like the first guy and fuck me harder. This is very natural behavior. As for me, I think its understandable, but I also think that we as a nation simply need to pay our bills and focus on what is going on here at home. I believe that our previous behaviors (deficit spending, trade imbalance, being lazy and putting our nose in other people's business, etc) have precipitated what Saddam did.
The one time I can think of needing a keyboard/monitor would be for install and if something really really bad was going on in the hardware.
Bingo. Sometimes the shit does hit the fan, and there are times when a direct connection to a server is needed. LOM or serial stuff is OK. I use my Mac for that with a serial to USB adaptor, but some "real" servers do not have LOM or serial connections and do require a display and a keyboard.
I too would like to see some solutions for those servers that do require a keyboard and a monitor. Oh, and KVM is simply not practical with large numbers of servers that already have multiple cables coming out of them.
But the thing that I get concerned about from time to time are the issues with robot concerns that Michael Criton addressed in the (book?)/movie Runaway.
The more I work with "high tech" stuff, the more I am reminded of this movie, where all of the electronic stuff was half broken junk that we all "needed" but in reality was basically the cause of many of our problems.
For those that haven't seen this movie yet (I highly recommend it). It has some elements of "robot terrorism", where these nasty insect looking robots go after Tom Selleck's character launched by the evil Gene Simmons' character.
Think about the security issues if you could have a small army of robots that could diligently and quietly do things like build bombs in large buildings or other populated areas (over a period of many years) or simply quietly eat away at structural elements of things like buildings, bridges, airports, etc.
Viruses and/or spyware are annoying for people that still use PCs, but they really don't do anything too eventful (don't know why, but..) But think about someone that gets bored one day and programs a team of self healing, possibly self replicating robots that have parasitic activities programed in them like a horrible locust or some other parasitic insect infestation.
I guess after our government finishes defeating terrorism by a bunch of humans who are motivated by eternal and suicidal ideologies to do their deeds, they will have the skills and resources to defeat nasty robots like this (that was sarcasm btw). But this kinda scary shit makes me think from time to time.
Speaking loudly in a public place can be intercepted!
Although this appears to be a valid bug in GMail (that is still beta mind you, and will probably be fixed very quickly), who in the world considers plain text communication secure?
I have no idea who at my ISP has root access (or others that can gain root access) to read my plaintext mailbox.
Excellent. I believe that I may have heard or seen the SRV RFC before. Now I did a quick search and saw plenty of references to that RFC, but none (besides a dead openldap thread) that talked about using it.
Is SRV implemented in current DNS servers? Does the resolv library and/or any applications actually use this handy spec?
This whole thing was probably conceived to give Paris Hilton more publicity. Who cares? Why does anybody care about her?
I doubt it. But people care simply because people care. Most popular people are popular because they are popular. Look back at the popular people from HS and whatnot. Paris Hilton is pretty hot, a little thin for my liking. I've seen her publicity stunt sex tape, and she's as boring having sex as she is in general. IMHO an average to below average fuck. She does have that "show dog" look about her. I guess it comes from good genes and knowing that she can do and have whatever she wants with the whole world watching.
Yes, this might save with bandwidth, but as with bzip2, it won't reduce server disk space on servers because both formats have to exist for, oh, 10 years or so before people figure out how to handle the "new" format.
In less geektechnophysicsspeak, and like the article said, its akin to an ice skater pulling in its arms to spin rotate faster.
This earthquake made the earth more round and less "fat" in the middle and "flat" on the top, again like the ice skater. The change in the earth's shape is the significant and causal part, the shortening of the day and the faster rotation are the effects.
How sucky would it be to have unreliable phone service?
Although it has gotten better in the past 2 to 3 years, people put up with cellphones that were very unreliable. Me personally, after I was finished "needing" a cell phone, I paid to get out of my annual contract and threw the phone in the trash due to its unreliability and high rates. (That phone was on many resume's before I got a POTS line).
Hi, I'm the phone company, I've decided that you have no choice but to use me for phone service, so I'm going to screw you. Oh wait, you suddenly have a choice... I TAKE THAT BACK, I'm your best friend, look here's some free stuff, here's a discount, just don't leave, PLEASE!!!
I love competition
Its hard to figure out the point of this post, but most phone companies are getting out of the phone company business and going to networking (with the exception of mobile phones, too much money there). I guess they figure that soon its going to just be data from point to point instead of phones. Makes sense to me.
Sure it does. It maintains status quo for those who make the rules and those that pay for the rules to be written -- rich people and corporations.
The US currently incarcerates more people per capita than any other country. To me, its an indicator of how fragile our society really is. I mean apartheid was maintained with fewer people in prison than the US society. I believe that its almost 2% of the US total population is either incarcerated or on parole or somehow else "in the system".
Its also interesting that jails and prisons are pretty much populated with poor uneducated people. A bright person with money can be much more successful than one without those qualities to either avoid getting busted in the first place or escape incarceration in the event of getting busted. Regardless of the truth of OJ's guilt or innocence, he would be in prison if he were not a multimillionaire.
What's sick is that we simply put up with this crap. Americans used to be headstrong people that stood up for their beliefs. We came here mostly due to persecution in one form of another. We used to have sayings like "taxation without representation" and whatnot. I guess one thing that makes these control efforts more successful today is that they do tend to prey on uneducated under-financed individuals.
The perfect example is incarceration for "illegal" drug possession. More lower middle class white people do drugs than any other group, but jails and prisons are predominately occupied by lower class non-whites.
Its time that harddrive manufacturers start agreeing with the rest of the world with their specs. I have no idea how big a 500GB drive is when I put it into my computer. I'm not even sure if I could figure it out with the math since most of the FAQs talk about "megabytes" and I don't know how to extrapolate that to a gigabyte (is it multiplied by 1000 or 1024, or 42?). It would not suprise me to end up with about 400 real GBs of space once this guy is formatted which is a 20% loss vs what I was expecting.
So harddrive people, is this a real 3.5" disk or a 3.7 or 3.3" one? Is it really 7200 RPM or do your revolutions not go all the way around? Is it a 500GB disk or a fraction there of?
These differences were not that significant back when disks were only 10 or 20 gigs, but now I'm starting to be very disapointed in the actual formatted capacity of drives today.
I've found that the average consumer that I'm dealing with is really in the dark about current TV technology and tends to follow the notion that more expensive = better. I found myself having to really educate people who come in since they often have no idea that LCD is diffrent from flat CRTs, or plasmas, or HDTV.
Hmm, dumb customer + big wallet + belief that expensive is better = big commission.
I'd sell whatever they wanted to spend money on. If they come in with no clue, what benefit are you doing to the industry or the economy by not selling them the most expensive thing that they will pay for?
I am only speaking as a hobiest and from what I have read and heard, mostly regarding recording of Grateful Dead concerts.
The Dead have more of a documented recorded history than any other band in history. Almost every concert and other odds and ends like studio outtakes, sound checks, and practices have been recorded and circulated. The Dead have an official vault that has many of the analog recordings over the years, which is carefully climate controlled. There are mostly 1/4" two channel analogue tapes, but there are some multitrack recordings as well. Most of the 1/4" tapes were recorded at 7.5 ips, some were at 15. Not sure about the multitracks.
That being said, many of the older tapes from the 60s and 70s have had to be baked, literally, in an oven to rejoin the plastic layer of the tape to the magnetic layer. Many times when a tape is cooked, it is the last time that it is ever played. The Dead archivist also make a copy of every tape every time it is played from the vault with the best recording equipment available at the time in case something happens to the master. Unfortunately, crappy cassetes were used for recordings from the late 70s to early 90s. Digital recordings became avaiable in about 1982 or 1983. These early digital recordings were hacked PCM encoded data thrown on video tapes. DAT recorders became common in the early 90s. Now is is very common for recordings to be made as 16bit/48 or 16bit/44.1kHz recordings, some are appearing as 24bit/96kHz now. Many of these recordings now have a dedicated microphone preamp with a high quality AD converter, often times these preamps are after market moded for better sound. In my opinion, and that of many tapers today, the quality from good microphones with a good mic preamp and AD converter are the best available recordings today. The lack of the preamps made tapes from patches off of the soundboard better for earlier recordings.
My point being is that there is no good archival medium for audio recordings. Original wax recordings by Edison are still playable, but a silly recording of "Mary has a little lamb" are not too desirable, and the quality doesn't matter much. Vinyl is a decent archival medium, but the playback equipment is not likely to improve much beyond the original recording equipment, and vinyl noticibly degrades _every_ time it is played due to the friction of the needle on the surface of the disk. Yes, there are laser vinyl players, but I am not familar with them, and vinyl is not commonly known archival medium. Also, it is worth noting that there are some improvements that can be done with digital masters. I have heard a 30kHz DAT that was upsampled to 44.1kHz with noticable improvements.
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I've heard of the book, but have not actually read it personally. I remember reading something in 4th grade or thereabouts that talked about how advertisers used numbers to make their product seem better with things like 3 out of 4 doctors surveyed, etc.
Also, there is a popular quote that goes "Lies, damn lies, and statistics".
Similar to the article, there is a strange number game that was done a while back when the SARS "epidemic" hit the world. A total of about 850 people died from the thing, yet annually 10,000 or so people die from influenza. SARS is an epidemic, influenza not.
However, people have heard of influenza and not SARS, so I guess it makes for better headlines.
i really would like to have a chance to confront these disguisting people and try to make sense of their thought process...
:)
feel free to do a whois query or whatever and if they are in the US and you have free long distance or whatnot, give them a call. They really appreciate the feedback
When a DNS query goes to an ISPs DNS server, and the entry does not exist, does it go to the root servers?
Yes
Secondly, do invalid domain names get cached (I'm thinking not)?
Yes, its known as negative cacheing, its done to reduce the load on the root servers (see question 1).
Actually, the gotcha with the gateway is the $100 rebate and the $99 shipping (no shipping with the Apple). So the grand total for that gateway will be $598.99 w/o the $100 you get back after a while to make the total of $498. Back to the Mac price.
Pluses with Gateway:
- A huge ass bulky monitor.
minuses with Gateway:
- Windows XP home edition, a more reasonable version of XP will cost you extra
- You need to buy extra software to make it work (virus scanner, and whatever else, don't use Windows)
- Its a gateway
I'd say they are relatively comparable in value.
Personal preference, I'd go with the Apple.
zterm works for me. Its very primitive and not really finished, but does the trick.
Faking was unnecessary. The public was already emotionally distressed after 9/11, and as your sig implies, the popular opinion was that the war was due to 9/11.
Wow. Even if that were true, which I wouldn't know because I didn't read it, nor will I
Interesting.
it would only be relevant to the conversation currently underway if you'd presented it to Bush two and half years ago and he'd used it as the justification then.
Its easiest to think of nations as if they were individuals. So a war is like a fight between individuals. What do most fights that you know of happen over? Property disputes, money disputes, and ideology disputes (religion, politics, all that jazz).
Now I believe that Bush had been told about this little incident. I'm sure that Clinton knew it while he was still in office.
Now lets think rationally about what reasons we had to go to war with Iraq. The WMD thing. Sounds good, I almost bought it, especially after Blaire's comments on the matter at the time (honestly, I did buy the "reasons" but I did not believe that they warranted a war). I mean come on, these WMDs, if they did exist had existed for many years in many different countries. Many are sold by either America, or American companies, but that is a different story (yes I know that China and Russian weapons are popular as well). I mean, a war against a country half way around the world to prevent possible terrorist attacks, being that the previous terrorist attack was accomplished with airplanes and box cutters. Does this at all make sense? Keep in mind, that the previous major terrorist attack in this nation was done with diesel fuel and fertilizer (Oklahoma City bombing). To my knowledge, I've never heard of a WMD attempted to be used in a terrorist attack, and I've heard of plenty of car bombs, pipe bombs, airplane hijackings, etc, etc. But, sure, if these bad people got hold of a WMD, I guess that is the logical progression from all of the previous attacks.
Now, still keep in mind that we are simplifying a nation as an individual. Lets think of "liberating" Iraq as a reason. That sounds noble. But I cannot think of a single example where an individual has physically beat the shit out of someone else with great suffering to themselves in the process in order to be a nice guy and help them out. Maybe I'm wrong. A parent can physically punish its child which causes some distress to the parent as well, but this does not really happen when the child is grown and can and will physically retaliate.
Now lets consider the economic edge. Hmm, this makes a little more sense. If someone is doing something to me to fuck me out of money from now to the end of the foreseeable future, I would kick some ass. Especially if others know of what is going on, and could do the same thing like the first guy and fuck me harder. This is very natural behavior. As for me, I think its understandable, but I also think that we as a nation simply need to pay our bills and focus on what is going on here at home. I believe that our previous behaviors (deficit spending, trade imbalance, being lazy and putting our nose in other people's business, etc) have precipitated what Saddam did.
I'm a troll and proud of it.
The one time I can think of needing a keyboard/monitor would be for install and if something really really bad was going on in the hardware.
Bingo. Sometimes the shit does hit the fan, and there are times when a direct connection to a server is needed. LOM or serial stuff is OK. I use my Mac for that with a serial to USB adaptor, but some "real" servers do not have LOM or serial connections and do require a display and a keyboard.
I too would like to see some solutions for those servers that do require a keyboard and a monitor. Oh, and KVM is simply not practical with large numbers of servers that already have multiple cables coming out of them.
Are the "Robots" self-conscious?
Not yet. And very unlikely in the near future.
But the thing that I get concerned about from time to time are the issues with robot concerns that Michael Criton addressed in the (book?)/movie Runaway.
The more I work with "high tech" stuff, the more I am reminded of this movie, where all of the electronic stuff was half broken junk that we all "needed" but in reality was basically the cause of many of our problems.
For those that haven't seen this movie yet (I highly recommend it). It has some elements of "robot terrorism", where these nasty insect looking robots go after Tom Selleck's character launched by the evil Gene Simmons' character.
Think about the security issues if you could have a small army of robots that could diligently and quietly do things like build bombs in large buildings or other populated areas (over a period of many years) or simply quietly eat away at structural elements of things like buildings, bridges, airports, etc.
Viruses and/or spyware are annoying for people that still use PCs, but they really don't do anything too eventful (don't know why, but..) But think about someone that gets bored one day and programs a team of self healing, possibly self replicating robots that have parasitic activities programed in them like a horrible locust or some other parasitic insect infestation.
I guess after our government finishes defeating terrorism by a bunch of humans who are motivated by eternal and suicidal ideologies to do their deeds, they will have the skills and resources to defeat nasty robots like this (that was sarcasm btw). But this kinda scary shit makes me think from time to time.
Speaking loudly in a public place can be intercepted!
Although this appears to be a valid bug in GMail (that is still beta mind you, and will probably be fixed very quickly), who in the world considers plain text communication secure?
I have no idea who at my ISP has root access (or others that can gain root access) to read my plaintext mailbox.
Nothing to see here... please move along.
Excellent. I believe that I may have heard or seen the SRV RFC before. Now I did a quick search and saw plenty of references to that RFC, but none (besides a dead openldap thread) that talked about using it.
Is SRV implemented in current DNS servers? Does the resolv library and/or any applications actually use this handy spec?
This whole thing was probably conceived to give Paris Hilton more publicity. Who cares? Why does anybody care about her?
I doubt it. But people care simply because people care. Most popular people are popular because they are popular. Look back at the popular people from HS and whatnot. Paris Hilton is pretty hot, a little thin for my liking. I've seen her publicity stunt sex tape, and she's as boring having sex as she is in general. IMHO an average to below average fuck. She does have that "show dog" look about her. I guess it comes from good genes and knowing that she can do and have whatever she wants with the whole world watching.
Give it 10 years and see how she is doing.
Yeah, on a similar note it kills me on those certain DOS based derived OSs people mistakenly spell HTML as HTM all the time.
Yes, this might save with bandwidth, but as with bzip2, it won't reduce server disk space on servers because both formats have to exist for, oh, 10 years or so before people figure out how to handle the "new" format.
DNS's MX entry is excellent, I wish it existed for other services as well.
In less geektechnophysicsspeak, and like the article said, its akin to an ice skater pulling in its arms to spin rotate faster.
This earthquake made the earth more round and less "fat" in the middle and "flat" on the top, again like the ice skater. The change in the earth's shape is the significant and causal part, the shortening of the day and the faster rotation are the effects.
When did using computers or the internet become an "experience"? They're tools, nothing more.
For me, about a year ago. Thats when I got my first Mac with OS X.
Top 50? Top 50 DVD's? What was the criteria? Movies you can watch without having to think all that much?
I always thought that tv shows based on countdowns and top XX lists were a sign of a lack of quality programming.
Hmm.
The funniest is when MTV has a top XX music video countdown.
How sucky would it be to have unreliable phone service?
Although it has gotten better in the past 2 to 3 years, people put up with cellphones that were very unreliable. Me personally, after I was finished "needing" a cell phone, I paid to get out of my annual contract and threw the phone in the trash due to its unreliability and high rates. (That phone was on many resume's before I got a POTS line).
Didn't explain why they've been advertising it for eons.
Marketers market, their jobs have little to nothing to do with products or services.
Hi, I'm the phone company, I've decided that you have no choice but to use me for phone service, so I'm going to screw you. Oh wait, you suddenly have a choice... I TAKE THAT BACK, I'm your best friend, look here's some free stuff, here's a discount, just don't leave, PLEASE!!!
I love competition
Its hard to figure out the point of this post, but most phone companies are getting out of the phone company business and going to networking (with the exception of mobile phones, too much money there). I guess they figure that soon its going to just be data from point to point instead of phones. Makes sense to me.
Jail doesn't work.
Sure it does. It maintains status quo for those who make the rules and those that pay for the rules to be written -- rich people and corporations.
The US currently incarcerates more people per capita than any other country. To me, its an indicator of how fragile our society really is. I mean apartheid was maintained with fewer people in prison than the US society. I believe that its almost 2% of the US total population is either incarcerated or on parole or somehow else "in the system".
Its also interesting that jails and prisons are pretty much populated with poor uneducated people. A bright person with money can be much more successful than one without those qualities to either avoid getting busted in the first place or escape incarceration in the event of getting busted. Regardless of the truth of OJ's guilt or innocence, he would be in prison if he were not a multimillionaire.
What's sick is that we simply put up with this crap. Americans used to be headstrong people that stood up for their beliefs. We came here mostly due to persecution in one form of another. We used to have sayings like "taxation without representation" and whatnot. I guess one thing that makes these control efforts more successful today is that they do tend to prey on uneducated under-financed individuals.
The perfect example is incarceration for "illegal" drug possession. More lower middle class white people do drugs than any other group, but jails and prisons are predominately occupied by lower class non-whites.
Its time that harddrive manufacturers start agreeing with the rest of the world with their specs. I have no idea how big a 500GB drive is when I put it into my computer. I'm not even sure if I could figure it out with the math since most of the FAQs talk about "megabytes" and I don't know how to extrapolate that to a gigabyte (is it multiplied by 1000 or 1024, or 42?). It would not suprise me to end up with about 400 real GBs of space once this guy is formatted which is a 20% loss vs what I was expecting.
So harddrive people, is this a real 3.5" disk or a 3.7 or 3.3" one? Is it really 7200 RPM or do your revolutions not go all the way around? Is it a 500GB disk or a fraction there of?
These differences were not that significant back when disks were only 10 or 20 gigs, but now I'm starting to be very disapointed in the actual formatted capacity of drives today.
I've found that the average consumer that I'm dealing with is really in the dark about current TV technology and tends to follow the notion that more expensive = better.
I found myself having to really educate people who come in since they often have no idea that LCD is diffrent from flat CRTs, or plasmas, or HDTV.
Hmm, dumb customer + big wallet + belief that expensive is better = big commission.
I'd sell whatever they wanted to spend money on. If they come in with no clue, what benefit are you doing to the industry or the economy by not selling them the most expensive thing that they will pay for?
I am only speaking as a hobiest and from what I have read and heard, mostly regarding recording of Grateful Dead concerts.
The Dead have more of a documented recorded history than any other band in history. Almost every concert and other odds and ends like studio outtakes, sound checks, and practices have been recorded and circulated. The Dead have an official vault that has many of the analog recordings over the years, which is carefully climate controlled. There are mostly 1/4" two channel analogue tapes, but there are some multitrack recordings as well. Most of the 1/4" tapes were recorded at 7.5 ips, some were at 15. Not sure about the multitracks.
That being said, many of the older tapes from the 60s and 70s have had to be baked, literally, in an oven to rejoin the plastic layer of the tape to the magnetic layer. Many times when a tape is cooked, it is the last time that it is ever played. The Dead archivist also make a copy of every tape every time it is played from the vault with the best recording equipment available at the time in case something happens to the master. Unfortunately, crappy cassetes were used for recordings from the late 70s to early 90s. Digital recordings became avaiable in about 1982 or 1983. These early digital recordings were hacked PCM encoded data thrown on video tapes. DAT recorders became common in the early 90s. Now is is very common for recordings to be made as 16bit/48 or 16bit/44.1kHz recordings, some are appearing as 24bit/96kHz now. Many of these recordings now have a dedicated microphone preamp with a high quality AD converter, often times these preamps are after market moded for better sound. In my opinion, and that of many tapers today, the quality from good microphones with a good mic preamp and AD converter are the best available recordings today. The lack of the preamps made tapes from patches off of the soundboard better for earlier recordings.
My point being is that there is no good archival medium for audio recordings. Original wax recordings by Edison are still playable, but a silly recording of "Mary has a little lamb" are not too desirable, and the quality doesn't matter much. Vinyl is a decent archival medium, but the playback equipment is not likely to improve much beyond the original recording equipment, and vinyl noticibly degrades _every_ time it is played due to the friction of the needle on the surface of the disk. Yes, there are laser vinyl players, but I am not familar with them, and vinyl is not commonly known archival medium. Also, it is worth noting that there are some improvements that can be done with digital masters. I have heard a 30kHz DAT that was upsampled to 44.1kHz with noticable improvements.