But we've also known this for years...from Omar Garrison on down. Even those early, unauthorized biographies of Hubbard make much of the fact that his history--military and otherwise--is extraordinarily embellished. I recall reading an "annotated" version of the What Is Scientology? intro piece that neatly debunked almost every claim (blood brother, nuclear physicist, etc.).
While certain churches believe evolution is compatible with Christianity, they nonetheless believe that evolutionary changes occured through the will of God. This idea, that evolution is ultimately directed by a higher power, not just some meaningless progression of chemical states, is supressed in academic discourse. ...but what you cite isn't Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design isn't "evolution guided," where some nonspecific, metaphysical entity might have guided the progression of evolution. Even if this were the case, discussion of this "possibility" in academic discourse would essentially be a fruitless exercise in warring idealisms, as the actual scientific process wouldn't change.
No, Intelligent Design is distinctly different. ID says that certain aspects of life as we see it cannot have come about from natural processes. Again: cannot. It then proceeds to interject itself into the many, many gaps still extant in biological understanding, seizing upon ephemera and declaring "Aha! This is irreducibly complex! You cannot find a natural explanation for this!" Attempts to find an explanation--a manifestation of scientific curiosity, a continuation of the investigatory process of science--are, according to intelligent design, absolutely fruitless, and you shouldn't even bother, because the intelligent agent designed the bacterial flagellum and you're never going to find a solution. Stop looking. And if you do find a solution...well, onto the next gap.
ID isn't the detached, "purposeful-evolution" entity that you describe. Few scientists and academics would have any real problem with your version, I'd think, because it has absolutely no actually effect on the progress of science (perhaps outside of instilling in it a distinctly anthro-perfective focus). ID is different.
I follow your point, but your use of "lossy compressed" when referring to CDs is exceptionally misleading. Essentially, it's taking "lossy" and applying it to something that it was never intended to apply to (the same way that digital "resolution" doesn't really have an exact analog counterpart, only approximates that are similar in concept but vastly different in implementation).
"Lossy," as far as I can tell, entered parlance to describe an operation performed on an entity that would sacrifice information for the purpose of space. See, for example, JPEG compression. Taking the expansive view that every recordation is essentially lossy has an element of truth--no capture mechanism can really ever perfectly capture *anything*--but totally defeats the purpose of the comparison. You can declare that every object in the world is "art," and under some definition you'd be right, but it would render the word "art" useless.
Consequently, "Lossy" and "lossless" should--especially when dealing with digital audio--be reserved for the purposes originally intended for them in order to not cause endless amounts of confusion. Recording a symphony orchestra as an 8-bit, 11kHz wave isn't strictly a lossy process, as you're capturing everything the medium can possibly capture. Encoded that wave to MP3 is an act of lossy compression. Inelegant? Perhaps. But it's what the terms originally referred to, and I don't see any particular reason to stretch the definitions beyond the point of common sense.
And FWIW, I would dissent heavily from your viewpoint that 128kb/s is indistinguishable from source, even with "modern day" MP3 encodes. It's tending a bit low on the spectrum. I will agree, though, that--properly used--LAME becomes essentially transparent at surprisingly low bitrates. Of course, "essentially transparent" once again reveals the real difference between lossy and lossless processes, as that essentially transparent MP3 will become awfully less so if you start trying to play around with frequency information, imaging, and so on.
My favorite thing is what tends to happen on certain audiophile boards. Some new, audiophile LP pressing of some overly venerated classic rock title is announced. MSRP: something like $30. Cue spooage, despite the fact that old copies of said release can be found for $.50 everywhere. Anyway, so the date approaches. The first person gets his record. Posts an almost glowing review, replete with WARMTH and TUBEY GOOSH and whatnot.
What's the almost?
There's always a caveat. "Pressing was a little warped; going to ask Classic to replace it." "There're a few nasty ticks on side 2." "There was, believe it or not, a skip in the third song."
And it just makes me laugh and laugh. Dude, you know what the problem is? You just bought...new vinyl! You're going to return it because it exhibits a lower grade of the problems inherent to the medium? Your search for perfection is going to yield anything but.
Bah. What's terrible is that it's apparently far easier to reissue things on vinyl than it is on CD (for independent labels, at least), so a lot of titles that haven't made it to CD get reissued on "audiophile vinyl" for $30, and then everyone acts as if that's solved the iniquity of its otherwise-unavailability.
Absolutely agreed. It's so terrible that I've declared all Acrobat versions post-6 to be pretty much dead to me. It's not that version 5 and before are fantastic or anything, but merely that they have far fewer options and tools to hide in the totally counterintuitive menus and toolbars.
Chris Carter's TV shows (and, apparently, anything related to them) always had terrible computer "simulations," long after it became even borderline acceptable for this to be the case. Millennium is a particular offender; I simply can't fathom the logic of having a "nerd character" (I forget the guy's name, but the Season 2 character who was introduced seemingly to be the "lone gunman" for the show) who gets things wrong so frequently. Frank Black's entire computer is a mockery of the reality of the internet.
I'm really disappointed by this; although I understand that this sort of thing is obviously the "right" response given the situation, I was hoping that the astounding array of music videos and the like from below-the-radar Japanese acts would go unnoticed by Japanese agencies not used to monitoring oversees sites. Youtube used to feature clips from bands like the Moon Riders and Dixied the Emmons, but I noticed that the selection slowly dwindled as the site matured. I can't help but feel that while this is the first reported mass deletion of videos, it's been going on for quite some time.
He didn't know there were twins...apparently despite a pangalactic civilization and hyperadvanced technology, their obstetrics technology is in the dark ages.
Oh, too true. I always found that to be kinda curious.
Whether the "saturation point" has been reached with CD is a bit more debatable. People have a surprising amount of difficulty distinguishing between the "next gen" formats and correctly-downconverted CD audio in double-blind tests.
Anybody excercising a certain degree of perception, though, can see that DVD could easily stand to be bumped up a little bit. Would it necessary matter to most people? That's a different question entirely.
How would you, personally, design an experiment to falsify (or otherwise) evolution?
It need not be an *experiment*, though. There are plenty of things that could falsify evolution. If a newly discovered, sophisticated, thriving group of organisms was posessed of an entirely divergent cellular makeup, that would be a major problem for evolution. If a modern elephant were discovered at a suitably-ancient fossil depth, that would be a major problem. A pig giving birth to a duck would also be a major problem. And as we go down the line, a group of aliens showing up and saying "Hey! Guess what? We did this, and human beings were the master plan implanted into the pattern of nature!" would throw the idea of undirected evolution out the window.
Yes, the latter examples are a bit ridiculous, but the first two are well within the realm of possibility. One can see them happening. One can also see why they might be problematic to the idea that evolution got everything from there to here.
No such examples exist with intelligent design (short of God saying "Nah, I didn't really do the hands-on thing"). Any variation, any unexplained phenomena, can be chalked up to the mysterious whims of the potentially unnamed designer.
He does, but I don't know how I feel about such retconning. I'd prefer the later books fit the earlier books, rather than creatively remixing the earlier books to make certain ISSUES OF IMPORTANCE (19, Walter=Flagg) fit the new continuity.
From a Buick 8 made sense--it's about how the profoundly unordinary can be absorbed by day-to-day life--but its structure didn't do it any favors, I agree.
You're right, we shouldn't expect all the answers.
However, with regard to the Dark Tower, there's a pretty clear (and pretty unfortunate) division between books 1-4 and the rest: the pre-accident and post-accident era. King's near-death experience profoundly affected him (heck, the fact that he writes the guy who hit him into the story--a guy who, you'll remember, killed himself not too long after the event in question--is testament to that by itself), and frankly, I think his writing suffered in the aftermath. A few people theorized that part of the problem is that his editors "went easy" on him afterwards, and that he was rushing to complete the series "just in case."
I agree with the grandparent that the series ended on a slow, disappointing note. No, I didn't expect everything to be explained. What I did expect, however, was storytelling that made up for the lack of clear explanations. Books 1-4 had this in spades. 5-7? Exposition, exposition, exposition. The characters are no longer "effortlessly" the characters we got used to; instead, they're almost forced in mannerisms and attitudes. Et cetera.
They weren't bad, but they weren't great, and as one who thinks that Stephen King is a profoundly underrated author (yes, yes, he's popular, but I think he has a grasp of literary technique that he is rarely acknowledged as posessing) I expected more.
I also found the MP3 file first...with the.bit extension, no less! The old Internet Beatles Album page (current getback.org, or something) put up a 128kb/sec encode of Take 1 of Strawberry Fields Forever. I don't think Winplay 3 was out yet, as they had explicit instructions on how to l3dec this file to a (whopping) 30+ megs...
And let's not forget the magical search for the "superior" version of L3Enc, the stupendous version 2.0, which had two advantages over the more common later versions:
a) Whereas 128kb/sec (the standard of the day) was a registered-version-only switch in later versions of L3enc, it was in the free and clear in earlier versions.
b) L3Enc 2.0 is one of the few encoders I've *ever* seen that supports dual-channel encoding, in which both channels of the stereo spectrum are dealt with entirely separately. As joint-stereo would occasionally sound like crap on some more dubiously-sourced MP3s, dual-channel was a must in those cases.
End result of the DRM: the non-sale of four CDs. The crazy thing here is the DRM was on an album that hasn't been in any kind of music chart for over twenty years, and anyone who's likely to want it either owns it already or would be willing to pay for it.
I've seen quite a few instances of this. In particular, EMI seems to have gladly jumped onto the "protecting stuff that doesn't really need to be protected" bandwagon. A few of their recent reissues--Syd Barrett and Kate Bush two-fers, for example--are copy controlled. Huh? I'm almost surprised they haven't added it to the current batch of circa-1987 Beatles CDs.
"As she lifts her arms up her breasts rise and flatten," says Valve's Ken Birdwell. He's showing off one of the character models for Alyx Vance, the female lead in Half-Life 2. Birdwell, who once wrote software to create custom shoe insoles, was the man tasked with making more-believable characters for Half-Life 2--characters who could express emotions through their faces and have full musculatures, as evidenced by the breast demonstration.
Yes. Clearly, Valve is focusing on the essential elements of an immersive game experience. "Breast demonstration?" Not snappy enough to become an industry benchmark. I say we go with the "Tit-test!"
"upon which Square developed a fully realized "greatest game ever..." the Secret of Mana, then had to chop it to little bits to make it fit on a cartridge when the SNES CD was not released, soured the relationship on Square's side."
Interesting...I've never heard of this SoM story before. Mind elaborating?
Interesting...does anybody here remember the a vaguely-similar route taken with id for the Quake shareware release? An encypted version of that game (and essentially every past Id game) was on the shareware CD, and could be unlocked when purchased. And then along came QCrack.
Valve's distribution idea is interesting, but I hope for their sake that the security's very strong, requiring all sorts of authorizations and whatnots. If not, Doom III's slightly-premature leaking to the internet might seem like a far more ideal scenario than a Valve-aided distribution of compromised content.
I've noticed that, actually. Take DVD+/-R drives, for example. Sony's drive is significantly more expensive than equivalent drives from the competition. Yet I never hear reports online about how much better those Sony drives are, or anything similar. They seem to be more expensive simply because of the name-recognition factor, i.e. Sony will hope that consumers will see the Sony brand-name, and think it assures a better experience.
"since you seem to know something about this, where are "digitally remastered CD's" in the copyright spectrum? I mean, if a song goes into public domain and a producer decides to "digitally remaster" the work, would s/he be able to copywrite that reproduction or not? That's really what I'm asking when it comes to quality of media... etc."
I'm pretty sure that you can't copyright new masterings, per se...some court apparently judged that this was a mechanican process and not an artistic one. I could be misremembering, though.
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But we've also known this for years...from Omar Garrison on down. Even those early, unauthorized biographies of Hubbard make much of the fact that his history--military and otherwise--is extraordinarily embellished. I recall reading an "annotated" version of the What Is Scientology? intro piece that neatly debunked almost every claim (blood brother, nuclear physicist, etc.).
No, Intelligent Design is distinctly different. ID says that certain aspects of life as we see it cannot have come about from natural processes. Again: cannot. It then proceeds to interject itself into the many, many gaps still extant in biological understanding, seizing upon ephemera and declaring "Aha! This is irreducibly complex! You cannot find a natural explanation for this!" Attempts to find an explanation--a manifestation of scientific curiosity, a continuation of the investigatory process of science--are, according to intelligent design, absolutely fruitless, and you shouldn't even bother, because the intelligent agent designed the bacterial flagellum and you're never going to find a solution. Stop looking. And if you do find a solution...well, onto the next gap.
ID isn't the detached, "purposeful-evolution" entity that you describe. Few scientists and academics would have any real problem with your version, I'd think, because it has absolutely no actually effect on the progress of science (perhaps outside of instilling in it a distinctly anthro-perfective focus). ID is different.
I follow your point, but your use of "lossy compressed" when referring to CDs is exceptionally misleading. Essentially, it's taking "lossy" and applying it to something that it was never intended to apply to (the same way that digital "resolution" doesn't really have an exact analog counterpart, only approximates that are similar in concept but vastly different in implementation).
"Lossy," as far as I can tell, entered parlance to describe an operation performed on an entity that would sacrifice information for the purpose of space. See, for example, JPEG compression. Taking the expansive view that every recordation is essentially lossy has an element of truth--no capture mechanism can really ever perfectly capture *anything*--but totally defeats the purpose of the comparison. You can declare that every object in the world is "art," and under some definition you'd be right, but it would render the word "art" useless.
Consequently, "Lossy" and "lossless" should--especially when dealing with digital audio--be reserved for the purposes originally intended for them in order to not cause endless amounts of confusion. Recording a symphony orchestra as an 8-bit, 11kHz wave isn't strictly a lossy process, as you're capturing everything the medium can possibly capture. Encoded that wave to MP3 is an act of lossy compression. Inelegant? Perhaps. But it's what the terms originally referred to, and I don't see any particular reason to stretch the definitions beyond the point of common sense.
And FWIW, I would dissent heavily from your viewpoint that 128kb/s is indistinguishable from source, even with "modern day" MP3 encodes. It's tending a bit low on the spectrum. I will agree, though, that--properly used--LAME becomes essentially transparent at surprisingly low bitrates. Of course, "essentially transparent" once again reveals the real difference between lossy and lossless processes, as that essentially transparent MP3 will become awfully less so if you start trying to play around with frequency information, imaging, and so on.
My favorite thing is what tends to happen on certain audiophile boards. Some new, audiophile LP pressing of some overly venerated classic rock title is announced. MSRP: something like $30. Cue spooage, despite the fact that old copies of said release can be found for $.50 everywhere. Anyway, so the date approaches. The first person gets his record. Posts an almost glowing review, replete with WARMTH and TUBEY GOOSH and whatnot.
What's the almost?
There's always a caveat. "Pressing was a little warped; going to ask Classic to replace it." "There're a few nasty ticks on side 2." "There was, believe it or not, a skip in the third song."
And it just makes me laugh and laugh. Dude, you know what the problem is? You just bought...new vinyl! You're going to return it because it exhibits a lower grade of the problems inherent to the medium? Your search for perfection is going to yield anything but.
Bah. What's terrible is that it's apparently far easier to reissue things on vinyl than it is on CD (for independent labels, at least), so a lot of titles that haven't made it to CD get reissued on "audiophile vinyl" for $30, and then everyone acts as if that's solved the iniquity of its otherwise-unavailability.
Absolutely agreed. It's so terrible that I've declared all Acrobat versions post-6 to be pretty much dead to me. It's not that version 5 and before are fantastic or anything, but merely that they have far fewer options and tools to hide in the totally counterintuitive menus and toolbars.
Chris Carter's TV shows (and, apparently, anything related to them) always had terrible computer "simulations," long after it became even borderline acceptable for this to be the case. Millennium is a particular offender; I simply can't fathom the logic of having a "nerd character" (I forget the guy's name, but the Season 2 character who was introduced seemingly to be the "lone gunman" for the show) who gets things wrong so frequently. Frank Black's entire computer is a mockery of the reality of the internet.
I'm really disappointed by this; although I understand that this sort of thing is obviously the "right" response given the situation, I was hoping that the astounding array of music videos and the like from below-the-radar Japanese acts would go unnoticed by Japanese agencies not used to monitoring oversees sites. Youtube used to feature clips from bands like the Moon Riders and Dixied the Emmons, but I noticed that the selection slowly dwindled as the site matured. I can't help but feel that while this is the first reported mass deletion of videos, it's been going on for quite some time.
He didn't know there were twins...apparently despite a pangalactic civilization and hyperadvanced technology, their obstetrics technology is in the dark ages.
Oh, too true. I always found that to be kinda curious.
Whether the "saturation point" has been reached with CD is a bit more debatable. People have a surprising amount of difficulty distinguishing between the "next gen" formats and correctly-downconverted CD audio in double-blind tests.
Anybody excercising a certain degree of perception, though, can see that DVD could easily stand to be bumped up a little bit. Would it necessary matter to most people? That's a different question entirely.
How would you, personally, design an experiment to falsify (or otherwise) evolution?
It need not be an *experiment*, though. There are plenty of things that could falsify evolution. If a newly discovered, sophisticated, thriving group of organisms was posessed of an entirely divergent cellular makeup, that would be a major problem for evolution. If a modern elephant were discovered at a suitably-ancient fossil depth, that would be a major problem. A pig giving birth to a duck would also be a major problem. And as we go down the line, a group of aliens showing up and saying "Hey! Guess what? We did this, and human beings were the master plan implanted into the pattern of nature!" would throw the idea of undirected evolution out the window.
Yes, the latter examples are a bit ridiculous, but the first two are well within the realm of possibility. One can see them happening. One can also see why they might be problematic to the idea that evolution got everything from there to here.
No such examples exist with intelligent design (short of God saying "Nah, I didn't really do the hands-on thing"). Any variation, any unexplained phenomena, can be chalked up to the mysterious whims of the potentially unnamed designer.
He does, but I don't know how I feel about such retconning. I'd prefer the later books fit the earlier books, rather than creatively remixing the earlier books to make certain ISSUES OF IMPORTANCE (19, Walter=Flagg) fit the new continuity.
From a Buick 8 made sense--it's about how the profoundly unordinary can be absorbed by day-to-day life--but its structure didn't do it any favors, I agree.
You're right, we shouldn't expect all the answers.
However, with regard to the Dark Tower, there's a pretty clear (and pretty unfortunate) division between books 1-4 and the rest: the pre-accident and post-accident era. King's near-death experience profoundly affected him (heck, the fact that he writes the guy who hit him into the story--a guy who, you'll remember, killed himself not too long after the event in question--is testament to that by itself), and frankly, I think his writing suffered in the aftermath. A few people theorized that part of the problem is that his editors "went easy" on him afterwards, and that he was rushing to complete the series "just in case."
I agree with the grandparent that the series ended on a slow, disappointing note. No, I didn't expect everything to be explained. What I did expect, however, was storytelling that made up for the lack of clear explanations. Books 1-4 had this in spades. 5-7? Exposition, exposition, exposition. The characters are no longer "effortlessly" the characters we got used to; instead, they're almost forced in mannerisms and attitudes. Et cetera.
They weren't bad, but they weren't great, and as one who thinks that Stephen King is a profoundly underrated author (yes, yes, he's popular, but I think he has a grasp of literary technique that he is rarely acknowledged as posessing) I expected more.
Ninja Gaiden II soundtrack. Really. The days before easy emulation and NSF, y'see...
I also found the MP3 file first...with the .bit extension, no less! The old Internet Beatles Album page (current getback.org, or something) put up a 128kb/sec encode of Take 1 of Strawberry Fields Forever. I don't think Winplay 3 was out yet, as they had explicit instructions on how to l3dec this file to a (whopping) 30+ megs...
Yep. Mono downmixing was a must to play basically anything on a 486...
And let's not forget the magical search for the "superior" version of L3Enc, the stupendous version 2.0, which had two advantages over the more common later versions:
a) Whereas 128kb/sec (the standard of the day) was a registered-version-only switch in later versions of L3enc, it was in the free and clear in earlier versions.
b) L3Enc 2.0 is one of the few encoders I've *ever* seen that supports dual-channel encoding, in which both channels of the stereo spectrum are dealt with entirely separately. As joint-stereo would occasionally sound like crap on some more dubiously-sourced MP3s, dual-channel was a must in those cases.
I've seen quite a few instances of this. In particular, EMI seems to have gladly jumped onto the "protecting stuff that doesn't really need to be protected" bandwagon. A few of their recent reissues--Syd Barrett and Kate Bush two-fers, for example--are copy controlled. Huh? I'm almost surprised they haven't added it to the current batch of circa-1987 Beatles CDs.
Yes. Clearly, Valve is focusing on the essential elements of an immersive game experience. "Breast demonstration?" Not snappy enough to become an industry benchmark. I say we go with the "Tit-test!"
I wonder if Doom 3 passes...?
"upon which Square developed a fully realized "greatest game ever..." the Secret of Mana, then had to chop it to little bits to make it fit on a cartridge when the SNES CD was not released, soured the relationship on Square's side."
Interesting...I've never heard of this SoM story before. Mind elaborating?
Those're covers, either from the "True Love Waits" CD or "Anybody can Play Radiohead."
Interesting...does anybody here remember the a vaguely-similar route taken with id for the Quake shareware release? An encypted version of that game (and essentially every past Id game) was on the shareware CD, and could be unlocked when purchased. And then along came QCrack.
Valve's distribution idea is interesting, but I hope for their sake that the security's very strong, requiring all sorts of authorizations and whatnots. If not, Doom III's slightly-premature leaking to the internet might seem like a far more ideal scenario than a Valve-aided distribution of compromised content.
I've noticed that, actually. Take DVD+/-R drives, for example. Sony's drive is significantly more expensive than equivalent drives from the competition. Yet I never hear reports online about how much better those Sony drives are, or anything similar. They seem to be more expensive simply because of the name-recognition factor, i.e. Sony will hope that consumers will see the Sony brand-name, and think it assures a better experience.
"since you seem to know something about this, where are "digitally remastered CD's" in the copyright spectrum? I mean, if a song goes into public domain and a producer decides to "digitally remaster" the work, would s/he be able to copywrite that reproduction or not? That's really what I'm asking when it comes to quality of media... etc."
I'm pretty sure that you can't copyright new masterings, per se...some court apparently judged that this was a mechanican process and not an artistic one. I could be misremembering, though.
Try news.individual.net. It's text-only (i.e. no binaries), but it's free.