This point is even more important than it seems at first glance. Evolutionarily, we are optimized to live in small groups (tribes) and there would tend to be a closer (in time) shared genetic ancestry among the members of a tribe than those in other tribes. Inter-tribe interaction is naturally less personable and more utilitarian/competitive/often confrontational. Civilization only came about recently on evolutionary terms, and not long enough ago for biological adaptation to have made us naturally fit in the current social environment where you interact with strangers and non-strangers but still people with whom you have no personal relation. Instinctually, we still care most for those in our group, but this is a poor fit in a world where people's actions can affect the lives of many others who have no personal connection to them. This is an artificial environment for the human animal, a sort of a zoo, and it's a constant battle between instinct and social engineering.
Oops, dropped a word there. "being about as meaningful as the between a husband and wife" --> "being about as meaningful as the DEBT between a husband and wife"
They're looking for cash? That's funny, because the US government is not revenue constrained. There's no constitutional limit on creating any amount of money, and in fact that's one of the most important policy tools of a sovereign nation (the EU members gave that up, and it has ended with disaster except for the mercantilist Germans, as was predicted by Modern Monetary Theory many years ago). This is all the more clear when one notes that there is no operational connection between government spending and subsequent taxation or public/foreign borrowing (much like bank lending is not really reserve constrained since banks lend unconstrained during the day and borrow anything they need to make up for reserves from the overnight market--and even the Fed itself). Much of the debt is just an accounting fiction registered between the Fed and treasury (being about as meaningful as the between a husband and wife), and legally, 100% of government debt could be made in this form--there could legally be zero public borrowing and no taxation. The appearance that taxes pay for anything is just an illusion, since tax "revenue" does not make any legal constraint on spending. But borrowing is done due to custom and ideological and political considerations which are vestigial from the times of gold-backed currency--not any current legal constraints. Taxation's actual role, however, is critically important: it forces private entities to use the government issued currency. You can only pay the IRS in US dollars. More information: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625 or lighter reading at http://www.cnbc.com/id/45795986 as well as http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/ and http://moslereconomics.com/ MMT has been around for quite a while and derives from the old Chartalism, but nowadays it's really starting to gain steam, and some MMT ideas have been co-opted by other economic schools. Back to the original point, government doesn't need covert means of funding agencies such as the TSA because it can do so easily with legal means. Your conspiracy theory is superfluous.
Are you truly this ignorant? Germany doesn't treat their workers like shit? Germany's trade surplus is due far more to wage suppression than productivity. Indeed, this fact was pointed out to me initially by a German friend, and then I found tons of places that back it up; here's a quick sampling of references that mention it:
Your post makes it all the more clear to me that I should have no regrets over deciding not to pursue a PhD with the aim to stay in academia, and, instead, becoming the first employee of a start-up instead. Lots of work and initial hardship, with huge risk, but never dull or rote, without the day-to-day drudgeries of academic life (incidentally, now I remember reading a comment from Larry Niven that he became a sci-fi writer instead of a researcher in a university for essentially the same reason).
And yet, some of the top baristas in the world, as shown by international competitions, are to be found in North America (for example, the founder of Vancouver's Caffe Artigiano was in the top three in the World Barista Championships multiple years). The west coast is particularly good for this. Seattle in the US and Vancouver in Canada have several small chains with extremely well trained staff and who commonly purchase their coffees from auctions offering selections of best-of crops for a given growing season. In other places in North America, however, it can be a bit harder to find good coffee, let alone a barista that can pull a proper espresso show by knowing how to properly adjust his tamping technique and tweak the grinder setting each day as a batch of roasted coffee ages and requires these adjustments daily. The reverse side of this coin is that there is a significant community of amateur coffee geeks who can give the pros a run for their money (you can get a pretty good coffee roaster online for little over $100, and a decent burr grinder for about the same)--enthusiasm and experimentation can go a long way.
> This used to be a place where you could have a decent discussion
Great, more empathy-seeking and misdirection that would make a stage magician blush.
> the campaigns to silence "hostile" voices are so effective - it's very easy to accuse and whip up a froth of vitriol
Oh dear, now you're a victim of maleficent persecution. Really, did you even read your post before clicking Submit, or did the fury of your adolescent anger and indignation rush your trigger finger to the button as uncontrollably as a rising orgasm having reached beyond the point of no return?
What is this, a comparison of e-penis size as implied by length of slashdot membership? Maybe instead of trying to lead attention away from the fact that you were called out as an Apple shill--which I don't need the anonymous coward to tell me because I know already is the case, this being not the first time I see your nick on this board over the years attached exactly to this type of post--you should take it like a man and hang your head in deserved shame.
That's what I was referring to--storage and transmission, not processing (for which you can convert to whatever--say floating point). Sorry for not being clear in my post.
It's never that simple, though. There's clear intent in a post such as yours to imply a certain generalization, given the overall subject of the article.
Mike, the point is both sides are wrong--the audiophiles and. I'm right smack in the middle, because I have both experience as a musician and as an engineer who's built and designed audio equipment. While I've been criticizing those opposing your side for the most part in this story, it's because of the preponderance of skeptics on slashdot. On the other hand, many audiophiles clearly don't understand that blind testing is critically important, and that yes, it is possible to carry out blind testing in a valid way that is beyond reproach, and that indeed many things that audiophiles love do not make a difference (speaker cable floor stand-offs? shakti stones?). The best case is when people who are both scientifically minded and rigorous in their approach, yet into audio and understand audiophile concerns, perform research. Then you get stuff like Geddes and Lee's blind tests showing that THD correlates very poorly with perception of distortion, but that specifically weighted metrics can in fact correlate well with perception (due to the ear masking some types of distortions and being very sensitive to others). In other cases, you see people like the uber audiophile skeptic engineer Douglas Self come around on some points and recognize that some things he did not think make a difference in fact do, after discussions on diyaudio.org and measurements he further performed as a result.
Linear quantization never made sense to me as far as encoding audio. Human ears, like our other senses, are logarithmic. The difference in linear intensity between two soft sounds is far more detectable than the same difference between two loud sounds. Linear quantization is thus wasteful in one end of the absolute intensity scale, and possibly insufficient in the other end. Why use an encoding so far from the optimal? Hardware considerations are not a good excuse because the same digital processing circuitry that the average delta-sigma DAC chip in every piece of consumer gear uses to convert the audio into a high bitrate/low bit depth stream before actual conversion to an analog signal can be trivially modified to handle nonlinearly quantized inputs.
I've got one better than blind tests, which are still based on introspection: _measure_ the effect precisely. And when you do, it turns out that the brain can perceive even ultrasound: http://jn.physiology.org/content/83/6/3548.full
Blind tests show that we perceive ultrasound: http://jn.physiology.org/content/83/6/3548.full So I suggest you GTFO. Albeit the effect is not conscious, no one has ruled out that it cannot subtly affect the perception of audible sound over long periods of time to the point where a conscious preference may develop in long term listening, without subjects of a study being able to describe the specific difference. In fact, this is more than plausible, given the reference I posted and others like it.
They only determined there's no immediately detectable conscious difference. Now consider this research: http://jn.physiology.org/content/83/6/3548.full So frequencies we don't consciously notice affect brain activity. Thus your reference is not as conclusive as you imply; still need studies to eliminate the possibility that inaudible frequencies do not impact the brain's perception of audible frequencies in a subtle manner over long listening. I've been suggesting we need long-term listening blind tests with psychological assays for about a decade, but haven't found volunteers that want to go through the trouble.
Information content is proportional to the product of bit depth and sampling rate. You can _always_ trade one for the other. In fact, this is what delta-sigma DACs (which is pretty much any modern audio DAC chip) rely on--the input audio data is converted to use few bits and very high sampling rate, because it's easier to build digital-to-analog converting hardware that uses a higher frequency than one that has sufficient matching between its switched current output elements (that's why you used to read about laser-trimmed resistors in the old R2R DAC datasheets). It's really shameful that you call yourself an audio engineer and don't know basic sampling theory--and on top of this you are posting misinformation here--for shame!
You're wrong again: there is an upper bound placed on us by cosmological considerations: the accelerating expansion of the universe means that our Hubble volume will forever only contain a finite amount of mass-energy (eventually everything outside the gravitationally bound local group of galaxies will be carried away from us by expansion at speed greater than the speed of light, making it forever out of reach). So where the hell are you going to get the arbitrary amount of energy you need to make an arbitrary frequency signal?
As for why people are combative: it's because we get upset when someone posts misinformation and we know we are likely too late in responding with a correction to bring the misled readers of the original post back to the path of righteousness.
Infinite bandwidth would also violate the Bekenstein bound and holographic principle. But hey, people will still think they can encode arbitrary precision real numbers in physical objects with finite extent, as futile as that dream is.
Infinite frequency is impossible even in principle because it implies infinite energy per photon (-> infinite mass -> black hole with event horizon at infinity), so, NO. This was such an obvious point that I'm surprised you put your foot in your mouth with that comment like this.
Slashdot Mirror
This point is even more important than it seems at first glance. Evolutionarily, we are optimized to live in small groups (tribes) and there would tend to be a closer (in time) shared genetic ancestry among the members of a tribe than those in other tribes. Inter-tribe interaction is naturally less personable and more utilitarian/competitive/often confrontational. Civilization only came about recently on evolutionary terms, and not long enough ago for biological adaptation to have made us naturally fit in the current social environment where you interact with strangers and non-strangers but still people with whom you have no personal relation. Instinctually, we still care most for those in our group, but this is a poor fit in a world where people's actions can affect the lives of many others who have no personal connection to them. This is an artificial environment for the human animal, a sort of a zoo, and it's a constant battle between instinct and social engineering.
Oops, dropped a word there. "being about as meaningful as the between a husband and wife" --> "being about as meaningful as the DEBT between a husband and wife"
They're looking for cash? That's funny, because the US government is not revenue constrained. There's no constitutional limit on creating any amount of money, and in fact that's one of the most important policy tools of a sovereign nation (the EU members gave that up, and it has ended with disaster except for the mercantilist Germans, as was predicted by Modern Monetary Theory many years ago). This is all the more clear when one notes that there is no operational connection between government spending and subsequent taxation or public/foreign borrowing (much like bank lending is not really reserve constrained since banks lend unconstrained during the day and borrow anything they need to make up for reserves from the overnight market--and even the Fed itself). Much of the debt is just an accounting fiction registered between the Fed and treasury (being about as meaningful as the between a husband and wife), and legally, 100% of government debt could be made in this form--there could legally be zero public borrowing and no taxation. The appearance that taxes pay for anything is just an illusion, since tax "revenue" does not make any legal constraint on spending. But borrowing is done due to custom and ideological and political considerations which are vestigial from the times of gold-backed currency--not any current legal constraints. Taxation's actual role, however, is critically important: it forces private entities to use the government issued currency. You can only pay the IRS in US dollars. More information: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625 or lighter reading at http://www.cnbc.com/id/45795986 as well as http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/ and http://moslereconomics.com/ MMT has been around for quite a while and derives from the old Chartalism, but nowadays it's really starting to gain steam, and some MMT ideas have been co-opted by other economic schools. Back to the original point, government doesn't need covert means of funding agencies such as the TSA because it can do so easily with legal means. Your conspiracy theory is superfluous.
Holy crap, she's stunning! Could give Audrey Hepburn a run for her money. *Goes off to invent a time machine.*
Also good is http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2012/02/getting-the-policy-mix-right-in-germany-and-the-uk/ and the linked-to-there OECD survey of Germany.
Are you truly this ignorant? Germany doesn't treat their workers like shit? Germany's trade surplus is due far more to wage suppression than productivity. Indeed, this fact was pointed out to me initially by a German friend, and then I found tons of places that back it up; here's a quick sampling of references that mention it:
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/Assets/onaran2.pdf
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inst/download/akyuz.pdf
http://www.alternet.org/economy/154231/german_economic_striving_at_the_expense_of_workers_and_neighbors_will_backfire
Please mod parent down for talking nonsense.
Your post makes it all the more clear to me that I should have no regrets over deciding not to pursue a PhD with the aim to stay in academia, and, instead, becoming the first employee of a start-up instead. Lots of work and initial hardship, with huge risk, but never dull or rote, without the day-to-day drudgeries of academic life (incidentally, now I remember reading a comment from Larry Niven that he became a sci-fi writer instead of a researcher in a university for essentially the same reason).
And yet, some of the top baristas in the world, as shown by international competitions, are to be found in North America (for example, the founder of Vancouver's Caffe Artigiano was in the top three in the World Barista Championships multiple years). The west coast is particularly good for this. Seattle in the US and Vancouver in Canada have several small chains with extremely well trained staff and who commonly purchase their coffees from auctions offering selections of best-of crops for a given growing season. In other places in North America, however, it can be a bit harder to find good coffee, let alone a barista that can pull a proper espresso show by knowing how to properly adjust his tamping technique and tweak the grinder setting each day as a batch of roasted coffee ages and requires these adjustments daily. The reverse side of this coin is that there is a significant community of amateur coffee geeks who can give the pros a run for their money (you can get a pretty good coffee roaster online for little over $100, and a decent burr grinder for about the same)--enthusiasm and experimentation can go a long way.
> This used to be a place where you could have a decent discussion
Great, more empathy-seeking and misdirection that would make a stage magician blush.
> the campaigns to silence "hostile" voices are so effective - it's very easy to accuse and whip up a froth of vitriol
Oh dear, now you're a victim of maleficent persecution. Really, did you even read your post before clicking Submit, or did the fury of your adolescent anger and indignation rush your trigger finger to the button as uncontrollably as a rising orgasm having reached beyond the point of no return?
So where does that leave me, then, as a die-hard Blackberry user?
> 12 years of membership
What is this, a comparison of e-penis size as implied by length of slashdot membership? Maybe instead of trying to lead attention away from the fact that you were called out as an Apple shill--which I don't need the anonymous coward to tell me because I know already is the case, this being not the first time I see your nick on this board over the years attached exactly to this type of post--you should take it like a man and hang your head in deserved shame.
Wouldn't this only be an issue with processing? I was talking about encoding for storage and transmission only.
That's what I was referring to--storage and transmission, not processing (for which you can convert to whatever--say floating point). Sorry for not being clear in my post.
Thanks for the link.
It's never that simple, though. There's clear intent in a post such as yours to imply a certain generalization, given the overall subject of the article.
Mike, the point is both sides are wrong--the audiophiles and. I'm right smack in the middle, because I have both experience as a musician and as an engineer who's built and designed audio equipment. While I've been criticizing those opposing your side for the most part in this story, it's because of the preponderance of skeptics on slashdot. On the other hand, many audiophiles clearly don't understand that blind testing is critically important, and that yes, it is possible to carry out blind testing in a valid way that is beyond reproach, and that indeed many things that audiophiles love do not make a difference (speaker cable floor stand-offs? shakti stones?). The best case is when people who are both scientifically minded and rigorous in their approach, yet into audio and understand audiophile concerns, perform research. Then you get stuff like Geddes and Lee's blind tests showing that THD correlates very poorly with perception of distortion, but that specifically weighted metrics can in fact correlate well with perception (due to the ear masking some types of distortions and being very sensitive to others). In other cases, you see people like the uber audiophile skeptic engineer Douglas Self come around on some points and recognize that some things he did not think make a difference in fact do, after discussions on diyaudio.org and measurements he further performed as a result.
Linear quantization never made sense to me as far as encoding audio. Human ears, like our other senses, are logarithmic. The difference in linear intensity between two soft sounds is far more detectable than the same difference between two loud sounds. Linear quantization is thus wasteful in one end of the absolute intensity scale, and possibly insufficient in the other end. Why use an encoding so far from the optimal? Hardware considerations are not a good excuse because the same digital processing circuitry that the average delta-sigma DAC chip in every piece of consumer gear uses to convert the audio into a high bitrate/low bit depth stream before actual conversion to an analog signal can be trivially modified to handle nonlinearly quantized inputs.
I've got one better than blind tests, which are still based on introspection: _measure_ the effect precisely. And when you do, it turns out that the brain can perceive even ultrasound: http://jn.physiology.org/content/83/6/3548.full
Blind tests show that we perceive ultrasound: http://jn.physiology.org/content/83/6/3548.full So I suggest you GTFO. Albeit the effect is not conscious, no one has ruled out that it cannot subtly affect the perception of audible sound over long periods of time to the point where a conscious preference may develop in long term listening, without subjects of a study being able to describe the specific difference. In fact, this is more than plausible, given the reference I posted and others like it.
They only determined there's no immediately detectable conscious difference. Now consider this research: http://jn.physiology.org/content/83/6/3548.full So frequencies we don't consciously notice affect brain activity. Thus your reference is not as conclusive as you imply; still need studies to eliminate the possibility that inaudible frequencies do not impact the brain's perception of audible frequencies in a subtle manner over long listening. I've been suggesting we need long-term listening blind tests with psychological assays for about a decade, but haven't found volunteers that want to go through the trouble.
Information content is proportional to the product of bit depth and sampling rate. You can _always_ trade one for the other. In fact, this is what delta-sigma DACs (which is pretty much any modern audio DAC chip) rely on--the input audio data is converted to use few bits and very high sampling rate, because it's easier to build digital-to-analog converting hardware that uses a higher frequency than one that has sufficient matching between its switched current output elements (that's why you used to read about laser-trimmed resistors in the old R2R DAC datasheets). It's really shameful that you call yourself an audio engineer and don't know basic sampling theory--and on top of this you are posting misinformation here--for shame!
The human prefrontal cortex does not completely mature until one is in their early twenties. It makes no sense to let 18 year olds vote.
You're wrong again: there is an upper bound placed on us by cosmological considerations: the accelerating expansion of the universe means that our Hubble volume will forever only contain a finite amount of mass-energy (eventually everything outside the gravitationally bound local group of galaxies will be carried away from us by expansion at speed greater than the speed of light, making it forever out of reach). So where the hell are you going to get the arbitrary amount of energy you need to make an arbitrary frequency signal?
As for why people are combative: it's because we get upset when someone posts misinformation and we know we are likely too late in responding with a correction to bring the misled readers of the original post back to the path of righteousness.
Infinite bandwidth would also violate the Bekenstein bound and holographic principle. But hey, people will still think they can encode arbitrary precision real numbers in physical objects with finite extent, as futile as that dream is.
Infinite frequency is impossible even in principle because it implies infinite energy per photon (-> infinite mass -> black hole with event horizon at infinity), so, NO. This was such an obvious point that I'm surprised you put your foot in your mouth with that comment like this.