Wow, you're the first person to not think the pre-amps are amazing on the R-09. Are you sure about this?
Uh, no. I'm NOT the first person to think so, your experience is based on those you work with, and me with mine--friends complain about them, and let me listen. They're noisy enough to be a problem when field recording soundscapes or using quieter mics, though maybe still good for the price (I happen to think analog audio price/quality ratio should have improved more over the years). Using a line-level signal through a decent external preamp is noticeably cleaner. Maybe you're using them to bootleg concerts? Preamp is much less of an issue when you need to use an attenuated setting. The basis of good recording is gain structure.
In fact, the link you supplied also recommends an external preamp. Listening and hearing are very subjective and task-dependent, so they're amazing for whatever you're doing, but for recording small waves on sand or the dawn chorus or a sleeping child, they pollute.
Use a subnotebook with a USB audio card with XLR inputs, considerably cheaper than $2800 CDN and much more flexible. You can even do the postproduction on the same subnotebook.
Well, yeah, I've tinkered with various setups, including laptops with breakout boxes (USB fails according to Murphy's Law, BTW; give me firewire and decent OS please! But apple doesn't make a subnotebook). I've tried MiniDisc (ecch), flash recorders (2 years ago they sucked), back to an old Nagra, MiniDV, even semi-pro Hi8, hand-made tube mic preamps, etc. I can always get it to work, and get a recording, but with the exception of the nagra and minidv, they suck compared to DAT's quality and the relative simplicity of a proper field recorder.
The problem for me is I'm a pro-sumer, in the nether land between cheap junk and exponentially priced film gear. I do soundscape recordings and indie video, and the budget wants a $1000 recorder that has balanced xlr, one handheld unit, 3 hour battery life, silent preamps, usb/1394, acceptable control over settings, and high sample rate lossless recordings with over 4 hours capacity.
I'm well aware that there are recent offerings that promise this, like Sound Devices's 722, which does time code, is rugged, and would replace that tascam field recorder I loved and hated, at about $2800. I just think that the tech is there to make what I want at the price point I want, but the integration and market aren't there. I've been dreaming about this device for decades: essentially Korg's new MR1, with xlr jacks (or at least 1/4"!), firewire, more battery, timecode, and more tactile controls. Just a couple hundred dollars more stuff! But not available. We're in-between DAT and decent flash recording for The Peepul. For now, I use a MiniDV camera with XLR inputs, a kludge that is clunky but sounds fine.
Actually, tapers have moved to flash based recorders. The Edirol R-09 is an amazing unit for live taping... many more flash memory units coming as well...
Sure, if you are happy with the jacks and the preamp (many serious recordists bypass the R-09 noisy preamps). We aren't much better off than we were with DAT. The Korg 1-bit recorders look and sound good, but the price is pretty much where DAT recorders were, without the DRM excuse, and the MR1 has 1/8" jacks too. Prosumer flash recorders haven't matured yet.
DATs strength was field recording . . . I've not experienced it directly, but hear that dat suffers from shelf life issues . . .
Yes, I have some DAT tapes here that I'm anxious about, as I haven't converted them and me and my pals have all moved on to other tech.
One of DAT's more notorious flaws was its sensitivity to head alignment, so that a tape recorded on one deck wouldn't play on another, sometimes it was sheer voodoo: blood, feathers, dancing cables and hauling decks around.
While the portable Tascams were sweet machines for field recording, they were bulky and $2800 CDN. The next step down in price was $1000 and had no XLR inputs. As far as I'm concerned, we're in an in-between phase: the right replacement for DAT hasn't come along yet, and I just use MiniDV cameras when I need to record in the field. It's a drag, audio should be so much easier than video.
On the El Mariachi DVD, there was a special feature called something like "The 10-minute film school of Robert Rodriguez". It probably talks about some of the stuff in his book, like how not to waste film.
I regularly show this to my students before they undertake a week of guerilla-style indie videomaking. It's a review of some raw footage from El Mariachi analysing how he pulled it off. It's full of tricks that translate from 16mm to DV, because they're about being cheap, cheap, cheap. As he puts it, "once you start that money hose flowing, it's hard to shut it off." The main thing is to be able to shoot with the edit in mind: the same scene from multiple angles to make it look like you have more cameras; vary framing and zoom during cut-away moments to keep the actors on a roll; be clever about props so you can edit for realism; mic placement is more important than equipment quality; minimize the need for ADR and foley (or, conversley, use them instead of expensive field recording); use a wide lens instead of steadicam; shoot in sequence when possible.
Those are all good tips, but the main thing to making an indie flick despite a tiny budget? Story. Story story story. Most indie films suck, but if it's a well-edited moving story, nearly everything else is forgiven.
Humans are apex predators. Yes, we may die to animal attacks but there is not a single animal that hunts us to eat us.
You've never heard of polar bears? Jaguars? Lions and tigers? Even wolverines have been known to stalk prospectors in hungry times. A very large snake will hunt and eat humans, and we're prey to mass animals like army ants.
Life is a cycle and we're eaten as much as we eat (swat, damn early for 'skeeters). Your own body contains 10 times as many bacterial cells as your own cells. Get used to it. The old saw about human special separateness is fading.
[shameless SP] It's a good point, and, fed up with the lowest common denominator, some friends and I are going to be posting about 5 hours of student videos (about 50) to youtube in the coming week, culled from about 4000, from the Gulf Islands Film and Television School near Vancouver and Victoria. They were all made guerilla flim style, with prosumer gear and in under a week. That 'film boot camp' indie style quick training is just what is needed for the lumpen proletubiat to start making something a little more worthwhile than drunken crotchbiting animashup ninjaporn. [/shameless SP]
About 30% of these films involve at least one scene of people running through the woods; how's that for canadian content, eh?
Please list all the circumstances in which making a copy of a digital music file is legal, and all those in which it is illegal.
What? You can't? I guess the issue isn't as simple as you make it out to be.
I'm not the OP, but let's see: oh, I can make any copy I want, so long as I don't sell it or redistribute it en masse. That includes me being allowed to give you, my buddy, a copy! Here!
However, I live in Canada, and I've paid for copying privileges in levies and in the courts. It's pretty simple up here, really, so long as you know about your rights (though few do, they mostly think we live under american rules, *sigh*).
That's a cool story. I've used a firewire cable with my laptop in a pinch at various times when a spare ethernet cable wasn't available, and it always works easily (mac/linux, haven't tried it with windows yet). I'm curious about real-world throughput speeds on an IP network, if anyone knows. It's a little-known feature, it seems. Does anyone else have a permanent setup using firewire?
I'm also curious about why it's so easy to do this with FW and not USB.
They are 6-pin (larger and powered) and 4-pin (small, unpowered) on FW400. This is because consumer/prosumer cameras have space constraints and run under their own power. Sometimes manufacturers (Avid, e.g., ugh) use 4-pins on non-portable devices, just because they're powered, which sucks, because you're absolutely right, the 4-pin firewire jack is easy to ruin with a little jiggling. FW800, however has a medium-small but pretty stable plug and jack.
To be fair, USB has a range of jack sizes too, including small, very small, and miniscule.
The biggest improvement in this area, for me, would be small powered jacks/plugs that have a positive latch connection and are laterally stabilized.
My 2-bit opinion on the article: Firewire wins over USB 2 any day if you want stable bandwidth and CPU load (e.g. video), and the option of fast networking.
Whoosh! The comment was a kind of metonymy. Government really has no place in our everyday intimate social relations until there's violence of some kind.
he still remains generally opposed to infringing on privacy, big-government, and censorship.
Privacy, yeah, he respects privacy by wishing he could tell us who we can marry. The bedroom, that's a good public place for conservatives to govern, isn't it? We already know that he's happy to tell me what substances I can put in MY body, that's mighty libertarian of him. Next thing you know they'll be messing around with people's wombs. Oh, opposed to big government (but not a big military), sure, so long as that works for big business, and when big business calls the policy, that's a good substitute for democracy and government, is it? Oh, and censorship; we don't really know about that yet, do we? It's a minority government.
Unless, of course, you'd rather listen to what a politician says, rather than watch what they do. Then you'd be perfectly right.
You implied I was a lazy bastard: I stand guilty as charged. Incompetent? Not really. Now, if you had called me unclear, you wouldn't be such a flaming cowboy.
I didn't question the quality of the Cuban system, its reknown is deserved and I perhaps know more about it than you assume--Canadians do not labour under the same propaganda regime as Helms-Burton Land, and some of us go there for treatment, including dental care (which isn't covered by our quasi-socialist healthcare). I was calling into question the GP's assertion that the reasons behind this attention to health care were purely propagandistic and that it did no good to the poor. He was saying, in a sense, that there was no grassroots sincerity to the "revolution" -- a statement like that is just more propaganda unless verified.
BTW, there are a number of other metrics you could add to that list that are impressive for a poor blockaded nation under constant threat of invasion, such as literacy rates, agricultural efficiencies, etc.
In other words, you're berating me for something that I took as obvious.
Then stupid, sadistic fools with far more money than brains could cruise the universe in giant spaceships that deliberately waste energy in search of amusement and happen upon our planet. It would be much like some of the early European settlers and the games they played with natives (which weren't so much fun for them -- see the Yaqui and Tasmanians ), and not unlike that of a small boy molesting a pile of ants.
Hey, crop circles! Like doing spins in the parking lot.
You're saying that you think water has medicinal properties?....
I think we're done here. Thanks for the...."interesting" suggestions, I'll let yo get back to your "studies".
No, I'm not. You consistently misread others' posts in a trollish manner. I merely state that humans likely don't know all there is to know about water, or anything else. Fools claim otherwise.
Do you have a reading disorder? I'm the one who called homeopathy placebo. The fact that it's completely dilute is obvious. That doesn't explain or disprove anything in itself, unless you claim to understand water.
Benveniste, Ennis, Reilly all have strange data on homeopathy, and while Randi was happy to succeed in his challenge regarding one attempt at homeopathy, reproducing marginal results is difficult. The point is that even marginal results, if confirmed, would indicate all kinds of questions about the nature of water. I imply no explanation, just that there isn't enough evidence to support your confidence.
"...you're quite ignorant about what science is."
And you use a religious style of rhetoric. Science is more than a method of observation. It's about reproducibility. You're confusing the scientific method with the overall endeavour.
Again, you didn't read my post, even though you quoted it. We're making the same point about the level of technology available. I'm complaining about unscientific drivel such as suggesting that science has all the answers already, that it will never have to adjust another paradigm. I'm also saying (for the third time, you really can't read very well, can you?) that people use the wrong explanation for things all the time--such as therapeutic touch being energy field manipulation, when in fact it may be (a postulation) a form of mildly and sporadically effective suggestion. It isn't the explanations for marginal phenomena I care about, I don't believe them. The effects, however, should be studied. The nine-year-old proved that adults were using a bogus explanation, which supports my point, she didn't study the effectiveness of the technique over a large sample. Confusing what she did with disproving the effect shows poor schooling.
The placebo effect is well established, as is suggestibility.
Randi's stunt-like approach overlooks the difficulty that even good scientists have reproducing phenomena where the paramaters and conditions aren't fully identified. He is challenging the explanations of the expert charlatans more than the results over large sample sets, and so he places an ideological goal above smart science. In other words, he isn't seeking to explore the world, he's trying to confirm a conclusion without adequate data.
Basically, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You were supposed to learn that in first year. Science is ideally about reserving judgement when it comes to unknowns.
The only reason they fund the visible arm of their medicine as well as they do is because it generates money from foreigners looking to be healed, and it makes for good propaganda. Do you seriously think that the average Cuban sees any benefit from this research? If you're a poor Cuban, you'd be better off trying to find medical aid in Zimbabwe.
And your assertion (I almost said analysis, oops) is based on what source? A.gov website? Cubans in exile? A tourist visit? Just curious about how you seem so smug and confident in passing down self-evident truths, such as "the only reason" and that people think cuba is utopia (I don't see evidence of that in postings here, show me?).
Next time you run into one of these "convincing dowsers" or miracle healers, tell 'em to head on over and claim James Randi's $1 million prize.
I don't think you're getting mine, RTFPost again. I used the word placebo and postulated alternate explanations such as hypnosis. I'm not saying that these incidents are easily repeatable or can be explained by their practitioners. I'm saying that even as one-off events, Ockham's razor isn't in evidence, attempts to explain them away lack data. There is, for instance, some very strange data about successful homeopathy, only partially repeated, but statistically significant. Adequate data, however, is lacking. Note that I'm a skeptic, I don't believe the claims of homeopathics etc. despite the evidence presented by my own experiences.
I have serious doubts about the claims of those who imply that Science has reached apotheosis and the current paradigms are adequate to explain everything. The naysayers about some of this stuff seem fervently religious in their lack of skepticism and unstudied confindence.
Randi's intentions may be noble but his methods, predictably, are more like a circus act. We need real science applied to some of these strange marginalia--but who would fund it? An example would be that weird red rain recently concentrated in Kerala. Samples were taken and tested, but the science was incredibly weak, given the potential of such an unknown.
Face it, we're just tiny little meat puppets barely out of the caves, we perceive a small amount of the available radiation and acoustic band, we're barely aware of most of our own thought processes (especially our own dogma), we can only observe
Consider for a minute that an even larger percentage of the EU beleives in things like Homeopathy, and "the healing touch".
Some use homeopathy as a very effective placebo. Or something, because, anecdotally, I've seen it work well for things like allergies. I'm a skeptic, because I don't have adequate data to evaluate and neither does anyone else, but I've seen accurate dowsing and a nearly naked man sit in the snow for hours without shivering or goosebumps or any obvious discomfort. Humans are pretty amazing, and there are plenty of unexplained effects, some perhaps easier to explain eventually (such as, maybe the dowser was reading the geomorphology in an intuitive emergent-system kind of way).
Likewise with "therapeutic touch," practiced by some professional nurses making some relatively humble claims (i.e. no rapid miracles, but obvious immediate relief). Doesn't make sense to me that it would or wouldn't work, because I don't understand the body's electromagnetic fields, though I have seen kirlian photography of a missing finger and felt the effects of strong magnets. Perhaps the "touch" is a powerful form of suggestion that boosts the body's natural processes? How do you know, have you studied it extensively? Have you ever seen a room full of people do strange things due to a subtle set of suggestions? Have you seen firewalking, trances, sighted people blind to what's right in front of them? I have. But I don't think it's wise to pretend we understand it, yet.
Human inventions always surpass our understanding of them.
You act like I care what other people think of me, why do I care if people like/dislike me?
Because you're a hominid, a troupe animal, and unless your biology is severely fscked, caring about what other people think (to a point) is an essential part of your instinctive behaviour and helps regulate things like hormones and, well, is healthy. I know it's cool to act the sociopath. Sorry to pop your balloon.
I read all three years ago, and read them again recently. I remember it seeming like a bit of a slog for a while in the second book, but it does get a lot more interesting. When I re-read it the soap opera parts seemed more important because they gave foundation to the characters' motivations and actions. I'd certainly recommend sticking it out, there's a lot of really good stuff in there.
Robinson's playing off of a key theme in the books: longevity. The main characters are tight with each other for over 150 years, many decades spent in isolation and underground. They're suffering memory and ennui problems, they're legends to everyone else but all-too human to each other, the same immature relationships. I think that reading Proust might give extra insight into what's going on in the overall character development.
Then there's the terraforming planet as a character. I guess that >20% of the story is about the topography, areology, aremorphology, climatology, ecology, engineering, and travel. If it interests you as quality hard SF, it's great storytelling. If not, it's a slog.
The politics are pretty heady, too. There are some challenging ideas in there, and if they clash with one's own ideologies, it makes it more of a slog.
I'm rereading the Mars trilogy now, and just came to the part where they reach the northern polar ice cap, and are completely overwhelmed by its massive size. Robinson did some excellent research for these books, says my geomorphologist brother.
I also found it an odd measure. I'd much rather see an image of where the lakes/oceans might be if all of it was melted, perhaps with depth maps.
It's one of those statements meant to boggle, like "if you stacked all the books ever printed, they would reach the moon" [that's bunk, just made that up].
Anyway, you asked for a sea level map of Mars, so here ya go.
I dont see Greenpeace being beyond being manipulative, but Monsanto is in a whole different league. In fact, I have a hard time understanding why the company isnt permanently terminated and its governors banned from conducting any business anywhere.
The latest vile deed to surface is in Wales. Monsanto is just unbelievable. From their glory days of Chemistry to their explosive growth into a biopirate Life Sciences behemoth, to the *IAA-like abuse of the intellectual property system, they've always leveraged their close relationship with US Federal agencies, especially the FDA. Executives and bureaucrats have often worked for both, and maintain ties. That's why they won't kill that company until there's a consumer revolt of enormous proportions.
They've been snapping up seed companies around the world. They know, to paraphrase a Cargill newsletter, that if you control the seed you control the farmer, and if you control the farmers, you control the nation. Look at their mad rush of a patenting campaign over the last two decades: they would patent you, if they could. They're hollywood evil.
in the late 80s early 90s MS almost encouraged piracy
More appropriately to the topic at hand, in the late 90's one, um, apparently merely had to enter 111111111-111 to dismiss the license screen for Office 98. Very clever and devious algorithm, that. Office was still spreading like the plague and quashing WordPerfect, and more than a few installations, including many fully paid licensed copies that I saw in action, used MS's shortcut license key. It was similarly easy with Office 97. It was so trivial to pirate that it really did become ubiquitous, even where it wasn't really needed.
The carrot and stick strategy of acting huffy about piracy on one hand while handing it out left and right worked, and I now get nearly everyone using the.doc format needlessly, and thinking there's no other way.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no. I'm NOT the first person to think so, your experience is based on those you work with, and me with mine--friends complain about them, and let me listen. They're noisy enough to be a problem when field recording soundscapes or using quieter mics, though maybe still good for the price (I happen to think analog audio price/quality ratio should have improved more over the years). Using a line-level signal through a decent external preamp is noticeably cleaner. Maybe you're using them to bootleg concerts? Preamp is much less of an issue when you need to use an attenuated setting. The basis of good recording is gain structure.
In fact, the link you supplied also recommends an external preamp. Listening and hearing are very subjective and task-dependent, so they're amazing for whatever you're doing, but for recording small waves on sand or the dawn chorus or a sleeping child, they pollute.
Well, yeah, I've tinkered with various setups, including laptops with breakout boxes (USB fails according to Murphy's Law, BTW; give me firewire and decent OS please! But apple doesn't make a subnotebook). I've tried MiniDisc (ecch), flash recorders (2 years ago they sucked), back to an old Nagra, MiniDV, even semi-pro Hi8, hand-made tube mic preamps, etc. I can always get it to work, and get a recording, but with the exception of the nagra and minidv, they suck compared to DAT's quality and the relative simplicity of a proper field recorder.
The problem for me is I'm a pro-sumer, in the nether land between cheap junk and exponentially priced film gear. I do soundscape recordings and indie video, and the budget wants a $1000 recorder that has balanced xlr, one handheld unit, 3 hour battery life, silent preamps, usb/1394, acceptable control over settings, and high sample rate lossless recordings with over 4 hours capacity.
I'm well aware that there are recent offerings that promise this, like Sound Devices's 722, which does time code, is rugged, and would replace that tascam field recorder I loved and hated, at about $2800. I just think that the tech is there to make what I want at the price point I want, but the integration and market aren't there. I've been dreaming about this device for decades: essentially Korg's new MR1, with xlr jacks (or at least 1/4"!), firewire, more battery, timecode, and more tactile controls. Just a couple hundred dollars more stuff! But not available. We're in-between DAT and decent flash recording for The Peepul. For now, I use a MiniDV camera with XLR inputs, a kludge that is clunky but sounds fine.
Sure, if you are happy with the jacks and the preamp (many serious recordists bypass the R-09 noisy preamps). We aren't much better off than we were with DAT. The Korg 1-bit recorders look and sound good, but the price is pretty much where DAT recorders were, without the DRM excuse, and the MR1 has 1/8" jacks too. Prosumer flash recorders haven't matured yet.
Yes, I have some DAT tapes here that I'm anxious about, as I haven't converted them and me and my pals have all moved on to other tech.
One of DAT's more notorious flaws was its sensitivity to head alignment, so that a tape recorded on one deck wouldn't play on another, sometimes it was sheer voodoo: blood, feathers, dancing cables and hauling decks around.
While the portable Tascams were sweet machines for field recording, they were bulky and $2800 CDN. The next step down in price was $1000 and had no XLR inputs. As far as I'm concerned, we're in an in-between phase: the right replacement for DAT hasn't come along yet, and I just use MiniDV cameras when I need to record in the field. It's a drag, audio should be so much easier than video.
I regularly show this to my students before they undertake a week of guerilla-style indie videomaking. It's a review of some raw footage from El Mariachi analysing how he pulled it off. It's full of tricks that translate from 16mm to DV, because they're about being cheap, cheap, cheap. As he puts it, "once you start that money hose flowing, it's hard to shut it off." The main thing is to be able to shoot with the edit in mind: the same scene from multiple angles to make it look like you have more cameras; vary framing and zoom during cut-away moments to keep the actors on a roll; be clever about props so you can edit for realism; mic placement is more important than equipment quality; minimize the need for ADR and foley (or, conversley, use them instead of expensive field recording); use a wide lens instead of steadicam; shoot in sequence when possible.
Those are all good tips, but the main thing to making an indie flick despite a tiny budget? Story. Story story story. Most indie films suck, but if it's a well-edited moving story, nearly everything else is forgiven.
You've never heard of polar bears? Jaguars? Lions and tigers? Even wolverines have been known to stalk prospectors in hungry times. A very large snake will hunt and eat humans, and we're prey to mass animals like army ants.
Life is a cycle and we're eaten as much as we eat (swat, damn early for 'skeeters). Your own body contains 10 times as many bacterial cells as your own cells. Get used to it. The old saw about human special separateness is fading.
[shameless SP]
It's a good point, and, fed up with the lowest common denominator, some friends and I are going to be posting about 5 hours of student videos (about 50) to youtube in the coming week, culled from about 4000, from the Gulf Islands Film and Television School near Vancouver and Victoria. They were all made guerilla flim style, with prosumer gear and in under a week. That 'film boot camp' indie style quick training is just what is needed for the lumpen proletubiat to start making something a little more worthwhile than drunken crotchbiting animashup ninjaporn.
[/shameless SP]
About 30% of these films involve at least one scene of people running through the woods; how's that for canadian content, eh?
What? You can't? I guess the issue isn't as simple as you make it out to be.
I'm not the OP, but let's see: oh, I can make any copy I want, so long as I don't sell it or redistribute it en masse. That includes me being allowed to give you, my buddy, a copy! Here!
However, I live in Canada, and I've paid for copying privileges in levies and in the courts. It's pretty simple up here, really, so long as you know about your rights (though few do, they mostly think we live under american rules, *sigh*).
That's a cool story. I've used a firewire cable with my laptop in a pinch at various times when a spare ethernet cable wasn't available, and it always works easily (mac/linux, haven't tried it with windows yet). I'm curious about real-world throughput speeds on an IP network, if anyone knows. It's a little-known feature, it seems. Does anyone else have a permanent setup using firewire?
I'm also curious about why it's so easy to do this with FW and not USB.
They are 6-pin (larger and powered) and 4-pin (small, unpowered) on FW400. This is because consumer/prosumer cameras have space constraints and run under their own power. Sometimes manufacturers (Avid, e.g., ugh) use 4-pins on non-portable devices, just because they're powered, which sucks, because you're absolutely right, the 4-pin firewire jack is easy to ruin with a little jiggling. FW800, however has a medium-small but pretty stable plug and jack.
To be fair, USB has a range of jack sizes too, including small, very small, and miniscule.
The biggest improvement in this area, for me, would be small powered jacks/plugs that have a positive latch connection and are laterally stabilized.
My 2-bit opinion on the article: Firewire wins over USB 2 any day if you want stable bandwidth and CPU load (e.g. video), and the option of fast networking.
Whoosh! The comment was a kind of metonymy. Government really has no place in our everyday intimate social relations until there's violence of some kind.
Privacy, yeah, he respects privacy by wishing he could tell us who we can marry. The bedroom, that's a good public place for conservatives to govern, isn't it? We already know that he's happy to tell me what substances I can put in MY body, that's mighty libertarian of him. Next thing you know they'll be messing around with people's wombs. Oh, opposed to big government (but not a big military), sure, so long as that works for big business, and when big business calls the policy, that's a good substitute for democracy and government, is it? Oh, and censorship; we don't really know about that yet, do we? It's a minority government.
Unless, of course, you'd rather listen to what a politician says, rather than watch what they do. Then you'd be perfectly right.
Well, you DO write like a drunk lawyer.
You implied I was a lazy bastard: I stand guilty as charged. Incompetent? Not really. Now, if you had called me unclear, you wouldn't be such a flaming cowboy.
I didn't question the quality of the Cuban system, its reknown is deserved and I perhaps know more about it than you assume--Canadians do not labour under the same propaganda regime as Helms-Burton Land, and some of us go there for treatment, including dental care (which isn't covered by our quasi-socialist healthcare). I was calling into question the GP's assertion that the reasons behind this attention to health care were purely propagandistic and that it did no good to the poor. He was saying, in a sense, that there was no grassroots sincerity to the "revolution" -- a statement like that is just more propaganda unless verified.
BTW, there are a number of other metrics you could add to that list that are impressive for a poor blockaded nation under constant threat of invasion, such as literacy rates, agricultural efficiencies, etc.
In other words, you're berating me for something that I took as obvious.
One of the obstacles is how to power them.
The answer - make them absorb blood shugar!
Woah, slow down there. You've obviously never had a yeast infection...
Hey, crop circles! Like doing spins in the parking lot.
No, I'm not. You consistently misread others' posts in a trollish manner. I merely state that humans likely don't know all there is to know about water, or anything else. Fools claim otherwise.
Do you have a reading disorder? I'm the one who called homeopathy placebo. The fact that it's completely dilute is obvious. That doesn't explain or disprove anything in itself, unless you claim to understand water.
Benveniste, Ennis, Reilly all have strange data on homeopathy, and while Randi was happy to succeed in his challenge regarding one attempt at homeopathy, reproducing marginal results is difficult. The point is that even marginal results, if confirmed, would indicate all kinds of questions about the nature of water. I imply no explanation, just that there isn't enough evidence to support your confidence.
"...you're quite ignorant about what science is."
And you use a religious style of rhetoric. Science is more than a method of observation. It's about reproducibility. You're confusing the scientific method with the overall endeavour.
Again, you didn't read my post, even though you quoted it. We're making the same point about the level of technology available. I'm complaining about unscientific drivel such as suggesting that science has all the answers already, that it will never have to adjust another paradigm. I'm also saying (for the third time, you really can't read very well, can you?) that people use the wrong explanation for things all the time--such as therapeutic touch being energy field manipulation, when in fact it may be (a postulation) a form of mildly and sporadically effective suggestion. It isn't the explanations for marginal phenomena I care about, I don't believe them. The effects, however, should be studied. The nine-year-old proved that adults were using a bogus explanation, which supports my point, she didn't study the effectiveness of the technique over a large sample. Confusing what she did with disproving the effect shows poor schooling.
The placebo effect is well established, as is suggestibility.
Randi's stunt-like approach overlooks the difficulty that even good scientists have reproducing phenomena where the paramaters and conditions aren't fully identified. He is challenging the explanations of the expert charlatans more than the results over large sample sets, and so he places an ideological goal above smart science. In other words, he isn't seeking to explore the world, he's trying to confirm a conclusion without adequate data.
Basically, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You were supposed to learn that in first year. Science is ideally about reserving judgement when it comes to unknowns.
And your assertion (I almost said analysis, oops) is based on what source? A .gov website? Cubans in exile? A tourist visit? Just curious about how you seem so smug and confident in passing down self-evident truths, such as "the only reason" and that people think cuba is utopia (I don't see evidence of that in postings here, show me?).
Next time you run into one of these "convincing dowsers" or miracle healers, tell 'em to head on over and claim James Randi's $1 million prize.
I don't think you're getting mine, RTFPost again. I used the word placebo and postulated alternate explanations such as hypnosis. I'm not saying that these incidents are easily repeatable or can be explained by their practitioners. I'm saying that even as one-off events, Ockham's razor isn't in evidence, attempts to explain them away lack data. There is, for instance, some very strange data about successful homeopathy, only partially repeated, but statistically significant. Adequate data, however, is lacking. Note that I'm a skeptic, I don't believe the claims of homeopathics etc. despite the evidence presented by my own experiences.
I have serious doubts about the claims of those who imply that Science has reached apotheosis and the current paradigms are adequate to explain everything. The naysayers about some of this stuff seem fervently religious in their lack of skepticism and unstudied confindence.
Randi's intentions may be noble but his methods, predictably, are more like a circus act. We need real science applied to some of these strange marginalia--but who would fund it? An example would be that weird red rain recently concentrated in Kerala. Samples were taken and tested, but the science was incredibly weak, given the potential of such an unknown.
Face it, we're just tiny little meat puppets barely out of the caves, we perceive a small amount of the available radiation and acoustic band, we're barely aware of most of our own thought processes (especially our own dogma), we can only observe
Some use homeopathy as a very effective placebo. Or something, because, anecdotally, I've seen it work well for things like allergies. I'm a skeptic, because I don't have adequate data to evaluate and neither does anyone else, but I've seen accurate dowsing and a nearly naked man sit in the snow for hours without shivering or goosebumps or any obvious discomfort. Humans are pretty amazing, and there are plenty of unexplained effects, some perhaps easier to explain eventually (such as, maybe the dowser was reading the geomorphology in an intuitive emergent-system kind of way).
Likewise with "therapeutic touch," practiced by some professional nurses making some relatively humble claims (i.e. no rapid miracles, but obvious immediate relief). Doesn't make sense to me that it would or wouldn't work, because I don't understand the body's electromagnetic fields, though I have seen kirlian photography of a missing finger and felt the effects of strong magnets. Perhaps the "touch" is a powerful form of suggestion that boosts the body's natural processes? How do you know, have you studied it extensively? Have you ever seen a room full of people do strange things due to a subtle set of suggestions? Have you seen firewalking, trances, sighted people blind to what's right in front of them? I have. But I don't think it's wise to pretend we understand it, yet.
Human inventions always surpass our understanding of them.
Because you're a hominid, a troupe animal, and unless your biology is severely fscked, caring about what other people think (to a point) is an essential part of your instinctive behaviour and helps regulate things like hormones and, well, is healthy. I know it's cool to act the sociopath. Sorry to pop your balloon.
Robinson's playing off of a key theme in the books: longevity. The main characters are tight with each other for over 150 years, many decades spent in isolation and underground. They're suffering memory and ennui problems, they're legends to everyone else but all-too human to each other, the same immature relationships. I think that reading Proust might give extra insight into what's going on in the overall character development.
Then there's the terraforming planet as a character. I guess that >20% of the story is about the topography, areology, aremorphology, climatology, ecology, engineering, and travel. If it interests you as quality hard SF, it's great storytelling. If not, it's a slog.
The politics are pretty heady, too. There are some challenging ideas in there, and if they clash with one's own ideologies, it makes it more of a slog.
I'm rereading the Mars trilogy now, and just came to the part where they reach the northern polar ice cap, and are completely overwhelmed by its massive size. Robinson did some excellent research for these books, says my geomorphologist brother.
It's one of those statements meant to boggle, like "if you stacked all the books ever printed, they would reach the moon" [that's bunk, just made that up].
Anyway, you asked for a sea level map of Mars, so here ya go.
The latest vile deed to surface is in Wales. Monsanto is just unbelievable. From their glory days of Chemistry to their explosive growth into a biopirate Life Sciences behemoth, to the *IAA-like abuse of the intellectual property system, they've always leveraged their close relationship with US Federal agencies, especially the FDA. Executives and bureaucrats have often worked for both, and maintain ties. That's why they won't kill that company until there's a consumer revolt of enormous proportions.
They've been snapping up seed companies around the world. They know, to paraphrase a Cargill newsletter, that if you control the seed you control the farmer, and if you control the farmers, you control the nation. Look at their mad rush of a patenting campaign over the last two decades: they would patent you, if they could. They're hollywood evil.
More appropriately to the topic at hand, in the late 90's one, um, apparently merely had to enter 111111111-111 to dismiss the license screen for Office 98. Very clever and devious algorithm, that. Office was still spreading like the plague and quashing WordPerfect, and more than a few installations, including many fully paid licensed copies that I saw in action, used MS's shortcut license key. It was similarly easy with Office 97. It was so trivial to pirate that it really did become ubiquitous, even where it wasn't really needed.
The carrot and stick strategy of acting huffy about piracy on one hand while handing it out left and right worked, and I now get nearly everyone using the .doc format needlessly, and thinking there's no other way.