So are the Creationists now faced with having to argue that a "random error" in the science process resulted in a non-deleterious "trait" making it to publication? Whoa.
Whoa. Let's not equate the tube vs. solid-state debate with cable voodoo. You can look at the waveform of a tube amp's output and compare it to a solid-state amp's output and see the difference yourself, if you know what to look for. Tubes color the sound (essentially, distort it, but in a way that many people prefer) by emphasisizing the odd-ordered harmonics of a given tone.
There was a Science friday topic on this late last year that answered a lot of the same questions for me. You can try to dig up the podcast if you like ("Winter Sky" 12/01/2006). It didn't have specific brand advice but the two things I remember being most helpful were: 1) a good mount is as important, if not moreso, than the telescope. And 2) he had a good recommendation for a key optical ratio, which I've of course forgotten. The podcast is ony 20 minutes, though, so might be worth your time.
There's a chance the writer of that article is confused. I read another write up of the same event that said Nimoy would be in the movie, but made no mention of his playing Spock again. I got the impression is would be more of a cameo role - a nod to the fans.
I live in Dallas. There's a wonderful indie coffee shop called Drip on Lover's Lane. The owner roasts all his beans himself and puts the roasting date on the bag, throwing every batch out after ten days. In my experience, freshness makes a HUGE difference. Grinding and brewing coffee that's been roasted the same day tastes far superior to any other coffee I've had. It almost has a naturally sweet taste.
Smolin is highly skeptical of many string theorists' reliance on the Anthropomorphic Principle.
That's the Anthropic Principle: the idea that the constants we observe in this universe which are ostensibly crucial for the formation of life, are that way because if they were any other way we wouldn't be here to observe them.
I work as a copywriter at an ad agency. Several years ago, my boss handed me an assignment for Clear Channel. I just looked at the client on the job brief and handed it back to him, saying, "There are very few companies I hate more than them" and walked off. Never had any repercussions. He could have made my life pretty hard, but he respected where I was coming from not everyone is as fortunate. But the thing that made it easy for me was there was no moral gray area in my mind. No self-debating, it was a knee jerk, "I hate them, no, I'm not doing it" right at the beginning of the assignment. I'm the first to admit, hell, I'm in advertising - there's lots of fuzzy ethics, and when the lines are blurrier for me, I tend to swallow my moral objections and do my job.
Re:This is What Slashdot Should Be
on
Dark Matter Exists
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Yes! Finally someone noticed. I was thrilled with the writing of that blog entry, which is why I chose to submit that rather than a more "official" write-up (also, none of the big publications had picked the story up when I submitted it yet. On the other hand, a real publication would have been able to handle the server load. Oh well). But my original summary even said something about how well written the blog entry was, but the editor cut that part.
My grandmother researched our family tree very extensively, and it turns out Ben Franklin is my great (x7) uncle. His father is my great great great great great great great grandfather. Anybody else out there related? Maybe some direct descendents, even? Considering how well he did for himself, I'd think that likely.
I'd have to disagree. One of the worst ones for me was Super Mario 64. I couldn't drive anywhere without imagining triple jumping from rooftop to rooftop. And that insidious "Hip! Hoop! Wahhooo!" playing in a recursive loop in my head the whole time.
Actually, my main point in posting that was to make an Aqua Teen Hunger Force reference. But apparently, no one got it. At some point, either Ignignot or Urr makes the claim that, "On the moon, we are excellent spellers." If I remembered what the damn context was, it would be funny, I swear.
While true, the bigger reason that loudspeakers sound better than headphones is that your brain is used to processing sound with both ears. In other words, sound from loudspeakers sounds more natural because your right hear hears sound from both the left and right speakers, only it hears the right speaker louder and slightly sooner. (And, obviously, the reverse is true for the left ear). That's what creates the "stereo" effect. This isn't true with headphones - your right ear only hears the right channel. So for the vast majority of recorded material, when you listen in headphones, your brain interprets the sound as slightly wrong somehow.
Some manufacturers of headphone amplifiers (http://headroom.headphone.com/) include a simple processor that feeds some of the left channel to the right headphone with the appropriate attenuation and delay, and vica versa. I use one of these and love it. The concious effect is subtle, but you find that you can listen to headphones for a much, much longer time before you get that "Aaaagh! Gotta take these off!" effect.
"NetRatings, based in New York and Milpitas, Calif., used a panel of 50,000 participants selected through calls to randomly generated phone numbers. Each participating household provides a profile of the users in the home, and a device connected to each Internet-linked PC in the home logs where those users go on the Internet. Users have to log in to identify themselves when they start using the computer, Ryan said."
Did the pollers stop to think that the fact that they were *calling* people might in and of itself skew the sample results? After all, people who have broadband are far more likely to answer the phone when the pollers call. No dial-up busy signals to contend with.
Frankly, I think boredom makes for the worst jobs. I worked as an intern at the Superconducting Supercollider the summer congress canned it. Those were some slow, depressing days. But I did get to learn UNIX on a sparc2, which got me lots of street cred.
Not that you need actual work to avoid boredom. Best job I ever had was driving the campus escort shuttle in college. I'd sit in my dorm room from 10PM-2AM, watching MST3K with my roommates. Whenever the campus police radioed, I'd drive my little golf cart out to pick up some safety-conscious girl at the library and drive her back to the dorm room. And man, did I show them a thing or two about safety! (I'm not sure what that meant).
>Realistically speaking, the only big problem with FM radio > quality is that it attenuates above 16kHz
That's not quite true. I write and produce ads for a living. When I record radio commercials, we're severely limited in the subtleties of sound we choose to use, partly because most people listen to the radio on poor speakers, but also largely because radio stations send all their programming and ad signals through ungodly amounts of compression. The end result of compression is that you lose a whole lot of dynamic information, which is why on the radio, even the "quiet parts" of a song sound almost the same volume as the loud parts.
Here's my problem with the media's coverage of geographic profiling: if the killer is now aware of the technique, how hard is it for him to thwart it?
For example, after reading that article, if I were go on a killing spree I'd make sure to kill at least one person right by my house, then a bunch of people successively further and further away. Or maybe the reverse. Seems as simple as that.
But wait.... !! Maybe that's exactly their plan! Oh crap! The cops know that I know about geoprofiling, and they're using the media to INTENTIONALLY get me to kill someone by my house, leading them straight to me! I've been duped. Guess I'll just kill randomly now.
Slashdot Mirror
Dammit! This robot arms race is only going to distract robot researchers from the vastly more important goal: the robot sex race.
So are the Creationists now faced with having to argue that a "random error" in the science process resulted in a non-deleterious "trait" making it to publication? Whoa.
Oops. You're right - even ordered indeed. My nerdy preference for odd numbers colored my memory.
Whoa. Let's not equate the tube vs. solid-state debate with cable voodoo. You can look at the waveform of a tube amp's output and compare it to a solid-state amp's output and see the difference yourself, if you know what to look for. Tubes color the sound (essentially, distort it, but in a way that many people prefer) by emphasisizing the odd-ordered harmonics of a given tone.
There was a Science friday topic on this late last year that answered a lot of the same questions for me. You can try to dig up the podcast if you like ("Winter Sky" 12/01/2006). It didn't have specific brand advice but the two things I remember being most helpful were: 1) a good mount is as important, if not moreso, than the telescope. And 2) he had a good recommendation for a key optical ratio, which I've of course forgotten. The podcast is ony 20 minutes, though, so might be worth your time.
There's a chance the writer of that article is confused. I read another write up of the same event that said Nimoy would be in the movie, but made no mention of his playing Spock again. I got the impression is would be more of a cameo role - a nod to the fans.
I live in Dallas. There's a wonderful indie coffee shop called Drip on Lover's Lane. The owner roasts all his beans himself and puts the roasting date on the bag, throwing every batch out after ten days. In my experience, freshness makes a HUGE difference. Grinding and brewing coffee that's been roasted the same day tastes far superior to any other coffee I've had. It almost has a naturally sweet taste.
I work as a copywriter at an ad agency. Several years ago, my boss handed me an assignment for Clear Channel. I just looked at the client on the job brief and handed it back to him, saying, "There are very few companies I hate more than them" and walked off. Never had any repercussions. He could have made my life pretty hard, but he respected where I was coming from not everyone is as fortunate. But the thing that made it easy for me was there was no moral gray area in my mind. No self-debating, it was a knee jerk, "I hate them, no, I'm not doing it" right at the beginning of the assignment. I'm the first to admit, hell, I'm in advertising - there's lots of fuzzy ethics, and when the lines are blurrier for me, I tend to swallow my moral objections and do my job.
Yes! Finally someone noticed. I was thrilled with the writing of that blog entry, which is why I chose to submit that rather than a more "official" write-up (also, none of the big publications had picked the story up when I submitted it yet. On the other hand, a real publication would have been able to handle the server load. Oh well). But my original summary even said something about how well written the blog entry was, but the editor cut that part.
My grandmother researched our family tree very extensively, and it turns out Ben Franklin is my great (x7) uncle. His father is my great great great great great great great grandfather. Anybody else out there related? Maybe some direct descendents, even? Considering how well he did for himself, I'd think that likely.
My favorite way to curse is to combine a really obscene word with a goofily innocuous one. Like "Cockbottom". Or "Cuntpoop". But that's just me.
I'd have to disagree. One of the worst ones for me was Super Mario 64. I couldn't drive anywhere without imagining triple jumping from rooftop to rooftop. And that insidious "Hip! Hoop! Wahhooo!" playing in a recursive loop in my head the whole time.
Actually, my main point in posting that was to make an Aqua Teen Hunger Force reference. But apparently, no one got it. At some point, either Ignignot or Urr makes the claim that, "On the moon, we are excellent spellers." If I remembered what the damn context was, it would be funny, I swear.
I know it's nitpicky, but it's spelled "rendezvous". I only point it out because on the moon, we are excellent spellers.
While true, the bigger reason that loudspeakers sound better than headphones is that your brain is used to processing sound with both ears. In other words, sound from loudspeakers sounds more natural because your right hear hears sound from both the left and right speakers, only it hears the right speaker louder and slightly sooner. (And, obviously, the reverse is true for the left ear). That's what creates the "stereo" effect. This isn't true with headphones - your right ear only hears the right channel. So for the vast majority of recorded material, when you listen in headphones, your brain interprets the sound as slightly wrong somehow.
Some manufacturers of headphone amplifiers (http://headroom.headphone.com/) include a simple processor that feeds some of the left channel to the right headphone with the appropriate attenuation and delay, and vica versa. I use one of these and love it. The concious effect is subtle, but you find that you can listen to headphones for a much, much longer time before you get that "Aaaagh! Gotta take these off!" effect.
I for one welcome our new beowulf cluster of these linux-running overlords.
"NetRatings, based in New York and Milpitas, Calif., used a panel of 50,000 participants selected through calls to randomly generated phone numbers. Each participating household provides a profile of the users in the home, and a device connected to each Internet-linked PC in the home logs where those users go on the Internet. Users have to log in to identify themselves when they start using the computer, Ryan said."
Did the pollers stop to think that the fact that they were *calling* people might in and of itself skew the sample results? After all, people who have broadband are far more likely to answer the phone when the pollers call. No dial-up busy signals to contend with.
Maybe they found the fossil buried in the sky.
Frankly, I think boredom makes for the worst jobs. I worked as an intern at the Superconducting Supercollider the summer congress canned it. Those were some slow, depressing days. But I did get to learn UNIX on a sparc2, which got me lots of street cred.
Not that you need actual work to avoid boredom. Best job I ever had was driving the campus escort shuttle in college. I'd sit in my dorm room from 10PM-2AM, watching MST3K with my roommates. Whenever the campus police radioed, I'd drive my little golf cart out to pick up some safety-conscious girl at the library and drive her back to the dorm room. And man, did I show them a thing or two about safety! (I'm not sure what that meant).
>Realistically speaking, the only big problem with FM radio
> quality is that it attenuates above 16kHz
That's not quite true. I write and produce ads for a living. When I record radio commercials, we're severely limited in the subtleties of sound we choose to use, partly because most people listen to the radio on poor speakers, but also largely because radio stations send all their programming and ad signals through ungodly amounts of compression. The end result of compression is that you lose a whole lot of dynamic information, which is why on the radio, even the "quiet parts" of a song sound almost the same volume as the loud parts.
Better soup. Am I right?
Here's my problem with the media's coverage of geographic profiling: if the killer is now aware of the technique, how hard is it for him to thwart it? For example, after reading that article, if I were go on a killing spree I'd make sure to kill at least one person right by my house, then a bunch of people successively further and further away. Or maybe the reverse. Seems as simple as that. But wait .... !! Maybe that's exactly their plan! Oh crap! The cops know that I know about geoprofiling, and they're using the media to INTENTIONALLY get me to kill someone by my house, leading them straight to me! I've been duped. Guess I'll just kill randomly now.
Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.
Imagine: a hard drive in my wrist watch.
... it will be able to ... record every time it's ever told AND the precise time at which it told it.
So
I can't wait.