Yes you're right - if the data wasn't there in the first place you'll never get it back. I guess the mus-biz is just waiting to provide remasters at 96kHz, 24 bit as the last step in the selling of the back catalogue. Trouble is though (as I'm sure they know) most people won't really see the benefit or care that much. Another thing is that on remaster collections everything gets compressed and re-EQ'ed anyway which is what probably accounts for the live Who cymbal thing. It's possibly true that standards in audio engineering are slipping a little and sometimes really nasty top end gets through in remasters. The record companies couldn't really care less in my experience. Here's a story about that: when they rereleased the Beatles on CD they took the 2trk masters and thought they were stereo splits and made the CDs with it's characteristic hard left/right pan placing (eg Ringo's in one speaker and George is in the other) by the millions. In fact the 2trks were meant to bounced into mono and were actually the final part of balance/control for the mastering engineer not for public consumption. George Martin realised the mistake had been made and told EMI to redo it. Guess what? - To this day they're still sold as split pairs not mono as they should be.
I don't really post much about this kind of thing and prefer reading/. to reading about work. Some of the pro-Audio magazines have fairly high-level discussions about this kind of thing which you can check out on the net. EQ magazine and others.... Or Sound-On-Sound magazine can occasionally be worth a look but it seems to be kids making the same mistakes over and over.
Hi, as for 'warble and shimmer' try a live recording that you have on CD with a fairly open drum sound. Live rock gigs that have been well recorded are good (Led Zep that kind of thing, The Who etc) - most recordings from the 70s have better dynamic ranges than today so it's a good place to start. Then use your favourite MP3 ripper (I use iTunes) to generate a few rips at different bit rates. Try 48, 64, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 256k. When you listen to the 48k one you'll notice resolution breaking down in the top end where the cymbals are - you should be able to notice distinct bands appearing. That's how MP3 works - it gathers the sound around a freq band into one seperate frequency and so effectively quantises the audio spectrum (continuous) into discrete bands. As you move up the MP3 bit rates you'll notice this effect dissappearing although it never entirely disappears. Once you've learned what this sounds like you'll be able to hear it at higher and higher bit rates. Also, what we call 'transients' -- the speed of attack in drum sounds --- tends to slow down with MP3 at any bitrate. The stereo image particularly in the top end can move around a little too.
I do think 44.1KHz conversion adds all kinds of nasties into the sound and tends to strip the sound of some life. That's due to the very unmusical digital filters that need to be applied to prevent aliasing (where the top end become bass again - the old wagon wheels on film problem if you know what I mean). Like you say even 48KHz would be better but 44.1KHz was chosen as it's a sub-carrier of the PAL frequency format. It was in my mind a bad choice but one that we've had to live with for 20 years now. Most projects now are recorded at 96Khz, 24 bit and then mastered down to 44.1KHz, 16bit. That's where all our lovely work gets really chopped down to size and is definitely the most lossy stage of the recording process today. So I do think CDs do have a constrained sound and modern multiband digital compression tends to make it even worse. Sometimes it's refered to as a 'plasticky' sound - somehow it's not quite the real thing. I used to work on 30ips multitrackers (analogue) that never suffered in that way - always had a lovely non-constrained open sound all the way to where only dogs could hear. (Typically flat response from 30Hz to 35KHz on a good recorder)
Having said all this unless you have high quality sound cards and monitors it can be hard to hear what I'm talking about. The iPod has a pretty good sound though especially when put through some hi quality headphones. My soundcard is a MOTU 828MkII at home driving some Mackie HR824 monitors - that's probably too much for most people just for audio.
I can tell the difference between the two easily. Cymbals particluarly will warble and shimmer - you can hear the resolution of the limited audio bands in the top end. Bass response of mp3 at any rate is always bad, careful A/Bing should show that. Having said that I archive non-important stuff at 224kbps AAC and can detect practically no audible difference between that and master (perhaps something in the bass-end but hardly anything). Mp3 is just not as good as AAC anyway. Of course iPods can play lossless audio (ALE) with no problems.
The article misrepresented the difference between audio compression and digital compression. This seems to be a hard concept for people to grasp and the author doesn't seem to either. Clue: audio compression affects the dynamics (squashing all the ampliudes to the same kind of level), digital compression reencodes the signal into freq bands but doesn't (usually) affect the dynamic range.
16bits is completely adequate for a master recording and no real difference can be noted at 24bit in any normal listening environment. What would be good though is a higher sampling rate like 96KHz. People would notice that. On 96KHz systems the filtering can be soft slowly tapering down to nothing to prevent aliasing. At 44.1KHz a 'brickwall' filter has to be used which tends to produce a constrained sound.
I look after about 25 Mac users and only one of them uses IE (and they are an accountant that has to do banksites - surely this will change next year?). IEs been dead for years as we all know. There's more interest in the story dupes than IE being discontinued. Just in case you don't know: IE is a *PoS* when compared to any other browsers available for OSX. Good riddance, another little nail in Bill's silly little coffin etc.
thought the cartoon was gr8. When someone says the software is terrible but then can't cite examples I say "bitter". Always noticed this about the Woz. Apple s/w is generally pretty good, always quite a treat, I just don't get the problem. OK, Finders a bit cacky but it's hard to pin down a bug there - just too many features competing.
... How moronic the typical slashdot comments are for climate change. The arrogance is spectacular. I suppose technologists are the last people to understand that there will be no techno-fix for this problem that actually works. As the ice-caps melt, methane (in the form of methyl hydrates) is being released in quantites that dwarf man's production of greenhouse gases. Methane is 500% more effective as a greenhouse gas too. (Cue stupid comments about cows farting etc). This process already appears to be in 'runaway mode' so even curtailing our carbon emissions will not prevent the icecaps from melting (which is causing the 30% slowdown in the gulf stream already).
Ultimately this will ruin much of the world's agricultural land and has already caused drought and famine in Africa to devastating effect. It will spread to other continents and we will begin to run short of food - particularly as food production is so dependent on natural gas (methane: the irony!) to produce fertilisers - a declining natural resource. It will affect everyone and is worth thinking about instead of the reflexive denial I see here.
So flame away, whatever, I care little about that. But please start thinking with your good brains - it's what they're there for.
I used to be able to solve the cube when I was at school. My fastest time was 33 seconds although that was a freak - normally it would be 60-90 seconds. Half the people in my class could solve it and we all used fixed moves (transforms I spose a mathematician would call them) to get there. The only thing that was hard was to complete the top face (with all the upper sides correct) - from there the transforms could be applied from memory. The moves were shown to us by other people and were closely guarded secrets like joing the magic circle or something. The fastest times came from the authentic "rubik's' cube (the knock-offs were mechanically slower by miles) and extra lubrication using graphite or bike oil. I was 13 years old probably the perfect age to be doing it. My family still talk about this ability of mine at Xmas and stuff although I had completely forgotten the moves by my twenties. I read the book that was published and it contained extra steps and longer transforms than the methods we had learnt, so you could never beat our fastest times with 'shop bought knowledge'. Oh happy days!!!!
Well said. You're quite right of course. It is, for me, the official commencement of the new dark ages. It really is that serious and it seems most slashdotters are too young or intellectually arrogant to see this.
I totally agree. I'm 30something and beginning to realise how easy my parents gen had it. Kids younger than me I feel sorry for, and me I'll never be able to afford a house. The BB gen are so selfish (and I see it in my own self-satisified parents). Can't they see these house prices are basically stealing from a younger generation, from future money?
Call me a tinfoiler but there's something about this that is wrong. No hosting company would do this without some kind of mamgement meeting about how to handle it. The logs/hardware mix-up just wouldn't happen would it? It would be discussed and understood properly. The job wouldn't be left to a kid or something either. They were dealing with the FBI and knew it.
Sorry, it just doesn't make propewr sense.
Excellent comment. It's so true and somehow I've never seen ('grokked') it so clearly.
Re:Mystery of the computer industry
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 1
Yes I agree with you. If the machine is about providing visual information to people it makes sense that principles of graphic design should apply to the interface. But I started using Macs in 86 so I stopped really caring about this along time ago.
I've no idea why the Windows system font is so damn ugly and hard to read either.
Yes I think that's a lot of it. However, no-one has mentioned that Japan has no natural fossil fuel resources and their governemnt are fully aware of the impending peak oil crisis. They could well end up at war with China over access rights or something like that. This is just a small step compared with what will actually have to happen.
OSX actually prevents the stupid user syndrome by needing a password to install or change any important files. ie Typical of a secure *nix installation. If my stupid users (I probably have a dozen of them easily in the big networks I manage) ever got hold of something from the malware scene they would need an admin p/w. Obviously they don't have that because we know they're stupid and don't give them a chance to break stuff. Case closed.
My compnay also makes a small fortune selling anti-virus software that has no real use. The sig files for the OSX anti-virus s/w are always tiny because there are no viruses. But always the management of these places see viruses as a terrible threat because they all have wintel boxes and learn from that experience.
I used to think that Star Wars was a big waste of money that nothing came out of. That isn't true at all - plenty of horrific new technologies have come out of it. Missiles are brought down by hi-power lasers (they fry the management of the missile). Plasma guns, microwave weapons all came out of Star Wars.
Google for 'hole punch clouds' to see some very worrying pictures that are not properly explained at all.
No this is wrong. Yamaha has a form of high def MIDI for recording grand pianos. They abandoned 7-bit MIDI because it couldn't reproduce all the nuances they wanted to capture. This is the data that is captured. However, there is no such this as high-def MIDI really, it's an analogy (which is strange for a digital idea).
HIV and AIDS. Seriously this hasn't ever been shown.
In this paper I would like to present the evidence available to me in support of the hypothesis: (a) that AIDS is a typical example of epidemic hysteria; (b) that the epidemic has at its core an unconscious group delusion, which can be called the group-fantasy of scapegoating, according to which the poison feelings of the entire group are injected into containers who are called scapegoats and whose destruction rids the group of these bad feelings and insures its purification of guilt and sinfulless; (c) that the same fantasy complex underlies this scapegoating ritual as was found for leprosy during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance; (d) that the proximal and distal causes of the tensions giving rise to the epidemic can be found in the group psychology of the United States and (to a lesser extent, inasmuch as they follow the cultural lead of America) the West since World War II; (e) that among the more important distal causes are the effects of the following drastic changes in cultural ethos: the development of nuclear arsenals with a potential for obliterating the world, and the changes this has forced in the psychology of warfare; the introduction of birth control and the invention of "recreational sex"; positive changes in the mental health of American women over the last 35 to 40 years, culminating in the women's liberation movement and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the US. Constitution; and the "liberation" of various disenfranchised groups such as blacks and homosexuals; (f) that the proximal cause can be found in a vast, society-wide conservative swing (or neo-popuhst trend) in public opinion since 1977, cumininating in the Reagan years and the Central American conflict; (g) that the combination of these unconscious group tensions brought about a subtle and sophisticated, but nevertheless sacrificial witch hunt, in which the participants were the Moral Majority and an assortment of other conservative groups (as hunters) and the nation's drug addicts and homosexuals (as hunted); (h) that both of these subgroups are ardng-out group-sanctioned and group- delegated roles, which acting-out takes place mostly outside of awareness; (i) that these attacks resulted in an epidemic of depression based mostly on shame; (j) that the core sign of AIDS, the reclusion of cell-mediated immunity, is one of the typical vegetative signs of a severe depression (the mechanism of which will be the focus of the medical companion piece to this paper); (k) that the epidemic represents, in the group's unconscious fantasies, an equivalent of war, during which the group keeps carefull count of the sacrifices; (1) that most of the members of the group (the U.S.A.) are in a regression vis-a-vis this phenomenon, a trance state which is noticeable in a certain suspension of logic in the lay press and in the medical literature; (m) that there are powerful forces at work to delay the solution of the puzzle posed by this epidemic and to obscure its group-fantasy origins, since the epidemic itself is a wished-for solution to pre-existing conflicts; (n) and finally that, since the epidemic is psychogenic, the prediction can be made that the group will decide when it should be over (when they have "had enough"), a decision which will be broadcast to the group members through the media, so that after a suitable lag period (based on the time needed for the T-helper lymphocytes to be restored to previous levels of functioning) the epidemic will resolve and the incidence will descend from epidemic to endemic levels.
I find this effect a lot at Slashdot. I've noticed it with environmental concerns and now this. Anything that falls outside a technocratic and reductionist world tends to send up the 'does not compute' flags in the postings.
I used to be just like this myself too - a hardcore reductionist determinist - but it is clear to me now there is much more to the world than this allows. Results such as these experiments demonstrate are worth looking at - the science is at a good enough level for that.
All the critiscms I've read have been dealt with by the *proper* scientists around these projects years ago. It's so arrogant to assume that these things weren't thought of by the experimenters at Princeton (they are quite clever you know people!).
I think it's because all geeks learn very early on there's 'no such thing as a random number' in computing and infer this to everything they see. Or something like that;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Right I was going wha? My Sony widescreen bought in 1996 has front connectors.
Yes you're right - if the data wasn't there in the first place you'll never get it back. I guess the mus-biz is just waiting to provide remasters at 96kHz, 24 bit as the last step in the selling of the back catalogue. Trouble is though (as I'm sure they know) most people won't really see the benefit or care that much. Another thing is that on remaster collections everything gets compressed and re-EQ'ed anyway which is what probably accounts for the live Who cymbal thing. It's possibly true that standards in audio engineering are slipping a little and sometimes really nasty top end gets through in remasters. The record companies couldn't really care less in my experience. Here's a story about that: when they rereleased the Beatles on CD they took the 2trk masters and thought they were stereo splits and made the CDs with it's characteristic hard left/right pan placing (eg Ringo's in one speaker and George is in the other) by the millions. In fact the 2trks were meant to bounced into mono and were actually the final part of balance/control for the mastering engineer not for public consumption. George Martin realised the mistake had been made and told EMI to redo it. Guess what? - To this day they're still sold as split pairs not mono as they should be.
/. to reading about work. Some of the pro-Audio magazines have fairly high-level discussions about this kind of thing which you can check out on the net. EQ magazine and others.... Or Sound-On-Sound magazine can occasionally be worth a look but it seems to be kids making the same mistakes over and over.
I don't really post much about this kind of thing and prefer reading
Hi, as for 'warble and shimmer' try a live recording that you have on CD with a fairly open drum sound. Live rock gigs that have been well recorded are good (Led Zep that kind of thing, The Who etc) - most recordings from the 70s have better dynamic ranges than today so it's a good place to start. Then use your favourite MP3 ripper (I use iTunes) to generate a few rips at different bit rates. Try 48, 64, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 256k. When you listen to the 48k one you'll notice resolution breaking down in the top end where the cymbals are - you should be able to notice distinct bands appearing. That's how MP3 works - it gathers the sound around a freq band into one seperate frequency and so effectively quantises the audio spectrum (continuous) into discrete bands. As you move up the MP3 bit rates you'll notice this effect dissappearing although it never entirely disappears. Once you've learned what this sounds like you'll be able to hear it at higher and higher bit rates. Also, what we call 'transients' -- the speed of attack in drum sounds --- tends to slow down with MP3 at any bitrate. The stereo image particularly in the top end can move around a little too.
I do think 44.1KHz conversion adds all kinds of nasties into the sound and tends to strip the sound of some life. That's due to the very unmusical digital filters that need to be applied to prevent aliasing (where the top end become bass again - the old wagon wheels on film problem if you know what I mean). Like you say even 48KHz would be better but 44.1KHz was chosen as it's a sub-carrier of the PAL frequency format. It was in my mind a bad choice but one that we've had to live with for 20 years now. Most projects now are recorded at 96Khz, 24 bit and then mastered down to 44.1KHz, 16bit. That's where all our lovely work gets really chopped down to size and is definitely the most lossy stage of the recording process today. So I do think CDs do have a constrained sound and modern multiband digital compression tends to make it even worse. Sometimes it's refered to as a 'plasticky' sound - somehow it's not quite the real thing. I used to work on 30ips multitrackers (analogue) that never suffered in that way - always had a lovely non-constrained open sound all the way to where only dogs could hear. (Typically flat response from 30Hz to 35KHz on a good recorder)
Having said all this unless you have high quality sound cards and monitors it can be hard to hear what I'm talking about. The iPod has a pretty good sound though especially when put through some hi quality headphones. My soundcard is a MOTU 828MkII at home driving some Mackie HR824 monitors - that's probably too much for most people just for audio.
I can tell the difference between the two easily. Cymbals particluarly will warble and shimmer - you can hear the resolution of the limited audio bands in the top end. Bass response of mp3 at any rate is always bad, careful A/Bing should show that. Having said that I archive non-important stuff at 224kbps AAC and can detect practically no audible difference between that and master (perhaps something in the bass-end but hardly anything). Mp3 is just not as good as AAC anyway. Of course iPods can play lossless audio (ALE) with no problems. The article misrepresented the difference between audio compression and digital compression. This seems to be a hard concept for people to grasp and the author doesn't seem to either. Clue: audio compression affects the dynamics (squashing all the ampliudes to the same kind of level), digital compression reencodes the signal into freq bands but doesn't (usually) affect the dynamic range. 16bits is completely adequate for a master recording and no real difference can be noted at 24bit in any normal listening environment. What would be good though is a higher sampling rate like 96KHz. People would notice that. On 96KHz systems the filtering can be soft slowly tapering down to nothing to prevent aliasing. At 44.1KHz a 'brickwall' filter has to be used which tends to produce a constrained sound.
I look after about 25 Mac users and only one of them uses IE (and they are an accountant that has to do banksites - surely this will change next year?). IEs been dead for years as we all know. There's more interest in the story dupes than IE being discontinued. Just in case you don't know: IE is a *PoS* when compared to any other browsers available for OSX. Good riddance, another little nail in Bill's silly little coffin etc.
thought the cartoon was gr8. When someone says the software is terrible but then can't cite examples I say "bitter". Always noticed this about the Woz. Apple s/w is generally pretty good, always quite a treat, I just don't get the problem. OK, Finders a bit cacky but it's hard to pin down a bug there - just too many features competing.
... How moronic the typical slashdot comments are for climate change. The arrogance is spectacular. I suppose technologists are the last people to understand that there will be no techno-fix for this problem that actually works. As the ice-caps melt, methane (in the form of methyl hydrates) is being released in quantites that dwarf man's production of greenhouse gases. Methane is 500% more effective as a greenhouse gas too. (Cue stupid comments about cows farting etc). This process already appears to be in 'runaway mode' so even curtailing our carbon emissions will not prevent the icecaps from melting (which is causing the 30% slowdown in the gulf stream already). Ultimately this will ruin much of the world's agricultural land and has already caused drought and famine in Africa to devastating effect. It will spread to other continents and we will begin to run short of food - particularly as food production is so dependent on natural gas (methane: the irony!) to produce fertilisers - a declining natural resource. It will affect everyone and is worth thinking about instead of the reflexive denial I see here. So flame away, whatever, I care little about that. But please start thinking with your good brains - it's what they're there for.
I used to be able to solve the cube when I was at school. My fastest time was 33 seconds although that was a freak - normally it would be 60-90 seconds. Half the people in my class could solve it and we all used fixed moves (transforms I spose a mathematician would call them) to get there. The only thing that was hard was to complete the top face (with all the upper sides correct) - from there the transforms could be applied from memory. The moves were shown to us by other people and were closely guarded secrets like joing the magic circle or something. The fastest times came from the authentic "rubik's' cube (the knock-offs were mechanically slower by miles) and extra lubrication using graphite or bike oil. I was 13 years old probably the perfect age to be doing it. My family still talk about this ability of mine at Xmas and stuff although I had completely forgotten the moves by my twenties. I read the book that was published and it contained extra steps and longer transforms than the methods we had learnt, so you could never beat our fastest times with 'shop bought knowledge'. Oh happy days!!!!
Well said. You're quite right of course. It is, for me, the official commencement of the new dark ages. It really is that serious and it seems most slashdotters are too young or intellectually arrogant to see this.
I think you have to work in tech support to appreciate how good these are!
I know ;-)
I totally agree. I'm 30something and beginning to realise how easy my parents gen had it. Kids younger than me I feel sorry for, and me I'll never be able to afford a house. The BB gen are so selfish (and I see it in my own self-satisified parents). Can't they see these house prices are basically stealing from a younger generation, from future money?
Brilliant! I've cut'n'kept that for myself. Well said.
Call me a tinfoiler but there's something about this that is wrong. No hosting company would do this without some kind of mamgement meeting about how to handle it. The logs/hardware mix-up just wouldn't happen would it? It would be discussed and understood properly. The job wouldn't be left to a kid or something either. They were dealing with the FBI and knew it. Sorry, it just doesn't make propewr sense.
Excellent comment. It's so true and somehow I've never seen ('grokked') it so clearly.
Yes I agree with you. If the machine is about providing visual information to people it makes sense that principles of graphic design should apply to the interface. But I started using Macs in 86 so I stopped really caring about this along time ago. I've no idea why the Windows system font is so damn ugly and hard to read either.
Brilliant - made me really laugh out loud :-)
Yes I think that's a lot of it. However, no-one has mentioned that Japan has no natural fossil fuel resources and their governemnt are fully aware of the impending peak oil crisis. They could well end up at war with China over access rights or something like that. This is just a small step compared with what will actually have to happen.
OSX actually prevents the stupid user syndrome by needing a password to install or change any important files. ie Typical of a secure *nix installation. If my stupid users (I probably have a dozen of them easily in the big networks I manage) ever got hold of something from the malware scene they would need an admin p/w. Obviously they don't have that because we know they're stupid and don't give them a chance to break stuff. Case closed. My compnay also makes a small fortune selling anti-virus software that has no real use. The sig files for the OSX anti-virus s/w are always tiny because there are no viruses. But always the management of these places see viruses as a terrible threat because they all have wintel boxes and learn from that experience.
google for 'THEL weapon' that Israel/US already market as a product.
I used to think that Star Wars was a big waste of money that nothing came out of. That isn't true at all - plenty of horrific new technologies have come out of it. Missiles are brought down by hi-power lasers (they fry the management of the missile). Plasma guns, microwave weapons all came out of Star Wars.
Google for 'hole punch clouds' to see some very worrying pictures that are not properly explained at all.
No this is wrong. Yamaha has a form of high def MIDI for recording grand pianos. They abandoned 7-bit MIDI because it couldn't reproduce all the nuances they wanted to capture. This is the data that is captured. However, there is no such this as high-def MIDI really, it's an analogy (which is strange for a digital idea).
HIV and AIDS. Seriously this hasn't ever been shown.
In this paper I would like to present the evidence available to me in support of the hypothesis:
(a) that AIDS is a typical example of epidemic hysteria;
(b) that the epidemic has at its core an unconscious group delusion, which can be called the group-fantasy of scapegoating, according to which the poison feelings of the entire group are injected into containers who are called scapegoats and whose destruction rids the group of these bad feelings and insures its purification of guilt and sinfulless;
(c) that the same fantasy complex underlies this scapegoating ritual as was found for leprosy during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance;
(d) that the proximal and distal causes of the tensions giving rise to the epidemic can be found in the group psychology of the United States and (to a lesser extent, inasmuch as they follow the cultural lead of America) the West since World War II;
(e) that among the more important distal causes are the effects of the following drastic changes in cultural ethos: the development of nuclear arsenals with a potential for obliterating the world, and the changes this has forced in the psychology of warfare; the introduction of birth control and the invention of "recreational sex"; positive changes in the mental health of American women over the last 35 to 40 years, culminating in the women's liberation movement and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the US. Constitution; and the "liberation" of various disenfranchised groups such as blacks and homosexuals;
(f) that the proximal cause can be found in a vast, society-wide conservative swing (or neo-popuhst trend) in public opinion since 1977, cumininating in the Reagan years and the Central American conflict;
(g) that the combination of these unconscious group tensions brought about a subtle and sophisticated, but nevertheless sacrificial witch hunt, in which the participants were the Moral Majority and an assortment of other conservative groups (as hunters) and the nation's drug addicts and homosexuals (as hunted);
(h) that both of these subgroups are ardng-out group-sanctioned and group- delegated roles, which acting-out takes place mostly outside of awareness;
(i) that these attacks resulted in an epidemic of depression based mostly on shame;
(j) that the core sign of AIDS, the reclusion of cell-mediated immunity, is one of the typical vegetative signs of a severe depression (the mechanism of which will be the focus of the medical companion piece to this paper);
(k) that the epidemic represents, in the group's unconscious fantasies, an equivalent of war, during which the group keeps carefull count of the sacrifices;
(1) that most of the members of the group (the U.S.A.) are in a regression vis-a-vis this phenomenon, a trance state which is noticeable in a certain suspension of logic in the lay press and in the medical literature;
(m) that there are powerful forces at work to delay the solution of the puzzle posed by this epidemic and to obscure its group-fantasy origins, since the epidemic itself is a wished-for solution to pre-existing conflicts;
(n) and finally that, since the epidemic is psychogenic, the prediction can be made that the group will decide when it should be over (when they have "had enough"), a decision which will be broadcast to the group members through the media, so that after a suitable lag period (based on the time needed for the T-helper lymphocytes to be restored to previous levels of functioning) the epidemic will resolve and the incidence will descend from epidemic to endemic levels.
"Knowing" that 19 guys are going to hijack planes There is no evidence to suggest that they did.
I find this effect a lot at Slashdot. I've noticed it with environmental concerns and now this. Anything that falls outside a technocratic and reductionist world tends to send up the 'does not compute' flags in the postings. I used to be just like this myself too - a hardcore reductionist determinist - but it is clear to me now there is much more to the world than this allows. Results such as these experiments demonstrate are worth looking at - the science is at a good enough level for that. All the critiscms I've read have been dealt with by the *proper* scientists around these projects years ago. It's so arrogant to assume that these things weren't thought of by the experimenters at Princeton (they are quite clever you know people!). I think it's because all geeks learn very early on there's 'no such thing as a random number' in computing and infer this to everything they see. Or something like that ;-)