Waitaminnit, isn't Blockbuster that "Family-Oriented" video store that refuses to carry such dangerous stuff as The Last Temptation of Christ? You'd think that if farsighted Jobs were to pick a company to hook up with, it might not be Blockbuster anyway.
Ed Villchur, a loudspeaker design pioneer who invented the acoustic suspension speaker in the 1950s and founded the Acoustic Research corporation with Henry Kloss (http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/villchur.h tml ) used the propellor speaker design as a party gag. Interesting to see somebody actually making one, if it's real.
Do you know the source of that, i.e., what German company? I was under the impression that AT&T's human factors people came up with it in the late 1950s.
It's tempting to generalize when promoting fringe science. It's also tempting to generalize when debunking fringe science. Perhaps the most maligned of the fringe projects has been the SRI (not CIA) remote viewing study which has been referred to in this thread. People who take the time to read the reports of this study find two things: One, that the percentage of hits (remote views which conformed to the experiment's criteria for accuracy) was statistically significant; Two, that outside the controlled conditions of the lab, it was only possible to state the probability that an attempted view would or would not be a hit. Statistical significance is interesting science, but weapons require higher predictabilities, and no way was found within the time frame and parameters of the experiment to alter or affect the probabilities in any way. The outcome was "interesting" in the physics sense, but was fundamentally uncontrollable; and therefore, by the standards of the experiment, a failure.
This is where it's our job not simply to lump everything together and call it crap. Something odd happened at SRI: A "wild" phenomenon, being studied on the basis of a "look under every stone" philosophy, seemed to prove out real -- that is, statistically significant -- but not significant enough, and intractable to attempts to improve the odds. It's useless as a weapon or as just about anything else, but barring repeating the experiment we must accept that something odd enough to be genuinely disturbing happened to the technically sophisticated science workers and technicians who formed SRI's in-house volunteer test group.
This is just a plea to not throw out the baby with the bath. Because a far-out experiment fails doesn't mean that nothing was learned. We frequently learn more from our failures than from our successes. As Robert Heinlein said, if you don't bet, you can't win. Finding that remote viewing, though uncontrollable, may be accurate at rates slightly but consistently better than chance, suggests not necessarily funding more remote viewing experiments but looking more closely at basic physics for chinks where some tiny thing may have been misinterpreted for no other reason than "common sense". In other words, stay loose.
I was responsible for 2Cyberconf, the conference Randy Farmer referred to in the 1991 article now being discussed on Slashdot. I was also in the back of the room with the geeks, sometimes giggling, sometimes enjoying the proceedings, and sometimes horrified.
In "The Mythical Man-Month" Fred Brooks said that the structure of a program mirrors the structure of the organization that produced it. One of the main ideas behind litcrit and deconstruction was the same thing, stated for language in general. In the case of language, the "organization" was any structure of cultural power -- for instance, the folks who said "right to life" when you were trying to say "anti-abortion".
Deconstruction and litcrit were tools for fighting power -- nothing more. The problem with fighting power is that power controls the most powerful weapon of all, which is language. You can't step outside language to fight the control of language; you have to fight from inside language, making appropriate tools as you go. But as with every other powerful idea, decon and litcrit also became ways for people to get jobs. Once that happened, it was very difficult for a layman to tell the difference between what was decent work and what was jargon used for raising funds and holding down jobs.
The fact that you can buy a Windows box doesn't make Debian or SuSe less cool, even though the average joe won't notice the difference. Don't fall into that trap with litcrit. There is good and bad. Don't trash it until you can tell the difference.
There is a belief among some recording engineers that it's possible to overload a sonic space. An example that comes conveniently to mind is Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" album. In order to keep the reverberation as clean as possible, Roy Halee used every echo chamber the old Heider studios had, sending only a few instruments to each. Any reasonable electrical or acoustic engineer will tell you there's no basis whatsoever for that - ten sounds played through one echo chamber, or even one digital reverb simulator, ought to sound exactly the same as ten echo chambers, each one being fed one instrument. Yet they absolutely do not.
Voodoo? Maybe...after all, mixing's an art, not a craft or science. Or maybe Halee (and some other mixers) can hear things that mathematical models can't (yet) describe. People hear differently; real listening takes time and practice. Some folx will find simulated instruments irritating, while others will find them entirely satisfactory, but I'd wager that nobody will be able to axiomatize precisely why.
Slashdot Mirror
Waitaminnit, isn't Blockbuster that "Family-Oriented" video store that refuses to carry such dangerous stuff as The Last Temptation of Christ? You'd think that if farsighted Jobs were to pick a company to hook up with, it might not be Blockbuster anyway.
Ed Villchur, a loudspeaker design pioneer who invented the acoustic suspension speaker in the 1950s and founded the Acoustic Research corporation with Henry Kloss (http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/villchur.h tml ) used the propellor speaker design as a party gag. Interesting to see somebody actually making one, if it's real.
Do you know the source of that, i.e., what German company? I was under the impression that AT&T's human factors people came up with it in the late 1950s.
This is where it's our job not simply to lump everything together and call it crap. Something odd happened at SRI: A "wild" phenomenon, being studied on the basis of a "look under every stone" philosophy, seemed to prove out real -- that is, statistically significant -- but not significant enough, and intractable to attempts to improve the odds. It's useless as a weapon or as just about anything else, but barring repeating the experiment we must accept that something odd enough to be genuinely disturbing happened to the technically sophisticated science workers and technicians who formed SRI's in-house volunteer test group.
This is just a plea to not throw out the baby with the bath. Because a far-out experiment fails doesn't mean that nothing was learned. We frequently learn more from our failures than from our successes. As Robert Heinlein said, if you don't bet, you can't win. Finding that remote viewing, though uncontrollable, may be accurate at rates slightly but consistently better than chance, suggests not necessarily funding more remote viewing experiments but looking more closely at basic physics for chinks where some tiny thing may have been misinterpreted for no other reason than "common sense". In other words, stay loose.
In "The Mythical Man-Month" Fred Brooks said that the structure of a program mirrors the structure of the organization that produced it. One of the main ideas behind litcrit and deconstruction was the same thing, stated for language in general. In the case of language, the "organization" was any structure of cultural power -- for instance, the folks who said "right to life" when you were trying to say "anti-abortion".
Deconstruction and litcrit were tools for fighting power -- nothing more. The problem with fighting power is that power controls the most powerful weapon of all, which is language. You can't step outside language to fight the control of language; you have to fight from inside language, making appropriate tools as you go. But as with every other powerful idea, decon and litcrit also became ways for people to get jobs. Once that happened, it was very difficult for a layman to tell the difference between what was decent work and what was jargon used for raising funds and holding down jobs.
The fact that you can buy a Windows box doesn't make Debian or SuSe less cool, even though the average joe won't notice the difference. Don't fall into that trap with litcrit. There is good and bad. Don't trash it until you can tell the difference.
There is a belief among some recording engineers that it's possible to overload a sonic space. An example that comes conveniently to mind is Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" album. In order to keep the reverberation as clean as possible, Roy Halee used every echo chamber the old Heider studios had, sending only a few instruments to each. Any reasonable electrical or acoustic engineer will tell you there's no basis whatsoever for that - ten sounds played through one echo chamber, or even one digital reverb simulator, ought to sound exactly the same as ten echo chambers, each one being fed one instrument. Yet they absolutely do not.
Voodoo? Maybe...after all, mixing's an art, not a craft or science. Or maybe Halee (and some other mixers) can hear things that mathematical models can't (yet) describe. People hear differently; real listening takes time and practice. Some folx will find simulated instruments irritating, while others will find them entirely satisfactory, but I'd wager that nobody will be able to axiomatize precisely why.