There is a book by Peter W. Huber called "Orwell's Revenge: a 1984 palimpsest" which has a very interesting take on this notion. Huber took all of Eric Blair's writing and fed it into a computer (a 386 IIRC, it was written in the early nineties). Then he cut-and-pasted together a completely different story, using Orwell's own words and phrases, in which people were able to resist Big Brother by exploiting the bi-directional nature of the telescreens. Basically he looks at the telescreen network as what the internet could look like with this technology and with the textual content removed (again IIRC).
It's a shame that book isn't more widely known. It was a novel (ha-ha) concept in form and well executed, I was reminded of it when I read Cryptonomicon. If it helps you geeks to go find the book at all, the dude who wrote it was teaching at MIT at the time.
Well, we haven't scheduled a remix/remaster appointment yet. There is a huge difference between a slight (1.5:1) compression, and heavy-handed (4:1 or more) compression -- or even worse, the brickwall limiter the GP mentioned. I did a slight compression on my bands first album (available for purchase via my homepage link;-D ) and it sounds much quieter than anything else in a normal playlist. I like to think I know what I'm doing around the studio, and it's a bit unfair to call me the problem when you haven't listened to anything I've produced.
That being said, the band paid me $300 for ten hours of work. Do you think it's appropriate for me to make creative decisions for them, or try to influence them to follow my aesthetics? If he had paid me a producer's wage, then I certainly would have felt comfortable doing so -- but we would also have spent much more than ten hours on the two songs they recorded. I doubt that band has the budget to afford me as a producer:)
If he asks me to make it "louder" after we do some fattening, then I will politely try to convince him otherwise. Though it would behoove us to keep the aesthetics of the genre in mind, as well. Metal tends to have a much smaller dynamic range than jazz or classical music.
Good point! Compression has always been the audio engineer's hammer of choice. I use it all the time at live shows and on recorded vocals, acoustic guitar, bass, just to name a few. Just this weekend I recorded an awesome local black metal band, the sonqwriter/guitarist/keyboardist stayed all ten hours for recording and mixing and was raving about the mix at the end of the day.
The next day, after he had had a chance to listen to the master on a few different decks (we mixed through my crappy Edirol monitors and referenced through my JBL PA mains occasionally) he called me up and said he wanted it "louder". Of course I had normalized, so the only thing to do now is to compress it. I was having a bitch of a time getting my Mackie Onyx 1640 to play nice with 64Studio (since jack and the board have wildly different ideas of where zero is:P) so I skipped my normal 1.5:1 main mix compression during mixdown.
As for good EQ'ing, I've always preferred good mic placement to EQ, never have met a digital EQ I liked... And I haven't made enough money to buy a good outboard EQ yet;)
[T]o do all of that work, and then shove yet another compressor or brickwall limiter on the master and squish a whole track, is sad, and only something someone who hated music would do.
This is the heart of cognitive dissonance. I never verbalized it before, but it always seemed to me that CD is just mental laziness. People don't want to go through the trouble of relearning, or discriminating between competing interpretations by examining the evidence.
Underlying it all is a latent anti-intellectualism on the right, but I don't feel like starting that argument right now...
[I]f you can hear it, you can remember it, and each time you get an earworm, you are "enjoying" an uncompensated performance of that copyrighted material. Brilliant! I could retire early if I got royalties for earworms!
Re:Do you also own a cat with a diamond collar?
on
Failing Our Geniuses
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I too still feel bitter about the utter waste of my childhood at the hands of the state school system. I was identified as "gifted" early on, was reading at a sixth grade level in first grade and twelfth by the sixth. Of course, once I was identified as gifted nothing was done about it until Odyssey of the Mind in fifth grade (which was fun, but no substitute for a challenging curriculum). I remember learning about similes and metaphors on an annual basis. I remember "learning" long division four times (and of course I haven't used it in more than a decade).
After I took the SAT in seventh grade (and scored similarly to an average senior that year), I was allowed to skip eighth grade. There were upsides and downsides, and I'm fairly happy about where I am now -- but it's not for everyone. I lost a lot of friends and there seemed to be a higher asshole to polite person ratio in my graduating class.
I took a self-paced English course the summer after my freshman year. I finished a semester's worth of work in two weeks. I'm still pissed off about all of that wasted time. I could probably have learned a couple of languages, I would probably be better at math.. Hell, I could have become even more of a virtuoso guitarist if I had started music lessons a couple of years earlier;) .
I've had this discussion with many of my genius friends, and this attitude is pretty much universal among them. Yes, the school system is nearly useless for all ends of the spectrum. In my cynical moments I imagine that it's a plot to keep the country stupid and docile while they turn the Republic into a fascist shadow of its original promise.
If you call yourself a follower of a religion, and then follow it up with "but I think other religions are equally true," then why believe in your particular truth? What motivation do you have? There must be something special about what you believe in order for you to believe it, else you're just being irrational.
Actually, this is precisely what Buddhism teaches. Enlightenment isn't a goal in itself, it's what you do once you reach it that matters. Once one becomes omniscient, one can pick the appropriate religion with which to help your student. Whether this is Judaism, Islam, or Christianity doesn't matter -- it's all about helping other sentient beings reach Enlightenment and end their suffering. I consider Jesus Christ to be the most famous western Bodhisattva.
If you believe that it's the end of the journey which matters and not the path taken, then it's not irrational at all to see all religions as equal. If you study them, they all say pretty much the same thing, just using different language.
Does anyone seriously think/believe that Bush and the government really want to hear where their marijuana stash is hidden? I think the government has more important things to do with their time. More than 700,000 people were arrested for cannabis last year, 90% of them for simple possession. http://www.drugwarfacts.org/marijuan.htm
"Well, how can we trust them to do the right thing?" I'd ask, even with a warrant, how can you trust them to do the right thing? I mean, really. And then, how can you trust the FISA court? We used to be able to trust the judicial system, until Nixon declared war on drugs. Then the problem grew by an order of magnitude when Gonzales was directed to turn DoJ into another wing of the republican party. I can't understand why you are defending the handover of more power to these corrupt liars, but I will defend to the death your right to do so. That's what America is supposed to be about.
I agree with you about Enterprise. I find it to be most watchable of the series. We get to see the genesis of the Prime Directive, lots of exploration - and, as you mentioned, eye candy. Oh, and if you look closely at their computer terminals it looks quite a bit like they're running Linux!
I was really disappointed that it was canceled just before we got to see the Romulan war... Maybe they'll make that into a movie for number 12.
MightyMartian, I wonder if you'd tell us why you hate Enterprise so much. You've repeated it many times in this discussion, but haven't explained what it was that you didn't like. I'm curious.
So what reason does anybody have to doubt these claims? Just because "power corrupts"? Just because you don't like W's politics? Just because the Republicans are in bed with the corporations, or the Christians? You'll have to come up with something better than that.
Dude, read a fucking newspaper! Apparently you haven't been paying attention.
The FBI admitted to improperly wiretapping citizens just a few weeks ago. There have been numerous interviews with former detainees who tell about inhumane interrogation techniques and no access to counsel or the courts. This administration has demonstrated time and again that it does not believe the Rule of Law applies to them.
So... basically, you can grow your own tobacco & pot, brew your own beer & distill your own alcohol, and consume it yourself & maybe share it with your friends. BUT NOT SELL OR MARKET IT.
That's a cool idea. But it's probably too late to outlaw the alcohol industry without ending up with the same kind of mess we've got with the war on drugs. Also, the only alcohol I drink anymore is $6-a-glass Bushmill's every three months or so. That, and the only thing worse than having to fear the police is that I can't just go to the liquor store and pick up a few grams of ganja when I have cash to spend on cannabis. The black market is nothing if not unreliable.
We should reform drug laws for the children. It's really insane to leave the marketing and sales of dangerous drugs to criminals. It's not just us who think this is a civil rights issue, either -- last year former Seattle chief of police Norm Stamper said as much at the NORML annual conference.
That's pretty good... I was tickled in 2004 when I was reading an editorial arguing for Bush's Impeachment and saw an adsense ad for the president's website!
So by your logic all of those tobacco, alcohol, firearm lobbies are just doing their part and not actually evil. Trying to spin coverage of a practices pretty universal unethical practices is unethical.
Ugh. Is it really unethical to drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or go shoot a gun? Personally, I don't think so. At least I can take some consolation in the fact that you recognize the fundamental inconsistency of the war on (some) drugs. It should be just as illegal to smoke and drink as it is to smoke some hash. But we tried outlawing booze in the 20's and it worked out just as well as Prohibition does now.
It seems to me that people will always search for ways to alter their consciousness, whether through religion, drugs, politics, or risk-taking. It should be between the individual and their higher power what the individual does with their body and their mind. Police should stick to arresting people who harm others or commit property crime.
Perhaps it wouldn't be so painful to pay for everyone's health insurance if we weren't pissing away 7 billion dollars every year in a futile effort to keep tens of millions of people from taking a recreational drug other than alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine. I wonder how many health care professionals were among the more than 700,000 arrested last year for cannabis possession?
You know, there are so many things wrong with the policies of our government these days... A lot of times I think that we should just toss out everything but the Constitution and start from scratch. It might even be time for another constitutional convention, but I don't trust anybody currently in the government to do it properly. With effort, the internet could enable us to create the world's first true democracy.
Ah.. fuck it, I'm gonna go take another hit off the bong (4 Jesus, dontcha know)!
Now... if they could only figure out some way to sell advertising in-game it might actually be a profitable business model... Hell, they could even port it to linux and still make money that way!
I don't fly that often, but my dad is a retired airline pilot so I get to see the industry from a different angle..
Three years ago my family traveled to Ft. Bragg to see my brother off to the Iraq war (he's fine after serving two tours - he's now in the Army Reserve). On the way out, my mom (like my dad and brother, a military veteran) was stopped by the TSA because she set off the metal detector. She explained to the officer that she had a metal valve in her heart after a recent surgery. The officer told my mom that regulations required a pat-down search in that circumstance. My mom offered to show the officer the scar in private to avoid a strange person touching the still-healing scar, but the officer was adamant that the rules be followed. Add to this the fact that the airport is a two-hour drive and the flight left at 6AM and you get a fairly stressful situation.
We spent a few days with my brother before he left for war, and on the way back my mom tried to be pro-active by telling the officer in Raleigh about the artificial heart-valve before she went through the metal detector. This time the woman doing the searching had a really nasty attitude (especially for 4:30 in the morning) and not only patted down my mother with her dirty gloves but actually made my 57 year-old mother take off her shirt not in a separate room but behind s flimsy screen adjacent to the security checkpoint.
Yeah, "petty tyrants" sounds about right to me. Underpaid and overworked, too.
I think that I'd enjoy MythBusters more if they focused on one myth per episode, too. I gotta say that the explosions get me off, though. The thing that really gets my goat about the show, however, is when they flash a "WARNING: Science Content" sign at the beginning of a segment. To me it says: "prepare to be bored, we know that you guys don't think science is exciting." Insulting, if you ask me.
When I worked for a telemarketing firm, selling experian credit reports, my manager said that it counts as applying for a credit card and being declined. Of course, she was a total liar, so I don't know whether or not it's true;)
I hope someday to regain the karma I lost working there.
I dunno.. The Seattle PI added the ability to post comments on selected articles this year, and I've been fairly active there. Aside from the expected ad-hominem attacks there is usually some substantive discussion. Of course, instead of knee-jerk racism we tend to rant about the war on drugs at the drop of a hat.
WTF are you talking about?! There is no left wing in America! Every Democrat I could vote for was right-of-center, and the media is totally corporate. Maybe there was a bit of a liberal bias 10 years ago, but these days it's all corporate, all the time. The only news show I can stand on TV these days is Keith Olberman, at least he says what he thinks.
If the democrats don't even try to Impeach this cesspool of an Administration I'm never voting for another democrat. Unfortunately it seems that they are intent on letting every broken law slide since they think it will win them more votes in 2008... It's going to be interesting to see what they do when no Liberal will vote for them anymore. Can they live on centrists alone? I doubt it.
It's true in many jurisdictions.. I worked as a QA agent at a telemarketing agency for about a year (worst job ever, btw)- management told us that WA state law says one-party consent is all that is required, but since we were operating as a subcontractor for a national company we should get both consent from the "customer" as well.
"Police in Arizona are using laser range finders to detect and ticket tailgaters.
This is pretty simple really, living in Arizona 50% of the time the tailgator is A police car, I figure at least 10% of the rest are probably unmarked/off duty police cars, so really not much of a hassle, have the ticket pop out of the gun, cop swipes his credit card, no need to even pull anyone over. I'm surprised no one else has pointed this out.. The worst tailgaters here in WA state are definitely cops. My theory is that they want to encourage people to speed in order to meet their quota, but I have no evidence.. The law here is that less than 2 car-lengths or 2 seconds is tailgating. I can't count the number of times I've seen cops breaking this law. Damn it's annoying.
Last year the WSP started riding in the cabs of long-distance freight trucks watching for people cutting off tractor-trailers on I-5, I thought that was a great idea; about 6 or 7 years ago I saw somebody in a little pontiac cut off a big rig, and their rear fender caught the front of the truck. Man that was ugly. Always check your blind spot.
Oh, and one more thing about driving here: there is a reason you're supposed to pass on the left! No rational driver expects a car to be driving faster on the right. That's where the vast majority of exits are, so that's where you slow down to take them. Many's the time I've been driving +5 over the limit in the middle lane with only one car coming up behind me and an open road in front - and the asshat behind me picks the right lane to pass.
That's not as bad as waiting until the last possible moment to merge, though. There's a set of reversable lanes heading through downtown Seattle which are clearly marked. Heading southbound during the afternoon past the UW is always a pain in the ass. Invariably there are people who stay in the lane (which is clearly marked as closed like 4 times starting at least five miles from the exit) until they run out of road. They have to stop to wait for somebody to let them in, when they could have merged any number of times. Fucking morons. Sure, you passed a lot of traffic on your way to stopping on the freeway- but you had to stop! And you made me and about 2000 other people stop so you could "save" about 20 seconds. Disrupting the flow of traffic on a freeway is the worst thing you can do.
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It's a shame that book isn't more widely known. It was a novel (ha-ha) concept in form and well executed, I was reminded of it when I read Cryptonomicon. If it helps you geeks to go find the book at all, the dude who wrote it was teaching at MIT at the time.
That being said, the band paid me $300 for ten hours of work. Do you think it's appropriate for me to make creative decisions for them, or try to influence them to follow my aesthetics? If he had paid me a producer's wage, then I certainly would have felt comfortable doing so -- but we would also have spent much more than ten hours on the two songs they recorded. I doubt that band has the budget to afford me as a producer :)
If he asks me to make it "louder" after we do some fattening, then I will politely try to convince him otherwise. Though it would behoove us to keep the aesthetics of the genre in mind, as well. Metal tends to have a much smaller dynamic range than jazz or classical music.
The next day, after he had had a chance to listen to the master on a few different decks (we mixed through my crappy Edirol monitors and referenced through my JBL PA mains occasionally) he called me up and said he wanted it "louder". Of course I had normalized, so the only thing to do now is to compress it. I was having a bitch of a time getting my Mackie Onyx 1640 to play nice with 64Studio (since jack and the board have wildly different ideas of where zero is :P) so I skipped my normal 1.5:1 main mix compression during mixdown.
As for good EQ'ing, I've always preferred good mic placement to EQ, never have met a digital EQ I liked... And I haven't made enough money to buy a good outboard EQ yet ;)
[T]o do all of that work, and then shove yet another compressor or brickwall limiter on the master and squish a whole track, is sad, and only something someone who hated music would do.Couldn't agree more!
Underlying it all is a latent anti-intellectualism on the right, but I don't feel like starting that argument right now...
After I took the SAT in seventh grade (and scored similarly to an average senior that year), I was allowed to skip eighth grade. There were upsides and downsides, and I'm fairly happy about where I am now -- but it's not for everyone. I lost a lot of friends and there seemed to be a higher asshole to polite person ratio in my graduating class.
I took a self-paced English course the summer after my freshman year. I finished a semester's worth of work in two weeks. I'm still pissed off about all of that wasted time. I could probably have learned a couple of languages, I would probably be better at math.. Hell, I could have become even more of a virtuoso guitarist if I had started music lessons a couple of years earlier ;) .
I've had this discussion with many of my genius friends, and this attitude is pretty much universal among them. Yes, the school system is nearly useless for all ends of the spectrum. In my cynical moments I imagine that it's a plot to keep the country stupid and docile while they turn the Republic into a fascist shadow of its original promise.
Really? I have a hard time finding Bush these days... Seems like everywhere I look there's a shaved Bush :(
If you believe that it's the end of the journey which matters and not the path taken, then it's not irrational at all to see all religions as equal. If you study them, they all say pretty much the same thing, just using different language.
I was really disappointed that it was canceled just before we got to see the Romulan war... Maybe they'll make that into a movie for number 12.
MightyMartian, I wonder if you'd tell us why you hate Enterprise so much. You've repeated it many times in this discussion, but haven't explained what it was that you didn't like. I'm curious.
The FBI admitted to improperly wiretapping citizens just a few weeks ago. There have been numerous interviews with former detainees who tell about inhumane interrogation techniques and no access to counsel or the courts. This administration has demonstrated time and again that it does not believe the Rule of Law applies to them.
Wake the fuck up.
We should reform drug laws for the children. It's really insane to leave the marketing and sales of dangerous drugs to criminals. It's not just us who think this is a civil rights issue, either -- last year former Seattle chief of police Norm Stamper said as much at the NORML annual conference.
That's pretty good... I was tickled in 2004 when I was reading an editorial arguing for Bush's Impeachment and saw an adsense ad for the president's website!
It seems to me that people will always search for ways to alter their consciousness, whether through religion, drugs, politics, or risk-taking. It should be between the individual and their higher power what the individual does with their body and their mind. Police should stick to arresting people who harm others or commit property crime.
Perhaps it wouldn't be so painful to pay for everyone's health insurance if we weren't pissing away 7 billion dollars every year in a futile effort to keep tens of millions of people from taking a recreational drug other than alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine. I wonder how many health care professionals were among the more than 700,000 arrested last year for cannabis possession?
You know, there are so many things wrong with the policies of our government these days... A lot of times I think that we should just toss out everything but the Constitution and start from scratch. It might even be time for another constitutional convention, but I don't trust anybody currently in the government to do it properly. With effort, the internet could enable us to create the world's first true democracy.
Ah.. fuck it, I'm gonna go take another hit off the bong (4 Jesus, dontcha know)!
Now... if they could only figure out some way to sell advertising in-game it might actually be a profitable business model... Hell, they could even port it to linux and still make money that way!
I don't fly that often, but my dad is a retired airline pilot so I get to see the industry from a different angle..
Three years ago my family traveled to Ft. Bragg to see my brother off to the Iraq war (he's fine after serving two tours - he's now in the Army Reserve). On the way out, my mom (like my dad and brother, a military veteran) was stopped by the TSA because she set off the metal detector. She explained to the officer that she had a metal valve in her heart after a recent surgery. The officer told my mom that regulations required a pat-down search in that circumstance. My mom offered to show the officer the scar in private to avoid a strange person touching the still-healing scar, but the officer was adamant that the rules be followed. Add to this the fact that the airport is a two-hour drive and the flight left at 6AM and you get a fairly stressful situation.
We spent a few days with my brother before he left for war, and on the way back my mom tried to be pro-active by telling the officer in Raleigh about the artificial heart-valve before she went through the metal detector. This time the woman doing the searching had a really nasty attitude (especially for 4:30 in the morning) and not only patted down my mother with her dirty gloves but actually made my 57 year-old mother take off her shirt not in a separate room but behind s flimsy screen adjacent to the security checkpoint.
Yeah, "petty tyrants" sounds about right to me. Underpaid and overworked, too.
I think that I'd enjoy MythBusters more if they focused on one myth per episode, too. I gotta say that the explosions get me off, though. The thing that really gets my goat about the show, however, is when they flash a "WARNING: Science Content" sign at the beginning of a segment. To me it says: "prepare to be bored, we know that you guys don't think science is exciting." Insulting, if you ask me.
When I worked for a telemarketing firm, selling experian credit reports, my manager said that it counts as applying for a credit card and being declined. Of course, she was a total liar, so I don't know whether or not it's true ;)
I hope someday to regain the karma I lost working there.
It's working... But really ... fucking ... slowly.
I dunno.. The Seattle PI added the ability to post comments on selected articles this year, and I've been fairly active there. Aside from the expected ad-hominem attacks there is usually some substantive discussion. Of course, instead of knee-jerk racism we tend to rant about the war on drugs at the drop of a hat.
If the democrats don't even try to Impeach this cesspool of an Administration I'm never voting for another democrat. Unfortunately it seems that they are intent on letting every broken law slide since they think it will win them more votes in 2008... It's going to be interesting to see what they do when no Liberal will vote for them anymore. Can they live on centrists alone? I doubt it.
It's true in many jurisdictions.. I worked as a QA agent at a telemarketing agency for about a year (worst job ever, btw)- management told us that WA state law says one-party consent is all that is required, but since we were operating as a subcontractor for a national company we should get both consent from the "customer" as well.
IANA Business major/ethicist, FWIW..
This is pretty simple really, living in Arizona 50% of the time the tailgator is A police car, I figure at least 10% of the rest are probably unmarked/off duty police cars, so really not much of a hassle, have the ticket pop out of the gun, cop swipes his credit card, no need to even pull anyone over.
I'm surprised no one else has pointed this out.. The worst tailgaters here in WA state are definitely cops. My theory is that they want to encourage people to speed in order to meet their quota, but I have no evidence.. The law here is that less than 2 car-lengths or 2 seconds is tailgating. I can't count the number of times I've seen cops breaking this law. Damn it's annoying.
Last year the WSP started riding in the cabs of long-distance freight trucks watching for people cutting off tractor-trailers on I-5, I thought that was a great idea; about 6 or 7 years ago I saw somebody in a little pontiac cut off a big rig, and their rear fender caught the front of the truck. Man that was ugly. Always check your blind spot.
Oh, and one more thing about driving here: there is a reason you're supposed to pass on the left! No rational driver expects a car to be driving faster on the right. That's where the vast majority of exits are, so that's where you slow down to take them. Many's the time I've been driving +5 over the limit in the middle lane with only one car coming up behind me and an open road in front - and the asshat behind me picks the right lane to pass.
That's not as bad as waiting until the last possible moment to merge, though. There's a set of reversable lanes heading through downtown Seattle which are clearly marked. Heading southbound during the afternoon past the UW is always a pain in the ass. Invariably there are people who stay in the lane (which is clearly marked as closed like 4 times starting at least five miles from the exit) until they run out of road. They have to stop to wait for somebody to let them in, when they could have merged any number of times. Fucking morons. Sure, you passed a lot of traffic on your way to stopping on the freeway- but you had to stop! And you made me and about 2000 other people stop so you could "save" about 20 seconds. Disrupting the flow of traffic on a freeway is the worst thing you can do.