I think I've failed to get you to understand what I was trying to say at all.
Either I'm pathetically bad at communicating (which seems very likely), or you're not trying to hear what I'm saying.
Of course, no reason to bifurcate - both could be very true.
Unfortunately, I don't have time to keep this up, nor a whole lot of motivation - it seems like you're being pretty rude on purpose, which does not make me feel inclined to spend time on this discussion.
Not, I suspect, that you care very much about this. Reminds me of why I gave up on/. for the last year, really... Maybe I'll do that again.
I didn't read the rest of what you wrote because it's way too long, and I've got a major problem with your very first sentence.
What I wrote was less than eight hundred words. The Wikipedia says that average reading speed for basic comprehension is about 2-400 WPM. If you meet the Wiki's baseline average, it whould have taken you a horrifying four minutes to read my whole post.
Your ability to analyze and think does not impress me if you're that lazy and impatient.
In fact, science doesn't require "what you sense" to be reliable, otherwise the existence of magicians would have rendered science invalid.
My college physics professor was quite adamant that if, in a lab assignment, we got results that weren't expected, we had to carry through with the rest of the lab, and not quit working on it until we had at least some believable explanation for why we got the results we did.
This, I believe, is the core of, and the only valid understanding of, scientific methods. I think it's precisely the opposite of what you're claiming. It's not considered reliable because many observations yield an "average" or "normal" result; it's thought reliable because a scientist will support his theories with detailed outlines of experiments that will let you personally verify them, and will construct a theory that accounts for all the data he collected (or at the very least admit that there may be some flaws in his theories to date, if he can't account for all the information he's gathered). That individual verification of results, and personal/individual eyewitness testimony that they are as expected, is what matters in the scientific method, I believe, not that "lots of people get this result, and we can just ignore the handful who didn't".
Another way of saying this is to assert that the scientific method is not worth much without obsessive rigor, and I personally believe that to be true.
There's a beautiful passage Doug Adams wrote that I think summarizes what being a scientist should actually be like. It's in So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish. Wonko the Sane says:
"I'm not trying to prove anything, by the way. I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that. I'll show you something to demonstrate that later. So, the other reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool."
Gosh, that man was brilliant.
Anyway.
The scientific process exists exactly because we understand that individual perceptions are fallible.
The scientific method exists, I think, because people are pragmatic and want rules and observations that help them deal with the complexity and incomprehensibility of the universe, even if there's no reason to believe those rules are true, apart from "they've been close enough so far". I think its existence has nothing to do with the unreliability of people's observations. Scientific methods can't do anything to improve the quality of your senses - all they can do is make it easy for you or someone you trust to test a theory someone else has reported, if both parties involved in the communication are highly rigorous.
The scientific method is overrated as a method of knowing, in general. Programmers all think that shotgun debugging is a bad idea - it's generally agreed that combining attempts to understand what softwar
Science requires a belief which there is no way to prove, which is that what you sense is reliable.
In your view, does a belief have to be provable to be rational?
In a less philosophical vein, faith in scientific approaches requires a belief that the universe is predictable ("If we do X a bunch of times, and get result Y, it's reasonable to expect that we'll see result Y the next time we do X.").
That's actually a large (and unprovable) assumption, as many philosophers will happily tell you. Of course, by definition, an assumption is unprovable. Call it a postulate or an axiom, if you prefer, but it's still the same thing - something you take for granted, and acknowledge you cannot prove.
In the end, scientific methods are anything but logically rigorous. The whole system of science is predicated on a method of argument that is considered fallacious in formal logical arguments.
Are scientific approaches useful? Definitely. Forming hypotheses based on what you see, then testing them is an extremely pragmatic tool for getting through life, and also for developing technology and building mental models of how things seem to work.
Don't mistake it for a logical tool, though. I guess it's fine to call it rational, if your definition of rational doesn't require logical rigor. Mostly, though, I think the word "reasonable" is used to describe something that seems intuitively correct based on observation, not "rational". Maybe it's just my social circle that uses it that way, though.
All human beings have a strong tendency to explain new observations in a way that it fits into their current worldview. We call it confirmation bias, and in some contexts, it can be a problem.
While confirmation bias is not logically rigorous in the least, it can actually be a pragmatic tool for going through life. I've never met anyone whose life philosophy was completely bulletproof - if you rethought things from first principles every time you learned information that conflicted with how you currently thought the world worked, you would starve to death pretty quickly. Thus do creationists keep their beliefs despite geological dating, and thus do atheists keep their beliefs despite soft tissue in dinosaur bones. For any worldview, there are observations about the universe that have troubling implications, I think. It's my personal belief that the human mind is just too small and simple a thing to fully know and understand the universe, and that no human will ever be able to do it, so I don't worry about having a perfect philosophy. I try to figure out what seems to make the most sense based on what I've experienced to date, and go with that, even if it's not perfect.
As far as Christians not investigating evolution - most people, regardless of their beliefs, refuse to examine other people's beliefs. It's a very common human trait - while I know very few creationists who've read Dawkins, I also know very few atheists who've actually read the Bible, and even fewer who've actually read any serious defenders of Christianity (C.S. Lewis is a decent place to start). It's pretty obvious to me that people are fundamentally selfish, greedy, angry jerks, who don't want to actually understand anyone else's perspective (I see this tendency in myself on a daily basis, which is why I believe it).
As a theist who doesn't quite buy macroevolution, I've read chunks of Dawkins, and I don't find his arguments at all persuasive. Terry Eagleton wrote a scathing review of The God Delusion that summarizes the apparent gulf between Dawkins' arguments and what many theists believe pretty well. However, in case I've missed something, I'm planning to do a good careful read of some of Dawkins' books again this summer, to be certain I really do get what he's trying to say. I've had The God Delusion, The Blind Watchmaker, and The Ancestor's Tale recommended to me. Any other additi
Hate the government school because it's falling-apart and doesn't teach anything? Tough.
That one's easy to deal with.
Homeschool. It's what my parents did, and I'm quite grateful they did. Instead of spending twelve years of my life in an institutionalized Lord of the Flies, I got a good education. Just as important (or maybe more so), I developed incredibly close relationships with my family.
Private school would probably be better, too. Not as good as homeschooling, imo, but still probably an improvement over US public schools.
Obviously, if you yourself are a school student, it might be hard to get homeschooled, but it might still be possible. By the time I reached high school, I was pretty much self-educating, while my parents spent most of their effort on my younger siblings. If a kid is old enough to decide he wants to be homeschooled, he's probably old enough to teach himself, and most parents would probably be willing to help him with it when necessary.
You have *tons* of choice in whether or not you use the insanity which is the American public school or not. Don't pretend otherwise.
Granted, you'll still have to help pay for the system, but you don't have to be in it.
Once they did, I went 'oh yeah. DUH,' and realized that if I wanted to verify this, I could do something like what you've described.
I'd probably use a sequenced rhythm track that I could mute while playing, as that would more accurately reproduce what he's likely to do (playing with a live band is very different from playing with a recording), but it's not a huge difference.
I think the margin of error would be a lot smaller than a tenth of a second, actually - my intuitive perception of tempo is that I can hear misses much smaller than that, and I'm not even a drummer. That's why I was so shocked when it worked. Somehow, I failed to realize that he must be syncing off the delay, rather than just keeping the tempo internally. It's a dumb error to make, but the fact that I made it is why I was so astonished (and of course why I posted about it in the first place).
You'd think seventeen years of classical piano, four years of orchestral playing, and eight years playing in bands would teach me something about music.
Oh well.
I guess I'm just one more piece of evidence that even experts make stupid mistakes, and that it's incredibly dangerous to make declarations of certainty.
That explanation hadn't occurred to me before, but I think you're probably right.
You're obviously right about the best musicians being great listeners - truly great listeners are incredibly rare. Heck, even competent ones are really uncommon. The number of people who can't hear the difference between a Fender Rhodes and an electric guitar attests to that.
For some reason, though, it hadn't occurred to me that he might be locking into the keyboard sound. Since the slapback is an electronically-generated consistent periodic effect, it would effectively be providing him a click track, as long as he paid attention to it - it's just a musical one, rather than a sound not generated by anyone in the band.
And of course, any songs I don't use that effect on, I don't have any mechanical benchmark to listen to, and thus, I probably wouldn't notice minor variations in tempo.
How I missed that up until now, I don't know, but thanks for the response. That does seem to explain it rather well, and demonstrates a significant error in the thinking that made me conclude he had a nigh-perfect tempo sense.
Of course, it's possible he actually does - but my story doesn't actually constitute good evidence of that.
We really are just a weekly worship band, and as such, we really don't have any recordings - it's not something we focus on.
I do remember one occasion when we recruited a member of the youth group to set up some mikes and record us live, just in hopes that we might be able to get a better feel for what we sound like from the congregation's perspective, but he ran into some technical difficulties, and I'm not sure whether we actually got anything recorded or not. I'll see what I can find out.
Thanks for the offer, whether I manage to find anything or not - I appreciate it, and I'm curious too - I've wondered before how close it *really* is. Just because I don't notice any variations doesn't mean he's as consistent as I think he is.
Your analogy to pitch seems quite apropos. As someone who developed very accurate relative pitch, and wishes that I had perfect pitch, I know that some people do just have it (though there is some evidence that it can be developed).
It simply hadn't occurred to me before I played with this guy that the same might be true of rhythm.
I play keyboards for two different worship bands at my church, and I discovered a pretty amazing trait that our drummer/leader in the morning service has:
He doesn't change tempo unless he wants to.
At all.
To elaborate, as that sounds sketchy unless you know how I learned it:
I'm a pretty rhythmic keyboard player, and one of my favored techniques (especially if I need to fill in empty space from, say, a missing electric guitarist in addition to the other textural stuff I was doing) is to use multi-tap delay and really accurate timing to build rhythms and and evolving chords. It can be a really fun effect.
I don't use it much, though, because even with a tap-tempo delay, which I have in my rig, it's really awkward to stay synced up with the rest of the band. My delay is pretty accurate (built-in effect on the Nord Stage, which is rather high-end. I'm pretty confident it's got sub-millisecond accuracy), and I can stay tight with it, but even decent drummers can have a hard time with that (let's hear it for teachers that make you practice with metronomes, eh?), so I usually have to adjust the tempo a few times throughout a song, and that can make things get ugly fast. A less-than-decent drummer, which is all too common, can't stay consistent enough for me to even try it. Thus, I don't (or didn't, I should say) do this much at all, despite my fondness for it.
But, when I first tried it with Bob (the aforementioned drummer), I was shocked, because it just worked. I tapped in a tempo on his first measure or two, and it stayed tight the whole way through. I really hadn't expected that result - hadn't occurred to me humans could be that accurate.
Naturally, I started trying this in various places where it fit, and so far, I can't remember a single attempt where it didn't stay synced. Granted, I haven't tried it with really dragged out delay times (nothing above about two beats of delay at maybe 100 BPM), but even so...
This is the best of both worlds, because when you need him to be rock-solid, he is, but when the situation calls for it, he can (and does) manipulate tempo intentionally.
I've told him (and others) that playing with him is like having an expressive human metronome, and I mean it. It is amazingly blissful - I can wander out into strange netherworlds of syncopation and/or ethereal tempolessness (yay for pads!) and the foundation never wavers.
I'm sure that at times, he has small amounts of drift, but given that my delay stays tightly synced with him for whole songs at a single tempo, it can't get as large as even a single beat per minute very often.
We haven't tried it yet, but someday I'd like to try him out against some sequenced stuff - I'm pretty sure that if I could handle it (which I don't think I can, yet), he'd be unphased by it, even if it got pretty thick. Live band + sequenced riffs/textures/effects could result in some pretty cool stuff.
So, all that to say:
The guy who wrote TFA is actually just providing a measurement of how consistent the drummers for these bands are. Maybe they used a click track to achieve that consistency, but as a semi-pro living in central PA (not exactly renowned for its music scene), I've found one who doesn't need the click.
I can't claim to listen to much of the music that auto-tune is used in.
I do listen obsessively to the best vocal group I've ever heard, The Wailin' Jennys (http://www.thewailinjennys.com/). They're better harmonizers than any other group I've ever heard (and I've heard CSN live, and scoured Pandora for others like them). Amazingly tight, staggering vocal blend, and their live performances are nigh-flawless.
I've listened to a lot of singers in my day, some good, some bad, and one thing I can tell you:
If a singer needs Auto-Tune to stay in tune in the studio, the odds that they've mastered the rest of the art is pretty friggin' small, and they'll never be able to draw serious music buffs live.
Musicians like the Jennys will never have much to fear from them. I understand the theory, but as a serious vocal aficionado, it just won't be a problem.
Is Auto-Tune evil? Probably not, but it's not really a competitive advantage, either.
My hunch is that as the general public becomes more technically savvy, and storage devices get smaller, you'll actually wind up carrying your entire computational environment everywhere with you, operating system, applications, data, and all, on a little flash-drive-like thing about the size of a credit card.
You can actually do this today, if you're mildly geeky - a 2 gig flash drive and a lightweight Linux distro leaves you plenty of room to do most of your daily activities, and you can use it on any fairly recent Intel machine. (though we'll need to do something about those boot times...)
So anyway, I'd expect to see a standard terminal appear, which is probably an x86 piece of hardware, that boots off your little data cartridge, and you go on your merry way.
This has the advantage of the net-based computing paradigm - your personal setup and applications, everywhere you go. It doesn't have the massive problems of net-based computing, like completely losing access to your data when a fiber-seeking backhoe takes out your net connection.
Yeah, it would be pretty easy to lose your data, by losing the card, but there'll always be online backup services, like Apple's.Mac, and creating a backup that's not online wouldn't be too hard either. Encryption probably becomes more important, since if you lose this little storage device, someone else could probably break into it easily.
Humans will, by their nature, be corrupted by power. It just happens, and we can't fix that.
So what do we do? Limit the power. That's what the Founding Fathers were doing with the three different branches. Making it hard for any one person, or any one group, to get things done.
I've been wondering if a truly hardcore limit would be a good idea: One term, in any political office, is the maximum for your lifetime.
It would introduce _tons_ of problems, but it might solve the career politicians, and they're the problem with government today, whether liberal, conservative, Republican, or Democratic.
At work, I use a Windows XP SP 2 box with a 2 GHz processor, and a gig of RAM.
At home, I use a 1.5 Ghz PowerBook G4 w/ 1.5 gigs of RAM, running OS X 10.4.8.
Maybe it's just the RAM difference, which is admittedly a big deal, and all the crap that the corporate IT guys make us install on our boxes, but I've never had Windows XP run anywhere near as fast as OS X does.
It hasn't got much to do with visible load, either - I've had Windows just chugfest and take literal minutes to recover when I'm running a terminal emulator, Outlook, and Gaim. Again, that could be the AV software and 'let us spy on you!' junk they run in the background - I've never bothered to uninstall that, so I don't know how it would run without it.
Anyway, the Windows box slows to a completely unuseable crawl at least once a week - more often like two or three times a week.
I've never had OS X reach the unresponsiveness level that XP does on a regular basis.
When it's running well, XP does react a bit faster than OS 10.4.8, but the slowdowns are WAY worse than OS X's slowdowns, in my experience.
So, I'm sorry, but OS X is hardly light years ahead of XP for average user usability when much of what I explained above is the same exact thing: clicking an icon.
I'm not sure how true this is.
A member of the worship band I play in was at my house yesterday, and sat down at a machine to show me something. It was one of the sunflower iMacs. He'd never used a Mac before, so I had to show him where the browser was, but other than that, he was fine with it.
After about twenty minutes of poking around the 'Net, with me not even watching him (I was looking for something else on another machine), he just randomly says, "Hey, you know, I think I like Macs."
I don't think I've ever heard a Mac user say that about Windows, especially on their first exposure...
Re:The Myth of the 80 Hour Week
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On Point On Slacking
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I worked a summer in a lumber mill, which is generally speaking a notch easier than full-blown factory work.
It was dang hard work. I worked on the cut deck, and the mill hit 100+ degrees Fahrenheit more often than not.
Like the GP said, it was everything the crew could do to stay caught up. In fact, we usually didn't - we were lucky if we could keep the belts and elevators that moved the wood around from jamming.
I'd drink around 120 oz. of fluid in a day, to stay fully hydrated.
I joined corporate America almost a year ago, and I've been stunned at how little work is actually done. The team I'm on has a release cycle of almost _twice_ the length it would have to be, unless I'm some sort of undiscovered programming genius (I assure you, I'm not).
If you've never worked manual labor, well, you're missing a lot of things that can't be understood about it without trying it.
I'm 22, by the way - so it's not like hard work is a relic of the sweatshops.
Define "information" any way you like, and evolution produces it. It's mathetically demonstrable, we do it all the time in practice when we use genetic algorithms, and we observe it in nature. Generating new information is a BASIC function of the evolutionary process (depending on how you define information, it's either random mutation ITSELF, or the outcome of natural selection). Heck, the article here describes it happening. It might not phrase it in the language of information, but when the demands of an environmental pressure is imprinted onto a gene pool, that's an information increase in the gene pool (information about the environment).
You remind me of an artificial intelligence class I had once.
We spent a few class sessions on genetic algorithms, of course, because they're a big part of modern AI research.
We got to watch a program that a grad student had written attempt to evolve a match for a given cartoon face. The faces had about ten distinct features, with a number of permutations for each one.
After we'd been there for around twenty minutes, there were still no good candidates (the program showed the four closest candidates to date in a display area).
Finally, our prof stopped the demo, saying in his Russian accent, "It is possible there is bug in program, it is not finished."
Someone who was safely ensconced in the back row replied, "Or maybe there aren't enough bugs in it. It's been a while since I last saw a duck turn into a chicken."
The whole class (except the prof, of course) found that pretty amusing.
If the sniper fires a second shot from the same location either he is a sniper bent on dying, or has enough support he isn't concerned with return fire.
I think somebody's been playing a lot of CS, and now considers themselves an expert on real-world warfare.
Rest assured, in reality, snipers don't often move around the battlefield.
They instead hit from locations so far out that conventional arms don't have a prayer of hitting them.
A good sniper's ranges are listed in miles, not feet.
`echo p e ! ^ p r ! | sed -e 's#[[:space:]]\+##g' -e 'y#raped!^#forms -#' -e 's#$#/#g'`
It's a good thing I'm a twenty-one year old male, not a 70-year old Korean grandmother, because if I were the grandmother, the results of that sig would have dropped me on the floor from heart attack before I realized it didn't actually do anything.
I think I've learned a valuable lesson, and pretty cheap at the cost...
Yeah, I know that OSS is popular around here, and I'm not a stranger to it - my software engineering group from college released our project under the GPL. I like Free Software. I use it every day.
But, I don't think it's the only legitimate option, even for software development, and the OSS approach is fundamentally untenable for creating art, whether that be music, visual art, novels, games, or anything else.
Most Free software is developed by a bunch of hobbyists in their free time. All well and good; each person takes a small section and creates it, or perhaps adds a few bugfixes over the weekend; eventually, the tool becomes useful.
Try composing or arranging music that way. It really doesn't work. You can't really take a large number of people and have each one write a little music; the result won't be a cohesive whole in the least.
The fundamental difference, though, is this: badly written code is not a problem in a piece of software, so long as it performs the intended function reasonably well, or even at all, since a large proportion of the Free software users out there will use utter crap tools to avoid touching commercial software. Poorly written and/or performed music just sounds like crap.
To elaborate: it's possible to write code that performs a given function, but isn't documented, or perhaps runs a little slowly, or just accomplishes its task in a painfully ugly way. Once it compiles, if the user is happy, it doesn't matter to him.
With music, even if you have a solid grounding in theory, and write music according to that theoretical background (to analogize, write "music that compiles"), it's really easy to produce bad music. I know; I've heard a lot of it. Heck, I've produced more than I'd like to admit in my compositional career (but I try not to let that stuff into public;).
For the record, I'm not at all opposed to giving away music; I just don't think people should expect artists to give away their work for free. Musicians, painters, writers; we like to do what we do. Sometimes that means we give free concerts, or crank out a sketch of a friend's D&D character, because it's fun to do. If someone told me, "Hey, I like what you do. I'll give you food, clothing, and a place to work, if in exchange you'll write and perform music," I wouldn't even think; I'd take it. No money needed, I'd be happy, just like the dudes who had patrons back during the Italian Renaissance. Eventually I might want to move on to something else, but certainly not for a few years...
Unfortunately, patrons don't really happen these days, so a musician's only real shot at playing/writing/recording full-time is to charge for it, in the hope that eventually he'll be able to make a living off of it.
For now, I program to live (fortunately, I really enjoy that too:-), and work on art, music, writing, etc. in my spare time.
And, on the off-chance you'd like to see some of that, you could check out the not-very-good samples I have on that hardly-ever-touched website... Boy, there's something else I need to work on...
Keep in mind that most of what's up there are musical sketches, rough ideas that I found interesting enough to put up. They'd all need lots of refinement before I'd call them good, or anything.
I love getting free, good music from the internet. The Internet Achive's Audio section is my very good friend, as is LegalTorrents. Granted, that is completely different music from this, but still it is awesome to be able to enjoy music being made by people who love making music more than making money.
As a semi-pro musician, I get really, really tired of seeing other geeks bash musicians who charge for their work.
Certainly, there are performers who do it for nothing but the money - but coincidentally enough, they usually suck royally as musicians.
A large number of musicians charge for what they do because they like to do it, and if enough people are willing to pay them for their music, they can quit their day job, and spend more time creating the art that they love to do.
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I think I've failed to get you to understand what I was trying to say at all.
/. for the last year, really... Maybe I'll do that again.
Either I'm pathetically bad at communicating (which seems very likely), or you're not trying to hear what I'm saying.
Of course, no reason to bifurcate - both could be very true.
Unfortunately, I don't have time to keep this up, nor a whole lot of motivation - it seems like you're being pretty rude on purpose, which does not make me feel inclined to spend time on this discussion.
Not, I suspect, that you care very much about this. Reminds me of why I gave up on
Have a great evening.
I didn't read the rest of what you wrote because it's way too long, and I've got a major problem with your very first sentence.
What I wrote was less than eight hundred words. The Wikipedia says that average reading speed for basic comprehension is about 2-400 WPM. If you meet the Wiki's baseline average, it whould have taken you a horrifying four minutes to read my whole post.
Your ability to analyze and think does not impress me if you're that lazy and impatient.
In fact, science doesn't require "what you sense" to be reliable, otherwise the existence of magicians would have rendered science invalid.
My college physics professor was quite adamant that if, in a lab assignment, we got results that weren't expected, we had to carry through with the rest of the lab, and not quit working on it until we had at least some believable explanation for why we got the results we did.
This, I believe, is the core of, and the only valid understanding of, scientific methods. I think it's precisely the opposite of what you're claiming. It's not considered reliable because many observations yield an "average" or "normal" result; it's thought reliable because a scientist will support his theories with detailed outlines of experiments that will let you personally verify them, and will construct a theory that accounts for all the data he collected (or at the very least admit that there may be some flaws in his theories to date, if he can't account for all the information he's gathered). That individual verification of results, and personal/individual eyewitness testimony that they are as expected, is what matters in the scientific method, I believe, not that "lots of people get this result, and we can just ignore the handful who didn't".
Another way of saying this is to assert that the scientific method is not worth much without obsessive rigor, and I personally believe that to be true.
There's a beautiful passage Doug Adams wrote that I think summarizes what being a scientist should actually be like. It's in So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish. Wonko the Sane says:
"I'm not trying to prove anything, by the way. I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that. I'll show you something to demonstrate that later. So, the other reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool."
Gosh, that man was brilliant. Anyway.
The scientific process exists exactly because we understand that individual perceptions are fallible.
The scientific method exists, I think, because people are pragmatic and want rules and observations that help them deal with the complexity and incomprehensibility of the universe, even if there's no reason to believe those rules are true, apart from "they've been close enough so far". I think its existence has nothing to do with the unreliability of people's observations. Scientific methods can't do anything to improve the quality of your senses - all they can do is make it easy for you or someone you trust to test a theory someone else has reported, if both parties involved in the communication are highly rigorous.
The scientific method is overrated as a method of knowing, in general. Programmers all think that shotgun debugging is a bad idea - it's generally agreed that combining attempts to understand what softwar
Science requires a belief which there is no way to prove, which is that what you sense is reliable.
In your view, does a belief have to be provable to be rational?
In a less philosophical vein, faith in scientific approaches requires a belief that the universe is predictable ("If we do X a bunch of times, and get result Y, it's reasonable to expect that we'll see result Y the next time we do X.").
That's actually a large (and unprovable) assumption, as many philosophers will happily tell you. Of course, by definition, an assumption is unprovable. Call it a postulate or an axiom, if you prefer, but it's still the same thing - something you take for granted, and acknowledge you cannot prove.
In the end, scientific methods are anything but logically rigorous. The whole system of science is predicated on a method of argument that is considered fallacious in formal logical arguments.
Are scientific approaches useful? Definitely. Forming hypotheses based on what you see, then testing them is an extremely pragmatic tool for getting through life, and also for developing technology and building mental models of how things seem to work.
Don't mistake it for a logical tool, though. I guess it's fine to call it rational, if your definition of rational doesn't require logical rigor. Mostly, though, I think the word "reasonable" is used to describe something that seems intuitively correct based on observation, not "rational". Maybe it's just my social circle that uses it that way, though.
All human beings have a strong tendency to explain new observations in a way that it fits into their current worldview. We call it confirmation bias, and in some contexts, it can be a problem.
While confirmation bias is not logically rigorous in the least, it can actually be a pragmatic tool for going through life. I've never met anyone whose life philosophy was completely bulletproof - if you rethought things from first principles every time you learned information that conflicted with how you currently thought the world worked, you would starve to death pretty quickly. Thus do creationists keep their beliefs despite geological dating, and thus do atheists keep their beliefs despite soft tissue in dinosaur bones. For any worldview, there are observations about the universe that have troubling implications, I think. It's my personal belief that the human mind is just too small and simple a thing to fully know and understand the universe, and that no human will ever be able to do it, so I don't worry about having a perfect philosophy. I try to figure out what seems to make the most sense based on what I've experienced to date, and go with that, even if it's not perfect.
As far as Christians not investigating evolution - most people, regardless of their beliefs, refuse to examine other people's beliefs. It's a very common human trait - while I know very few creationists who've read Dawkins, I also know very few atheists who've actually read the Bible, and even fewer who've actually read any serious defenders of Christianity (C.S. Lewis is a decent place to start). It's pretty obvious to me that people are fundamentally selfish, greedy, angry jerks, who don't want to actually understand anyone else's perspective (I see this tendency in myself on a daily basis, which is why I believe it).
As a theist who doesn't quite buy macroevolution, I've read chunks of Dawkins, and I don't find his arguments at all persuasive. Terry Eagleton wrote a scathing review of The God Delusion that summarizes the apparent gulf between Dawkins' arguments and what many theists believe pretty well. However, in case I've missed something, I'm planning to do a good careful read of some of Dawkins' books again this summer, to be certain I really do get what he's trying to say. I've had The God Delusion, The Blind Watchmaker, and The Ancestor's Tale recommended to me. Any other additi
Hate the government school because it's falling-apart and doesn't teach anything? Tough.
That one's easy to deal with.
Homeschool. It's what my parents did, and I'm quite grateful they did. Instead of spending twelve years of my life in an institutionalized Lord of the Flies, I got a good education. Just as important (or maybe more so), I developed incredibly close relationships with my family.
Private school would probably be better, too. Not as good as homeschooling, imo, but still probably an improvement over US public schools.
Obviously, if you yourself are a school student, it might be hard to get homeschooled, but it might still be possible. By the time I reached high school, I was pretty much self-educating, while my parents spent most of their effort on my younger siblings. If a kid is old enough to decide he wants to be homeschooled, he's probably old enough to teach himself, and most parents would probably be willing to help him with it when necessary.
You have *tons* of choice in whether or not you use the insanity which is the American public school or not. Don't pretend otherwise.
Granted, you'll still have to help pay for the system, but you don't have to be in it.
Yep, someone else already pointed this out.
Once they did, I went 'oh yeah. DUH,' and realized that if I wanted to verify this, I could do something like what you've described.
I'd probably use a sequenced rhythm track that I could mute while playing, as that would more accurately reproduce what he's likely to do (playing with a live band is very different from playing with a recording), but it's not a huge difference.
I think the margin of error would be a lot smaller than a tenth of a second, actually - my intuitive perception of tempo is that I can hear misses much smaller than that, and I'm not even a drummer. That's why I was so shocked when it worked. Somehow, I failed to realize that he must be syncing off the delay, rather than just keeping the tempo internally. It's a dumb error to make, but the fact that I made it is why I was so astonished (and of course why I posted about it in the first place).
You'd think seventeen years of classical piano, four years of orchestral playing, and eight years playing in bands would teach me something about music.
Oh well.
I guess I'm just one more piece of evidence that even experts make stupid mistakes, and that it's incredibly dangerous to make declarations of certainty.
That explanation hadn't occurred to me before, but I think you're probably right.
You're obviously right about the best musicians being great listeners - truly great listeners are incredibly rare. Heck, even competent ones are really uncommon. The number of people who can't hear the difference between a Fender Rhodes and an electric guitar attests to that.
For some reason, though, it hadn't occurred to me that he might be locking into the keyboard sound. Since the slapback is an electronically-generated consistent periodic effect, it would effectively be providing him a click track, as long as he paid attention to it - it's just a musical one, rather than a sound not generated by anyone in the band.
And of course, any songs I don't use that effect on, I don't have any mechanical benchmark to listen to, and thus, I probably wouldn't notice minor variations in tempo.
How I missed that up until now, I don't know, but thanks for the response. That does seem to explain it rather well, and demonstrates a significant error in the thinking that made me conclude he had a nigh-perfect tempo sense.
Of course, it's possible he actually does - but my story doesn't actually constitute good evidence of that.
I'll see if I can dig anything up.
We really are just a weekly worship band, and as such, we really don't have any recordings - it's not something we focus on.
I do remember one occasion when we recruited a member of the youth group to set up some mikes and record us live, just in hopes that we might be able to get a better feel for what we sound like from the congregation's perspective, but he ran into some technical difficulties, and I'm not sure whether we actually got anything recorded or not. I'll see what I can find out.
Thanks for the offer, whether I manage to find anything or not - I appreciate it, and I'm curious too - I've wondered before how close it *really* is. Just because I don't notice any variations doesn't mean he's as consistent as I think he is.
Your analogy to pitch seems quite apropos. As someone who developed very accurate relative pitch, and wishes that I had perfect pitch, I know that some people do just have it (though there is some evidence that it can be developed).
It simply hadn't occurred to me before I played with this guy that the same might be true of rhythm.
I play keyboards for two different worship bands at my church, and I discovered a pretty amazing trait that our drummer/leader in the morning service has:
He doesn't change tempo unless he wants to.
At all.
To elaborate, as that sounds sketchy unless you know how I learned it:
I'm a pretty rhythmic keyboard player, and one of my favored techniques (especially if I need to fill in empty space from, say, a missing electric guitarist in addition to the other textural stuff I was doing) is to use multi-tap delay and really accurate timing to build rhythms and and evolving chords. It can be a really fun effect.
I don't use it much, though, because even with a tap-tempo delay, which I have in my rig, it's really awkward to stay synced up with the rest of the band. My delay is pretty accurate (built-in effect on the Nord Stage, which is rather high-end. I'm pretty confident it's got sub-millisecond accuracy), and I can stay tight with it, but even decent drummers can have a hard time with that (let's hear it for teachers that make you practice with metronomes, eh?), so I usually have to adjust the tempo a few times throughout a song, and that can make things get ugly fast. A less-than-decent drummer, which is all too common, can't stay consistent enough for me to even try it. Thus, I don't (or didn't, I should say) do this much at all, despite my fondness for it.
But, when I first tried it with Bob (the aforementioned drummer), I was shocked, because it just worked. I tapped in a tempo on his first measure or two, and it stayed tight the whole way through. I really hadn't expected that result - hadn't occurred to me humans could be that accurate.
Naturally, I started trying this in various places where it fit, and so far, I can't remember a single attempt where it didn't stay synced. Granted, I haven't tried it with really dragged out delay times (nothing above about two beats of delay at maybe 100 BPM), but even so...
This is the best of both worlds, because when you need him to be rock-solid, he is, but when the situation calls for it, he can (and does) manipulate tempo intentionally.
I've told him (and others) that playing with him is like having an expressive human metronome, and I mean it. It is amazingly blissful - I can wander out into strange netherworlds of syncopation and/or ethereal tempolessness (yay for pads!) and the foundation never wavers.
I'm sure that at times, he has small amounts of drift, but given that my delay stays tightly synced with him for whole songs at a single tempo, it can't get as large as even a single beat per minute very often.
We haven't tried it yet, but someday I'd like to try him out against some sequenced stuff - I'm pretty sure that if I could handle it (which I don't think I can, yet), he'd be unphased by it, even if it got pretty thick. Live band + sequenced riffs/textures/effects could result in some pretty cool stuff.
So, all that to say:
The guy who wrote TFA is actually just providing a measurement of how consistent the drummers for these bands are. Maybe they used a click track to achieve that consistency, but as a semi-pro living in central PA (not exactly renowned for its music scene), I've found one who doesn't need the click.
I can't claim to listen to much of the music that auto-tune is used in.
I do listen obsessively to the best vocal group I've ever heard, The Wailin' Jennys (http://www.thewailinjennys.com/). They're better harmonizers than any other group I've ever heard (and I've heard CSN live, and scoured Pandora for others like them). Amazingly tight, staggering vocal blend, and their live performances are nigh-flawless.
I've listened to a lot of singers in my day, some good, some bad, and one thing I can tell you:
If a singer needs Auto-Tune to stay in tune in the studio, the odds that they've mastered the rest of the art is pretty friggin' small, and they'll never be able to draw serious music buffs live.
Musicians like the Jennys will never have much to fear from them. I understand the theory, but as a serious vocal aficionado, it just won't be a problem.
Is Auto-Tune evil? Probably not, but it's not really a competitive advantage, either.
I actually think it'll go the opposite way.
.Mac, and creating a backup that's not online wouldn't be too hard either. Encryption probably becomes more important, since if you lose this little storage device, someone else could probably break into it easily.
My hunch is that as the general public becomes more technically savvy, and storage devices get smaller, you'll actually wind up carrying your entire computational environment everywhere with you, operating system, applications, data, and all, on a little flash-drive-like thing about the size of a credit card.
You can actually do this today, if you're mildly geeky - a 2 gig flash drive and a lightweight Linux distro leaves you plenty of room to do most of your daily activities, and you can use it on any fairly recent Intel machine. (though we'll need to do something about those boot times...)
So anyway, I'd expect to see a standard terminal appear, which is probably an x86 piece of hardware, that boots off your little data cartridge, and you go on your merry way.
This has the advantage of the net-based computing paradigm - your personal setup and applications, everywhere you go. It doesn't have the massive problems of net-based computing, like completely losing access to your data when a fiber-seeking backhoe takes out your net connection.
Yeah, it would be pretty easy to lose your data, by losing the card, but there'll always be online backup services, like Apple's
Humans will, by their nature, be corrupted by power. It just happens, and we can't fix that.
So what do we do? Limit the power. That's what the Founding Fathers were doing with the three different branches. Making it hard for any one person, or any one group, to get things done.
I've been wondering if a truly hardcore limit would be a good idea: One term, in any political office, is the maximum for your lifetime.
It would introduce _tons_ of problems, but it might solve the career politicians, and they're the problem with government today, whether liberal, conservative, Republican, or Democratic.
At work, I use a Windows XP SP 2 box with a 2 GHz processor, and a gig of RAM.
At home, I use a 1.5 Ghz PowerBook G4 w/ 1.5 gigs of RAM, running OS X 10.4.8.
Maybe it's just the RAM difference, which is admittedly a big deal, and all the crap that the corporate IT guys make us install on our boxes, but I've never had Windows XP run anywhere near as fast as OS X does.
It hasn't got much to do with visible load, either - I've had Windows just chugfest and take literal minutes to recover when I'm running a terminal emulator, Outlook, and Gaim. Again, that could be the AV software and 'let us spy on you!' junk they run in the background - I've never bothered to uninstall that, so I don't know how it would run without it.
Anyway, the Windows box slows to a completely unuseable crawl at least once a week - more often like two or three times a week.
I've never had OS X reach the unresponsiveness level that XP does on a regular basis.
When it's running well, XP does react a bit faster than OS 10.4.8, but the slowdowns are WAY worse than OS X's slowdowns, in my experience.
I'm not sure how true this is.
A member of the worship band I play in was at my house yesterday, and sat down at a machine to show me something. It was one of the sunflower iMacs. He'd never used a Mac before, so I had to show him where the browser was, but other than that, he was fine with it.
After about twenty minutes of poking around the 'Net, with me not even watching him (I was looking for something else on another machine), he just randomly says, "Hey, you know, I think I like Macs."
I don't think I've ever heard a Mac user say that about Windows, especially on their first exposure...
I worked a summer in a lumber mill, which is generally speaking a notch easier than full-blown factory work.
It was dang hard work. I worked on the cut deck, and the mill hit 100+ degrees Fahrenheit more often than not.
Like the GP said, it was everything the crew could do to stay caught up. In fact, we usually didn't - we were lucky if we could keep the belts and elevators that moved the wood around from jamming.
I'd drink around 120 oz. of fluid in a day, to stay fully hydrated.
I joined corporate America almost a year ago, and I've been stunned at how little work is actually done. The team I'm on has a release cycle of almost _twice_ the length it would have to be, unless I'm some sort of undiscovered programming genius (I assure you, I'm not).
If you've never worked manual labor, well, you're missing a lot of things that can't be understood about it without trying it.
I'm 22, by the way - so it's not like hard work is a relic of the sweatshops.
Define "information" any way you like, and evolution produces it. It's mathetically demonstrable, we do it all the time in practice when we use genetic algorithms, and we observe it in nature. Generating new information is a BASIC function of the evolutionary process (depending on how you define information, it's either random mutation ITSELF, or the outcome of natural selection). Heck, the article here describes it happening. It might not phrase it in the language of information, but when the demands of an environmental pressure is imprinted onto a gene pool, that's an information increase in the gene pool (information about the environment).
You remind me of an artificial intelligence class I had once.
We spent a few class sessions on genetic algorithms, of course, because they're a big part of modern AI research.
We got to watch a program that a grad student had written attempt to evolve a match for a given cartoon face. The faces had about ten distinct features, with a number of permutations for each one.
After we'd been there for around twenty minutes, there were still no good candidates (the program showed the four closest candidates to date in a display area).
Finally, our prof stopped the demo, saying in his Russian accent, "It is possible there is bug in program, it is not finished."
Someone who was safely ensconced in the back row replied, "Or maybe there aren't enough bugs in it. It's been a while since I last saw a duck turn into a chicken."
The whole class (except the prof, of course) found that pretty amusing.
Well, it looks to me like in my absence, the discussion has been pretty much covered.
Any points that don't seem clear to you still, though? I'd be more than happy to try to explain them if something still isn't clicking.
Like I said, lay out the most important day in the entire religion without leaving out inconveninet inconsistent facts. It can't be done.
It isn't even internally consistent, let alone if you add in outside facts.
Evidence please.
You've made the claim - under formal debate standards, it is now your job to uphold it. If you fail, it might seem to be implied that you can't do it.
You're undoubtedly right. I haven't touched Latin in years. :)
an apple a day keeps the viruses at bay
Virii, for crying out loud, not viruses.
It fits better rhythmically, too.
If the sniper fires a second shot from the same location either he is a sniper bent on dying, or has enough support he isn't concerned with return fire.
I think somebody's been playing a lot of CS, and now considers themselves an expert on real-world warfare.
Rest assured, in reality, snipers don't often move around the battlefield.
They instead hit from locations so far out that conventional arms don't have a prayer of hitting them.
A good sniper's ranges are listed in miles, not feet.
`echo p e ! ^ p r ! | sed -e 's#[[:space:]]\+##g' -e 'y#raped!^#forms -#' -e 's#$#/#g'`
It's a good thing I'm a twenty-one year old male, not a 70-year old Korean grandmother, because if I were the grandmother, the results of that sig would have dropped me on the floor from heart attack before I realized it didn't actually do anything.
I think I've learned a valuable lesson, and pretty cheap at the cost...
Yeah, I know that OSS is popular around here, and I'm not a stranger to it - my software engineering group from college released our project under the GPL. I like Free Software. I use it every day.
;).
:-), and work on art, music, writing, etc. in my spare time.
But, I don't think it's the only legitimate option, even for software development, and the OSS approach is fundamentally untenable for creating art, whether that be music, visual art, novels, games, or anything else.
Most Free software is developed by a bunch of hobbyists in their free time. All well and good; each person takes a small section and creates it, or perhaps adds a few bugfixes over the weekend; eventually, the tool becomes useful.
Try composing or arranging music that way. It really doesn't work. You can't really take a large number of people and have each one write a little music; the result won't be a cohesive whole in the least.
The fundamental difference, though, is this: badly written code is not a problem in a piece of software, so long as it performs the intended function reasonably well, or even at all, since a large proportion of the Free software users out there will use utter crap tools to avoid touching commercial software. Poorly written and/or performed music just sounds like crap.
To elaborate: it's possible to write code that performs a given function, but isn't documented, or perhaps runs a little slowly, or just accomplishes its task in a painfully ugly way. Once it compiles, if the user is happy, it doesn't matter to him.
With music, even if you have a solid grounding in theory, and write music according to that theoretical background (to analogize, write "music that compiles"), it's really easy to produce bad music. I know; I've heard a lot of it. Heck, I've produced more than I'd like to admit in my compositional career (but I try not to let that stuff into public
For the record, I'm not at all opposed to giving away music; I just don't think people should expect artists to give away their work for free. Musicians, painters, writers; we like to do what we do. Sometimes that means we give free concerts, or crank out a sketch of a friend's D&D character, because it's fun to do. If someone told me, "Hey, I like what you do. I'll give you food, clothing, and a place to work, if in exchange you'll write and perform music," I wouldn't even think; I'd take it. No money needed, I'd be happy, just like the dudes who had patrons back during the Italian Renaissance. Eventually I might want to move on to something else, but certainly not for a few years...
Unfortunately, patrons don't really happen these days, so a musician's only real shot at playing/writing/recording full-time is to charge for it, in the hope that eventually he'll be able to make a living off of it.
For now, I program to live (fortunately, I really enjoy that too
And, on the off-chance you'd like to see some of that, you could check out the not-very-good samples I have on that hardly-ever-touched website... Boy, there's something else I need to work on...
Keep in mind that most of what's up there are musical sketches, rough ideas that I found interesting enough to put up. They'd all need lots of refinement before I'd call them good, or anything.
I love getting free, good music from the internet. The Internet Achive's Audio section is my very good friend, as is LegalTorrents. Granted, that is completely different music from this, but still it is awesome to be able to enjoy music being made by people who love making music more than making money.
As a semi-pro musician, I get really, really tired of seeing other geeks bash musicians who charge for their work.
Certainly, there are performers who do it for nothing but the money - but coincidentally enough, they usually suck royally as musicians.
A large number of musicians charge for what they do because they like to do it, and if enough people are willing to pay them for their music, they can quit their day job, and spend more time creating the art that they love to do.
What's so bad about that?
Gah, I need more sleep.
Strike "death", that was supposed to say, "near-death".