Friday Ephemera

Yesterday’s word was optics too.

The council at work.
I think that’s *all* councils at work.

Morning, all.
Cunning.
Via dicentra.

Art.
You may need a barf bag.

“Hi! Is your mask edible? Are you a rock to lie on? Can I kiss you? Who’s your friend”? Hey, there are MORE of you!”
https://twitter.com/fluffsociety/status/974072743552483328?s=21

It’s a gas!

‘Nature takes its course’.
Not entirely unrelated:

Any takers, ladies?

Who the hell would pay those prices?

Any takers, ladies?
My word! It’s like James Spader was given Warwick Davis’ role in Willow.

It’s like James Spader was given Warwick Davis’ role in Willow.
See, now you’ve just ruined The Blacklist for me.

David, I thought the person holding the sign was female. ☺️

There’s 30 or 40 things that should have thoroughly ruined it for you long before I came along.
Heh. It’s true, the actress who plays Liz isn’t good, and the guy who played Tom was equally unconvincing. And Ressler is just dull. Navabi and Aram are okay, but the whole thing rests on Reddington. Oh, and I’m still trying to figure out why Harold never seems to have any lights on in his office.
It’s my only vice.
What?
Oh come on, it was worth a shot.

See, now you’ve just ruined The Blacklist for me.
I’m in the middle of Season Three. At this point, replacing James Spader with Warwick Davis could only improve things.
The actress who plays Liz isn’t good, and the guy who played Tom was equally unconvincing. And Ressler is just dull. Navabi and Aram are okay, but the whole thing rests on Reddington.
I’m still trying to figure out if Tom is being CGI post-processed or if he just naturally has freakishly large anime eyes.
The Navabi-Aram thing was fun to watch for a bit, but they can’t seem to decide if they want to do something realistic or a pandering-to-the-shippers fairy tale. My biggest problem with the show at this point is that Liz is the Mary Sue-est of Mary Sues to come down the pipe in a long while, and it’s getting increasingly tiresome. I’m kind of hoping all of Season Three will end up being her dying hallucination.

I’m still trying to figure out if Tom is being CGI post-processed or if he just naturally has freakishly large anime eyes.
Heh. Don’t worry, he [ SPOILERS ] doesn’t survive season five. We actually watch the thing – while drinking, obviously – in the hope that Liz will bite the dust, leaving Red to team up with Navabi and Aram.
Yes, it’s a guilty pleasure and I’ll thank you not to judge me.

“That’s the theory, at any rate.”
The theory needs double-blind tests. But the last ones I read about failed embarrassingly for the golden-ear autiophile experts: When they knew what equipment was playing their music, they confidently identified the expensive audiophile CD players as giving far better sound. But when neither they nor the testers knew at any moment what equipment was being used, their golden ears failed utterly.

Yes, it’s a guilty pleasure and I’ll thank you not to judge me.
I’ve seen all of Hart of Dixie. And I was sober at the time.

And I was sober at the time.
Oh, I couldn’t watch it without a fortifying beverage. As you say, Liz is badly cast and poorly written, and has always been the obvious weak link of the show. I’m actually surprised the producers pushed on with same actress and character. (As The Other Half says, “I don’t believe she’s an actress, let alone an FBI agent.”) The show has teased us, at least twice, with what seemed to be her final moments, only for her to recover the following week, thereby dashing our hopes. But despite its faults, which are numerous, it does have odd moments of charm, largely due to Spader and some faintly surreal scenarios.

Correction: “Sorry, xe has Schroedinger’s gender: You cannot know until xe tells you.”

Re: 96k 24bit remasters – I am semi-reliably informed by some guy I don’t know on facebook that the human ear can only pick up frequencies at a much narrower range than 96khz (no more than 20khz?), so the idea that you’re really hearing a purer sound is mostly bollocks. It may be a placebo effect, or it may be that they’ve remixed it so it sounds better anyway (why most comparisons of remasters to originals are apples to oranges), or it may be that recording and/or working with digital sound at 96khz causes less digital distortion which might creep into the audible range when the file is compressed.
I don’t know, it’s all a bit above my pay grade, but my general opinion is that it’s just snake oil..
Some fallacies like to creep into that common progression – usually between the purported limits of amplitude sensitivity and bollocks – and usually end with flat charges of snake oil, they being technically as unfounded as the purported snake oilers themselves. The 96/24 phenomenon has nothing to do with audible range in terms of a 96kHz extremity but instead in subtleties like audible air, space, grain, and various subtler electronic artifacts in the reproduction of digital media.
The “less distortion in the audible range” concept is also used (touted?) in designing hi-fi speakers that reproduce frequencies beyond normal human range.
Speakers that reproduce an extra high octave – which certainly is beyond the commonly held limits of human hearing – also positively affect the phasing of frequencies within human range. However, in practice 40kHz reproduction is significantly less audible than is a simply lower distortion speaker. Other, more fundamental driver behaviors and the underlying speaker design are more important, especially the design. Class for class, we hear how the thing is designed and executed more than the sacred cow of frequency response.
The theory needs double-blind tests. But the last ones I read about failed embarrassingly for the golden-ear autiophile experts: When they knew what equipment was playing their music, they confidently identified the expensive audiophile CD players as giving far better sound. But when neither they nor the testers knew at any moment what equipment was being used, their golden ears failed utterly.
That old saw gets passed audio circles around a lot, typically by folks with axes to grind more than music to enjoy. Two problems with it. Double-blind work has the 1) interesting property of reducing virtually all audio to similarly dismal results because it 2) violates the way we absorb a musical event, which ironically, is by not actually listening. We relax and we take in a far longer perspective in far more open-minded, perceptive, visual states then when we’re challenged and forced to produce a particular result. In one scenario you simply must taste a dozen “notes’ in what turns out to be a bottle of $15 Vintage Ordinaire; in another you enjoy the heck out of a fine dinner over the entire course of an evening.
Guys into turning hifi into a competition generally prevail in showing one and all that that’s all they’ve done while the rest of us go off exploring – through Kind of Blue or Sketches. It’s funny how hifi is reserved for this kind of abuse, fairly uniquely among human experience for pleasure. Great audio ultimately isn’t an aural experience, either. It’s a far more involved sensory foray involving a historical time machine. Get it really right and you’re not hearing Miles. You’re there, watching Miles.
I recall a test done in the 1980’s where someone skeptical of high-fi audio claims demonstrated that audiophiles could not tell the difference between signal carried by the finest gold-plated speaker wire, and a coat hanger he straightened out and jammed into the connectors.
To wit. Meanwhile, the better audio scientists in the world generally work alone – either in geographic or experimental isolation or both – and yet consistently arrive at highly similar findings. Among them is the accepted empirically-founded view that extremely low reactance audio cables have the least sonic signature, an eminently logical view. The tip of that spear is held by ultra-fine silver monofilaments suspended in air dielectrics and the language to describe the non-sound of them is remarkably, even shockingly consistent. This is not to say snake oil doesn’t exist; it does and it appears whenever there are dollars to be duped.

“Giant wearable woollen cat heads.”
Ethical!
“Stanford students demand Apple help them stop using their cell phones so much”
Just give me the best part of $1000 every autumn, instead of Apple, and before long you won’t be using an iPhone at all. Surefire cure. Guaranteed. Also works for Macbooks.
“The museum of obsolete media.”
If you enjoy that, you’ll like this guy.
“And finally, in specialist news, ‘For a small number of individuals, farting isn’t just a taboo by-product of human digestion—it’s the primary focus of their sex lives.’”
Have they no sense of smell? I’m serious; I kind of get their explanations for it – kind of – but… the pong… no. Just no.
“A Guardian fashion spread.”
Somebody, somewhere, is clearly trying to see how far they can push a gullible public, quite possibly for a bet. (I’m convinced that this is also what’s going on at BMW’s MINI design department. It’s the only rational explanation.)
“Re: 96k 24bit remasters”
Explanation, demonstration. (As far as I remember; I’m not going to watch the whole thing again to remind myself exactly what’s in each one. Point is, yes, 96k/24-bit is snake oil. For final distribution, at least; it has some benefits in editing.)

There is absolutely no reason a double-blind test cannot be done in which an entire performance is played many times, each time by one of two randomly selected music systems, and the audiophile scores each performance for quality.
There is absolutely no reason to conduct a double-blind test in which an entire performance is played many times, each time by one of two randomly selected music systems, with the audiophile scoring each performance for quality if the purpose is to replace simple, subjective, serial testing of one system or of one component in it by a reasonably perceptive listener. No other similar field expects such a presumption of odd, , conditioned, “scientific” rigor and in fact, no good audiophiles have expressed valid reason to question their own findings here than in, say, dining, drinking, or driving, among scores of other pursuits.
Put another way, without exception the finest, most authentic-sounding systems I’ve experienced in decades are assembled by this method while the objectivist camp meanwhile assemble loud, electronic-sounding hifi that either they express no perceptions about or that evidently never really please them anyway.

My mother (RIP) played the cello. For whatever reason, I have found that even expensive audio setups have difficulty in reproducing the sound and presence of a cello correctly to my ear. After a great deal of trial-and-error, listening to other people’s systems, and lots of time of high-end retailers’ “listening rooms”, I found a setup that makes a cello sound genuinely lifelike to me. As a bonus, other string instruments sound beautiful, jazz, pop and rock music all sound great, and movie soundtracks sound far better than any “multiplex” surround sound. The gear would be considered obsolete by most younger people, and sniffed at by my-system-cost-more-than-yours “audiophiles”, but I am happy enough with it that, after 25 years of service, I had the amplifier, pre-amp and speakers refurbished, rather than replace them.

I found a setup that makes a cello sound genuinely lifelike to me. As a bonus, other string instruments sound beautiful, jazz, pop and rock music all sound great, and movie soundtracks sound far better than any “multiplex” surround sound. The gear would be considered obsolete by most younger people, and sniffed at by my-system-cost-more-than-yours “audiophiles”, but I am happy enough with it
Cool. In the end, that’s the only legitimate test: Does it sound good.

You can’t make this sh*t up:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/03/the-reductio-ad-absurdum-of-diversity.php
“This is the kind of absurdity you get when you prioritize skin color over merit,” he said.

And in U.S. college basketball, the “wokest” take yet: Too many walk-ons are white. Pull quote:
The walk-ons — players who don’t receive athletic scholarships, pay their own tuition, room and board and do the dirty work in practice, all in exchange for a small role in big-time basketball.
It’s an outrage, of course, and thus, we must destroy even that small role because. . .reasons which are too nonsensical to be believed.