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.

Ten, once again, demonstrating that feels outweighs evidence for xim.
In most fields it is pretty easy to spot the charlatans and hucksters. They’re the ones who say evidence, and particularly double blind evidence, doesn’t apply in their field. Their field is, somehow,deeper.
I have a simple and deadly effective heuristic. If people won’t accept blind testing, they have something that doesn’t measure up.
This is not to say that subjective experience is unimportant, but the whole point of good trials is to even out the subjective part. An objectively better sound will also be a subjectively better sound provided the person is listening with their ears and not their wallets.
After all, acupuncture “works” in that people feel better for it. It just doesn’t actually work in the way the proponents claim it does.

Ten, once again, demonstrating that feels outweighs evidence for xim.
Now it’s evidence, the last refuge of the putative. I haven’t had this much fun since our recent hysterics about the inherent goodness of the public servant over in the vaunted education sector. Or had we extensively AB’d to prove such a thing because all I seem to remember was the anecdotal evidence.
In most fields it is pretty easy to spot the charlatans and hucksters. They’re the ones who say evidence, and particularly double blind evidence, doesn’t apply in their field. Their field is, somehow,deeper.
Or anecdotal.
I have a simple and deadly effective heuristic. If people won’t accept blind testing, they have something that doesn’t measure up.
Is that like the deadly effectiveness of ignoring the question about what inherently comes to public education’s defense vis a vis liberty, choice, and outcome so convincingly that instead the personal anecdote must carry its day? Because that didn’t quite measure up, if you don’t mind me saying.
This is not to say that subjective experience is unimportant…
Sadly, if associations are a clue in this our proof-by-anecdote realm, it’s exactly to say that the pleasure of subjective experience erecting a believable facsimile of an historic auditory event is unimportant, at least relative to arguing subjectively and quite wrongly about it – because the arguing Objectivist has no evident or even claimed sensitivity to such finely tuned arts – or as it invariably turns out, using his own strict scientific rigor to vigorously produce relative mediocrity.
Why, now that you mention it, it’s exactly like miring the world in bad academy because because.
…but the whole point of good trials is to even out the subjective part.
You’d think, except that that premise simply remains as logically flawed as its real outcomes. The reasons are myriad but the logic of real, end-of-the-day evidence refutes the theorizings of folks who take a dime store level view of what they think blind testing is and does. Either way, real results rarely appeal to the hidebound assertion nearly as strongly as its agenda shall. To wit:
An objectively better sound will also be a subjectively better sound provided the person is listening with their ears and not their wallets.
But there can be no objectively better sound because sensory input is, by the Objectivist’s own miserable metric, so uniquely fleeting and defective among the senses that we need equipment to witness it for us, not unlike how we need their social expertise to determine our ethics and moralities out in the messy world of race and gender.
Secondly, of course to any reasonably experienced audiophile there is no such one-bucket term as “best” that applies to so wide a set of aural stimuli as great hifi delivers. As noted, witnessing the reproduction of an original event involves a number of apparent senses plus the imagination at some added degree of stimulation. You’d think the hair shirt, Objectivist, signal justice warrior would realize from his experience that this broad, dimensional sphere of experience wouldn’t ever condense into a number or a chart or a nomenclature like “best” or even “objective” – the point of the thing is to engage the subjective. But then the signal justice warrior’s never allowed such an event so as to actually witness it or he’d not carry on like an unenlightened boor about what he only assumes constitutes the experiences of others.
After all, acupuncture “works” in that people feel better for it. It just doesn’t actually work in the way the proponents claim it does.
After all, so do outright fallacies, to take your meaning. Good thing Objectivist fallacists never permeate education or anything…

the equivalent of the art’s unhappy social justice warriors…You’d think the hair shirt, Objectivist, signal justice warrior…
Step away from the crack pipe, Ten. Your use of such hysterical, insulting, and politically charged terminology merely calls attention to your irrationality and dishonest crackpottery.

WWII Historians here might find this guy interesting

Joseph R. Beyrle (Russian: Джозеф Байерли, tr. Dzhozef Bayyerli; August 25, 1923 – December 12, 2004) is thought to be the only American soldier to have served with both the United States Army and the Soviet Red Army in World War II. Born in Muskegon, Michigan, Beyrle graduated from high school in 1942 with the promise of an athletic scholarship to the University of Notre Dame, but enlisted in the army instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Beyrle?wprov=sfti1

This electronics discussion is so exciting and stimulating that it has tired me out. I will celebrate St Pat’s Day by taking a nap. ☘️😴
We were going to go out to lunch at a restaurant that serves no booze, as is traditional in Ireland, but there was an ice storm and the back roads are still icy. (This place has such good food they can afford to be out in the middle of nowhere.). So we had Tuna Sandwiches a la Pogonip and will hit the restaurant Monday.
David, did you ever find another Chinese restaurant?

This is for you, Ten:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp6LT2MdaPI

Oh god, what did I start?
Ten, just out of curiosity, how many 96/24 digital remasters on 180g vinyl do you own?

I think my irony meter just redlined.
Dave used to have this on the blog’s masthead:

Meanwhile in the Cultural Studies of Science Education

“great, heavy knobfeel”
The weekly allotment for cock jokes was used up in a previous post, so I won’t speculate as to why that word was italicized.

http://knobfeel.tumblr.com

R.Sherman,
Trofim Lysenko called to say, “Dudes!?! You’ve gone off the deep end!”
The best part is that the primary author repeatedly quotes herself in the third person as a source.

A person capable of writing this unhinged poison should not be given car keys or left near children.
Let me see here … [Slips on spectacles onto nose … Googles …. starts reading]
Oh, my God.
What the fuck is this that I’m reading?

Whiteness embraces White ideology, and because Whites are at the apex of the racial hierarchy, whiteness becomes normalized and is invisible to those who benefit the most from it (Matias, Viesca, Garrison-Wade, Tandon, and Galindo 2014). This is particularly troubling because the normality of whiteness means that Whites do not believe that they are actively investing in White supremacy or racism, which keeps oppression intact. Ricky Lee Allen (2001) reminds us that with the globalization of White supremacy, we cannot rely solely on issues of classism and must work to decenter White voices and explore possibilities that form radical alliances with White people and people of Color to fight oppression. Thandeka (2009) asserts that the silence of whiteness stems from the expectation that White children adopt a colorblind ideology even though they do recognize racial differences as children. For Whites, whiteness operates in subtle, and yet, at times, not so subtle, ways to maintain White supremacy [ … ]
Take for example the emotionality of whiteness. Matias (2016a) describes how in her urban teacher education program that seeks to train teachers with cultural diversity the emotions of the mainly white female teachers when talking about race always shut down the learning and dialogue. Too often the emotion, themselves, become a strategic tool to silence racial dialogue and progress. As such, whiteness can be the everyday enactments that promote white hegemonic ideology.

In that example of “the emotionality of whiteness”, why is that I seem to be getting a mental image of something like army recruits undergoing a hazing ritual as part of a counter-insurgency interrogation resistance training programme?

Problematizing whiteness in science education allows us to understand the White imagination [ … ] If we are serious about an anti-racist science education, we must be critical of our own conceptions and emotions and how they stem from racist ideology [ … ]
This means that our White science educators must consider the following:
1. Recognize different forms of racism beyond the commonplace of explicit racism. Even though there have been decreases in blatant racist acts, humans carry many unconscious biases that allow racial disparities to exacerbate [ … ]
2. Understand the importance of White heritage by acknowledging what it means to be White. For science educators beginning on this journey, we recommend Peggy McIntosh’s (2001) article on White privilege, which identifies common acts that Whites may take for granted. [ … ]
3. Actively reject dominant racial ideologies such as deficit thinking, essentialism, and colorblindness. [ … ]
4. Reimagine what science education spaces can look like [ … ] Those committed to racial equity need to identify and understand their own whiteness and consider alternative views of science education in the creation of spaces that validate our students of Color. Within this re-imagination, we believe it is also important to consider that students of Color who decide to leave science are just as successful of those who continue. For example, students may be attracted to other disciplines during their studies and decide to pursue interests other than science (Strenta, Elliott, Adair, Matier, and Scott, 1994).

Can anyone explain how point 4 works? What do they mean by the idea that students who do not study science can be as successful at science as those who do? And how does that not undermine what I assumed to be the whole point of the article – namely to improve participation and achievement rates of students of color in public science education?

how many 96/24 digital remasters on 180g vinyl do you own?
None, but then I know the subject.
I think my irony meter just redlined.
My mistake addressing ptsd314 impersonally. I should have written, no, that’s your transparent intentionalism talking.

“the primary author repeatedly quotes herself in the third person as a source”
“I insist that you remain silent while I lecture you, flatter myself and virtue-signal. I’ll let you know when I’m done and then you can leave.”

Here’s a thing.

Yes, 91 ads. On one page of a phone tech site. Can anyone top that?

We have been here before. My advice remains the same.
Yeah, you’re right; I’d forgotten what Ten was.

Wow.

David, what site is it?

Thanks, David. I asked in case it would be helpful to be warned.
I’ve noticed that some tech sites are particularly obnoxious offenders, in number of ads, in bandwidth consumed, and in the intrusiveness of the ads.

Another entry into the annals of Stupid Politicians.

Meanwhile in American Lit class . . .
Remind me again the purpose of education? Perhaps ignorance, relatively speaking, is actually less expensive.

Meanwhile in American Lit class . . .
FTA:

When Ms. Haugaard pressed them for more of their thoughts, she was appalled to discover that not one student in the class was willing to say the practice of human sacrifice was morally wrong! She describes one interaction with a student, whom she calls Beth:
“‘Are you asking me if I believe in human sacrifice?’ Beth responded thoughtfully, as though seriously considering all aspects of the question. ‘Well, yes,’ I managed to say. ‘Do you think that the author approved or disapproved of this ritual?’
“I was stunned: This was the [young] woman who wrote so passionately of saving the whales, of concern for the rain forests, of her rescue and tender care of a stray dog. ‘I really don’t know,’ said Beth; ‘If it was a religion of long standing, [who are we to judge]?’”
“For a moment, I couldn’t even respond,” reports Ms. Haugaard. “This woman actually couldn’t seem to bring herself to say plainly that she was against human sacrifice. My classes of a few years before would have burst into nervous giggles at the suggestion. This class was calmly considering it.”
At one point, a student explained she had been taught not to judge, and if this practice worked for them, who was she to argue differently.
Appalled by the student’s moral indifference, Ms. Haugaard concludes, “Today, for the first time in my thirty years of teaching, I looked my students in the eye and not one of them in my class could tell me that this society, this cultural behavior was a bad thing.”

People don’t seem to understand how radical Judaism was/is in the ancient world and how the diminishing of Judeo-Christian principles is undercutting the foundations of Western Civilization.
If ritual human sacrifice is merely opinion, then what arguments can be marshaled against Sharia? FGM? Slavery?

Basic problem as I see it is that we’ve replaced Religion with Education. Seemed reasonable at the time because Religion was failing miserably at explaining God, falling way behind Science. So we’ve fallen over to use Education to explain Science. With parallel results. IMNSHO because whenever man makes progress, he fools himself into thinking he’s made great progress when really the road is much, much longer than he can imagine. There’s also a “skip ahead” fallacy involved but, eh. I’d be here all day.

Meanwhile in Canadian Lit