nerd_stuff
Maybe you should save your grandiose lectures for somebody who doesn't know enough to see through it. There's no reason to assume levels will be at a "reasonable" level and there's no reason to think a high-quality portable music player should only play back 16 bits. That's absurd. Should consumer level music players stop at 16? Sure. I want better than that but if you want to listen to mp3s on your phone nobody's stopping you.
I'm left wondering how much of this anti-Pono talk is shilling on behalf of smartphone manufacturers. I need 24 bit playback in roughly the same way I need a car that does 0-60 in under 3.5 seconds - I like things that are over-engineered so I can geek out on how awesome they are. But thanks to all the killjoys we can't even get excited about the first high quality portable music player because some amateur sound engineers want to show off they once read a blog post on Shannon-Nyquist theory.
I don't disagree that CD quality basically maxes out the ear's natural capabilities, I don't think it's that easy to do.
For a remix I'd rather get a 24-bit stream than a 16-bit stream (that's really 15 bits) and has to be padded up to 24 anyway.
> In order for it to be even theoretically possible to hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit audio,
Only for professionally mastered audio which is not a safe assumption in this day and age. If some home engineer recorded a track with too much headroom and you get the 24-bit track you're fine, at 16-bits you have a problem.
I would love a music player where I could play tracks at 88kHz/24-bit because that's what most music is during the mixing process and then an audio engineer can give you the raw version of what they're working with without having to deal with issues of headroom, downsampling and dithering.
24-bit audio doesn't hurt anything other than file size and it has real uses, be it remix culture or just high-quality unmastered music.
I have no patience for articles like this because instead of setting the record straight it just adds more pseudoscience to the mix. Their "experiment" doesn't prove what they claim it proves.
Is 24-bit useful for playback? Yes it is. Do you need it for properly mastered audio? Absolutely not. But there are 10,000 home studios across the country who have music files at 24-bits and a large chunk of those engineers don't know how to master audio. Is a raw 24-bit track better than a poorly mastered 16-bit track? It is to me.
Is 192kHz useful for anything? Probably not. Does it hurt anything? Maybe a little. I would expect a quality music player to go up to 96 anyhow so 192 isn't so bad. Similar reasons as before.
Does this reflect badly on the Pono player? Not really. Over-engineering isn't a bad thing in my book.
When you do experiments you must understand your experimental design enough to understand exactly what you're testing and what conclusions can be drawn from that. If you do A/B testing of 8-bit/16-bit (which is a good idea) you have to understand you're doing the test through your current audio hardware.
The whole point of the Pono player is to have higher quality hardwhere everywhere, including pre-amps and DACs so you have a chance to hear subtle differences.
If you do this test through your laptop speakers you really might not be able to tell the difference. If you'd like to "debunk" the Pono player then do this test through a Pono player pushing music through quality studio headphones.
Making things worse they're using Neil Young's Rockin In The Free World which contains, get this, large amounts of harmonic distortion to begin with. The pre-existing harmonic distortion will only serve to mask any distortion and fidelity loss from truncating to 8-bits.
If you don't own high-fidelity music equipment then this test is like proving high definition television is impossible because you can't tell the difference between a standard and high definition signals on your standard definition TV.
For electromagnetic radiation like light the momentum is a function of the energy, not the velocity.
EMF is not a force and it's not the only thing the word electricity refers to. I've just checked a physics and an electrical engineering textbook and neither refer to electricity or EMF the way you are. I honestly don't know where you're getting these ideas.
In physics there is a fundamental force sosmetimes called The Electromagnetic Force, and in a sense it does describe all of electricity, but it's not the same thing as The Electromotive Force.
Once they could make predictions and those predictions were verified by reality. "When I flip this switch the light will turn on.....When I move this magnet past this wire I can shock my lab assistant...."
I don't know much about D&D but I would venture the guess that electrons are far stranger than mana. I mean, not only do they have a wavelength[0], you can do the Double Slit experiment with them[1], but they also have an intrinsic angular momentum and there are rules of which electron can be where based on this "spin"[2]. That's just for starters.
Calling them "mana" (whatever that is) might not be any more wrong than calling them particles.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_wave 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_%28physics%29
> Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and flow of electric charge.
I doubt the article will steer people wrong. The gravity/e-field analogy is accurate, and they're clear to state that Bohr model of the atom is a useful model while providing a link to more info so interested readers could dig in there if they wanted.
> Electricity is the force not the flow...."Electricity"...is always the EMF
Speaking of details the Electromotive Force isn't a force because it doesn't have Newtons for units. EMF times charge does give a force but EMF alone is just Volts. In circuits we may think of it as if it's a force, and it has force in the name, but it's just a potential difference.
Nakamura's shown that he'll play interesting and sometimes dubious moves because he wants chess to be more entertaining for spectators. He spends a lot of time playing online against weaker players so they can have the memory of that one time they played against one of the best. He's done so much for chess and its popularity that if he takes an early draw once in a while he gets the benefit of the doubt.
Does it? I was pointing out that today there are motives for publicly supporting women in the sciences that didn't exist in 1966. In that quote Feynman pushed things in a progressive direction in a different political atmosphere than we live in today.
> I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up--that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line--a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart," etc.--I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.
That's almost 60 years ago that he went on record saying that pedagogical issues may be affecting women in mathematics and he had lost faith in the assumption of their inferiority. This wasn't just anybody saying this and this wasn't just any physicist saying this - this was Feynman. This was the guy the other physicists looked at in awe and it was the year after he won his Nobel Prize for Quantum Electrodynamics. Few physicists have ever earned so much respect from their peers.
If that's not convicing then read how he was the one who encouraged his sister Joan to pursue science against the wishes of their mother who thought women lacked the cranial capacity to do science. (http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/2003/JANUARY2003/MyMotherTheS...)
> It wasn’t until her 14th birthday—March 31, 1942— that her notion of becoming a scientist was revived. Richard presented her with a book called Astronomy. “It was a college textbook. I’d start reading it, get stuck, and then start over again. This went on for months, but I kept at it. When I reached page 407, I came across a graph that changed my life.” My mother shuts her eyes and recites from memory: “‘Relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms . . . from Stellar Atmospheres by Cecilia Payne.’ Cecilia Payne! It was scientific proof that a woman was capable of writing a book that, in turn, was quoted in a text. The secret was out, you see.”
Richard was 23 or 24 when he gave her that book. Keep in mind this was the 1940's and it was the same year he received his PhD - so he wasn't just a kid and supporting women in science wasn't the popularity contest it is today. When 24 years later he made the other quote in 1966 he knew women were capable scientists because his sister had already become one.
This is all to say that before you take one chapter from one book out of context and extrapolate across his entire life make sure you get a few more data points to see if the extrapolation makes any sense.
Some googling around suggests his students are quite pleased with him. He has, according to Wikipedia's intro for him, the undisputed king of math blogs. Both of these point to him being at least a good or above average educator.
At this point I see a blog post written by a well respected mathematician whom I feel comfortable trusting and it's being brushed aside by I don't know who.
I dealt with this question in high school physics, it's really no big deal. When you get to a point where all you can do is make a "metaphysical claim with no greater merit than its opposite" you go find something better to do with your time.
For me looking into String Theory's status as scientific/not-scientific is a good way to learn that the Popperian view of falsifiable==scientific is a bit too simplistsic and that classifying things as scientific/not-scientific may not even be a productive activity. It's just not that simple.
In the meantime it's generally best to listen to scientists talk about it to get a feel for its standing: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/28pzc1/string_t...
A good quote from that thread which may answer your question: "Anyways, my point is that String Theory is not just some whacky idea "what if everything was strings" that exists in a vacuum, but is rather a very natural and conservative extension of Quantum Field Theory to a more general and less arbitrary framework."
And here's a blog post (series of posts) linked from that discussion which may also help: http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/09/23/quantum-field-theory...
I agree with you that FOILing is stupid and might make the student worse off in the long run, but I think depriving them of getting practive with heuristics might be worse. Ideally a student would notice that FOIL isn't a good trick and stop using it, but there are other "tricks" that are extremely useful.
Like Fanana: First times all of them, next times all of them, next times all of them... it's not 100% clear but it took 10 seconds to come up with and it works with trinomials and beyond.
Or FettuchENE: First times each of them, plus next times each of them.... Ok, that's kind of bad, but you get the point. FOIL sticks around not becuase it's the best but because it's the most memorable, it's a meme. We should introduce better memes to compete with it.
The problem is if you only learn the trick without the reasoning behind it. The solution isn't to not learn the trick, it's to learn why it works.
I think it's a disservice to kids who will go into science and engineering if they've never been allowed to use heuristics before. Too often you learn a long-form solution method and then the "trick" to solve it quickly and you need to be able to do both.
What grandparent commenter showed was the school district's numbers are plausible. I doubt the district entered into a legal battle without first consulting an engineer or two about the electric costs.
I would suggest "Digital Taylorism threatens...." or "Modern Taylorism threatens..." as a title.
If it's a heated debate about who can call who which names then everybody loses. Which is why I chose to present them with the evidence they asked for while giving them the benefit of the doubt. When somebody with views like this gives the invitation to discuss evidence I say take it in good faith and encourage them to continue down that path.
Just a few paragraphs later he celebrates how irritating philosophy is while sidestepping how much its pompous pedanticism encourages anti-intellectualism. If it's a "huge problem with scientism" then it should also be a huge problem with philosophism.
It's also unclear how exactly "scientism" is responsible for climate change deniers. Somebody says "I believe someday science will explain everything!" and so somebody else says "Oh yeah? Climate change is a hoax by the government to get money!" Perhaps the author uses the word to describe being arrogant about science but you can be plenty arrogant about it without adopting a view of "scientism".
NASA: Climate Change Evidence - http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/indicators/
Union of Concerned Scientists: http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/global-warming/science-and-im...
Weather Underground: Evidence of Climate Change: http://www.wunderground.com/climate/evidence.asp
> "When we read a science textbook, all of the information is placed within the structure of the current paradigm, as if none other came before it."
Newtonian physics isn't taught from within the frameworks of quantum mechanics or relativity. The opposite is true, it's taught as if we live in a constant-time, deterministic universe. That's an exact wrong prediction for the most central and fundamental field of science. To make it worse it's something that's easy to check. That's frustrating.
A quick visit to wikipedia shows modern geology dates itself back to the 17th century. You can view the field since then as successive additions and modifications to what was started by Nicholas Sterno in 1669 when he stated the law of superposition, the principle of original horizontality and the principle of lateral continuity. Those are 3 of the 7 principles of modern stratigraphy that wikipedia lists, but according to you and Kuhn the "modern paradigm" of geology starts in 1965 and everything before that's been erased?
Feynman was an excellent communicator, it's rare that having an intermediary "explain" what he was saying adds more than it takes away.