Inside the MP3 Codec - Masking Effects
I wondered about this questions while flying home, listening to my AAC (MP4) encoded music on my iPod. These are old songs and tunes, yet I seem to hear more than I used to. Certainly neither my ears or my brain are improving; entropy rules. Probably it's simply using better headphones, and and perhaps the experience of listening with more care to more music. My iPod has brought more music to my middle-aged gray days than all the toys of my youth.
And yet ...
Lossy compressed music is fundamentally quite different from non-compressed music. It sounds reasonably similar to the original music because of our brain can't fully detect all the missing elments, and because in some ways the brain "recreates" what isn't heard by the ear. This lossy compression effect is usually considered a necessary evil; an unsatisactory compromise with the storage limitations of current technologies.
But one could hypothesize that the overall experience might in some way be "superior". With the 'unheard sounds' removed, can the brain better focus on the fundamental sounds? Could the process of 'filling the gaps' be in some way 'pleasant' for the brain, a mild excercise that is stimulating and agreeable?
It's easy to imagine all kinds of interesting experiments with different compression levels, different music, functional neurocognitive imaging, etc. I hope to read about these soon ...
It would be funny if it turned out that part of the appeal of the iPod is that people like lossless encoded music better than the 'real' thing.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Hope for Blogger?
Blogger Status Feb 18th
Blogger is now updating their status pages and they seem to be managing their problems more methodically. The situation is dire for those of us with a thousand or more postings. If the Blogger router assigns us to a troubled server we're dead in the water:
Blogger is now updating their status pages and they seem to be managing their problems more methodically. The situation is dire for those of us with a thousand or more postings. If the Blogger router assigns us to a troubled server we're dead in the water:
...What we are seeing is that individual application servers will trend toward 100% CPU usage over time - simply, the appservers get pegged and users on those servers encounter paralyzingly slow load times ...This last fix sounds potentially promising. I'll keep my digits overlapped.
Users with more than 500 posts are also being severely hampered at this time. We believe this is due to an improper use of system resources when users of such blogs either access the Edit Posts page or attempt to publish. We will be testing a potential fix to this problem over the next couple days and hope to push it to production early next week. Because of the extent of the change, we need to fully assess the impact on the service before deployment.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Orcinus on hate groups, racial purity, and the role of the 'people like us'
Orcinus - Succubs
Orcinus connects the Red Lake shootings to a wide range of American hate groups, and references an exceptionally horrid 1985 murder. I'm unsure how strong the connections are, but it's a remarkable set of stories.
Orcinus connects the Red Lake shootings to a wide range of American hate groups, and references an exceptionally horrid 1985 murder. I'm unsure how strong the connections are, but it's a remarkable set of stories.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
The harshness of mortal life - hidden refugees from North Korea
The New York Times > International > Asia Pacific > Glimpse of World Shatters North Koreans' Illusions
Howard French writes of two girls hiding in a Chinese border town.
Howard French writes of two girls hiding in a Chinese border town.
Sitting on a bare floor in a chilly one-room apartment, Lee Hae Jon and her younger sister, Hae Sun, struggled recently for words to describe their lives since they clandestinely made their way here from North Korea five years ago. Their mother married a Chinese man and disappeared from their lives without a trace. Since then, a Chinese widow of Korean descent has taken the girls into her apartment and kept them clothed and fed. But for five years, the teenage sisters have not dared to go outside in daylight for fear of being sent back to their country, or worse, trafficked as young brides or prostitutes in this booming Chinese border city.The problem of pain. I don't buy Lewis answers.
The sisters try to teach themselves Chinese, using a couple of old textbooks and repeating phrases from television, which they watch endlessly. A crude Hula-Hoop is their only source of exercise, and each knock on the door their only excitement. They never know whether it is help from their caretaker's friends or the police coming to arrest them.
'We have no friends, and no future, nothing at all, really,' said the soft-spoken older sister, Hae Jon, 17. 'But if we stay here, at least we have enough to eat. In our country, we could go for days without eating.'
Within months, according to an underground network of people who help support the sisters, Hae Jon may be alone. Hae Sun, a shy girl of 13, is dying of kidney cancer and is not permitted to be flown out of the country for advanced care.
Blowback - the sour fruits of an unwanted victory
When Frist and DeLay convened their emergency meeting of congress, the dems ran for the hills. The Schiavo bill passed. Bush flew in from Texas, the only vacation he's ever left for any cause, and signed the bill.
I thought the Dems were being cowardly, but in retrospect, whether they planned it or not, this was a brilliant Judo move. The polling data on the public response is so intensely negative, even among Bush supporters, that Rove must have known how this would go. The only plausible explanation for Frist and DeLay's action is that Rove never intended to win. He didn't expect the Dems to turn tail; he figured the Senate (at least) would defeat the bill. Then Ms. Shiavo would die and the ongoing moral fervor would give DeLay cover to dodge his impending conviction.
Instead, the bill passed. A personal tragedy became a constitutional issue. So negative has the response been, that a recent ABC news story has convinced activist groups like MoveOn to play politics themselves. I think this is a mistake, the dems should stay out of this one entirely. The MoveOn petition letter, however, has some noteworthy comments:
I thought the Dems were being cowardly, but in retrospect, whether they planned it or not, this was a brilliant Judo move. The polling data on the public response is so intensely negative, even among Bush supporters, that Rove must have known how this would go. The only plausible explanation for Frist and DeLay's action is that Rove never intended to win. He didn't expect the Dems to turn tail; he figured the Senate (at least) would defeat the bill. Then Ms. Shiavo would die and the ongoing moral fervor would give DeLay cover to dodge his impending conviction.
Instead, the bill passed. A personal tragedy became a constitutional issue. So negative has the response been, that a recent ABC news story has convinced activist groups like MoveOn to play politics themselves. I think this is a mistake, the dems should stay out of this one entirely. The MoveOn petition letter, however, has some noteworthy comments:
... a memo intended only for Republican Senators—uncovered by ABC News—reveals Republicans' true concern: "The pro-life base will be excited...this is a great political issue...this is a tough issue for Democrats." This story also takes the heat off Tom DeLay, who is facing a number of serious ethics charges and legal scandals...Despite my quoting of the some noteworthy comments (I can't resist either) I still think the Dems should lay low and let the Republicans roast in their juices. This is political madness and a sign of the deep sickness at the heart of the Republican party. Let that be seen for what it is.
...The New York Times talked to David Davenport of the Hoover Institute, a conservative research organization, who said, "When a case like this has been heard by 19 judges in six courts and it's been appealed to the Supreme Court three times, the process has worked even if it hasn't given the result that the social conservatives want. For Congress to step in really is a violation of federalism."
..."It's disturbing that doctors who would never venture a comment about the health of anybody from a homemade video are sitting on the floor of Congress making declarations," said Art Caplan, chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine. "My own impression, from a distance, is that they've subverted what they know to be good medicine for the aim of achieving a political goal."
...And reporters are now raising questions about a right-to-die law Bush signed as Texas governor, contradicting his position in the Schiavo case. Just last week, the law was applied for the first time, allowing doctors to remove a critically ill infant from life support against his mother's wishes. According to the Houston Chronicle, this marks the first time in American history that courts allowed a pediatric patient to die against the wishes of their parent.[7] As the Knight Ridder News service reports:
..."The mother down in Texas must be reading the Schiavo case and scratching her head," said Dr. Howard Brody, the director of Michigan State University's Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences. "This does appear to be a contradiction." Brody said that, in taking up the Schiavo case, Bush and Congress had shattered a body of bioethics law and practice."
Why Wolfowitz?
Crooked Timber Wolfowitz for the World Bank!
I won't even try to comment on whether Wolfowitz is a good choice for the World Bank leadership. The Economist said NO, Crooked Timber makes a backhanded case for 'maybe not so bad'.
More interesting, is why someone would want to take a Pentagon #2 and have them lead the World Bank. Imagine that the decision maker (Cheney? Rove? Rumsfeld? Bush? Rice?) thought Wolfowitz was trustworthy, loyal and competent. Perhaps they thought like this:
1. The primary military threat to the US in the next 20 years comes from decaying states and non-state actors.
2. The US will deploy all of its military power against emergent threats, but this strategy will not succeed. There are too many threats and the cost of havoc will keep falling.
3. The US must drain the swamp by encouraging global wealth and prosperity.
4. The World Bank must become an agent of US defensive strategy - it must drain the swamp.
5. The World Bank is a now a military-strategic engine, hence it should be run by a Military/political strategist. Unfortunately Karl Rove is not available. Hence Wolfowitz.
If this is the thinking of Cheney/Bush/Rove/Rumsfeld/Rice then the World Bank will take on its old mission with new intensity.
I would approve (I'm sure Bush would be impressed by that!). Of course this is probably all my wishful thinking ...
I won't even try to comment on whether Wolfowitz is a good choice for the World Bank leadership. The Economist said NO, Crooked Timber makes a backhanded case for 'maybe not so bad'.
More interesting, is why someone would want to take a Pentagon #2 and have them lead the World Bank. Imagine that the decision maker (Cheney? Rove? Rumsfeld? Bush? Rice?) thought Wolfowitz was trustworthy, loyal and competent. Perhaps they thought like this:
1. The primary military threat to the US in the next 20 years comes from decaying states and non-state actors.
2. The US will deploy all of its military power against emergent threats, but this strategy will not succeed. There are too many threats and the cost of havoc will keep falling.
3. The US must drain the swamp by encouraging global wealth and prosperity.
4. The World Bank must become an agent of US defensive strategy - it must drain the swamp.
5. The World Bank is a now a military-strategic engine, hence it should be run by a Military/political strategist. Unfortunately Karl Rove is not available. Hence Wolfowitz.
If this is the thinking of Cheney/Bush/Rove/Rumsfeld/Rice then the World Bank will take on its old mission with new intensity.
I would approve (I'm sure Bush would be impressed by that!). Of course this is probably all my wishful thinking ...
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Wasted money: school smoking education programs. So what about drugs?
The New York Times > Health > Vital Signs: Prevention: When the Smoke Doesn't Clear
Increasing the cost of smoking does work.
Time to try something else.
schools around the country offer a wide variety of programs to keep students from smoking, but a new study suggests that they all have one thing in common: they don't work.A meta-analysis of various trials show school anti-smoking programs are probably a waste of money. I suspect, based on this result, the same will be true of anti-drug programs.
Increasing the cost of smoking does work.
Time to try something else.
Mendel's head is spinning
Plants Fix Genes With Copies From Ancestors (washingtonpost.com)Plants can restore from backup systems.
I'm not sure it's totally unanticipated, I think I saw a star trek episode along those lines once (Picard is devolving towards some kind of lemur ...). Nonetheless, it's rather astounding. Gregor Mendel would really be amazed.
Then, in a move akin to choosing their parents, plants can apparently retrieve selected bits of code from that archive and use them to overwrite the genes they have inherited directly. The process could offer survival advantages to plants suddenly burdened with new mutations or facing environmental threats for which the older genes were better adapted.Eons ago I wondered if biological systems would somewhere implement algorithmic compression programs resembling lzw compression. This is weirder.
I'm not sure it's totally unanticipated, I think I saw a star trek episode along those lines once (Picard is devolving towards some kind of lemur ...). Nonetheless, it's rather astounding. Gregor Mendel would really be amazed.
Technology bites
Palm is now palmOne and PalmSource - US
My Palm synching had been trouble free for a while. Reassuring to know it's still unreliable! PocketMirror bit me tonight -- all my contacts are in one category.
Some people wonder why the PDA market died. They also wonder why Quicken is fading away.
I could tell 'em!
My Palm synching had been trouble free for a while. Reassuring to know it's still unreliable! PocketMirror bit me tonight -- all my contacts are in one category.
Some people wonder why the PDA market died. They also wonder why Quicken is fading away.
I could tell 'em!
Theocracy has its bright side -- the catholic church moves on to the death penalty
The New York Times > Washington > Bishops Fight Death Penalty in New Drive
We may be living in a nation that is increasingly theocratic, but even that has its bright side. In contrast to most evangelical churches, catholic churches have always technically opposed the death penalty. They've just been quiet about it. That may be about to end.
I hope mainstream Protestant churches will jump onboard. Even Senator Santorum (separate article), the bane of the Englightenment, is actually thinking that maybe it's a bad thing for the state to execute disabled, incompetent or (dare we say) innocent human beings. Santorum does seem a bit fuzzy about church doctrine vs. the Pope's personal prejudices -- he evidently missed out on a few catechism classes.
It will be amusing to see Catholic bishops and leftie right-to-choose activists sharing the same podiums (even if only virtually).
Bush won't like this one bit.
We may be living in a nation that is increasingly theocratic, but even that has its bright side. In contrast to most evangelical churches, catholic churches have always technically opposed the death penalty. They've just been quiet about it. That may be about to end.
I hope mainstream Protestant churches will jump onboard. Even Senator Santorum (separate article), the bane of the Englightenment, is actually thinking that maybe it's a bad thing for the state to execute disabled, incompetent or (dare we say) innocent human beings. Santorum does seem a bit fuzzy about church doctrine vs. the Pope's personal prejudices -- he evidently missed out on a few catechism classes.
It will be amusing to see Catholic bishops and leftie right-to-choose activists sharing the same podiums (even if only virtually).
Bush won't like this one bit.
Digital Rights Management and iTunes: why we should fund Chinese hackers
MacInTouch Home Page:
A father posts on Macintouch about a fascinating problem with Digital Rights Management:
I had my first "bite" from Apple's DRM the other day. I had to activate a new machine, but the new machine had an older version of iTunes. When I played a tune I'd downloaded (for free of course, I don't buy music with DRM) iTunes informed me I had to upgrade to a new version of iTunes to play it. Apple did this because they needed to close a security frailty in their FairPlay DRM system. It's nibbles like these that remind me of what that the DRM-beast will look like when it's full grown.
We ought to establish a fund to support Chinese hackers. Soon we'll all be needing their services ...
A father posts on Macintouch about a fascinating problem with Digital Rights Management:
I'd like to raise an issue that I'm faced with and I'd like to know if others find themselves in the same situation, or if this is a time-bomb waiting to ambush others.There are all sorts of variations on this theme. Divorce, marriage, etc. How many more can we not imagine? Digital Rights Management currently binds content to machines accounts, and the machine account is (in theory) bound to a person. The goal, ultimately, is to bind digital media it to a single person by biometric methods (or the old "chip in the left ventricle" technique :-).
Since iTunes opened, I've been purchasing music for my young daughter. This is music that I have generally no interest in, it's music for her library. At the same time, I have my own music library which also includes music from iTunes. All of this music was purchased under a single iTunes account (after all, it is my credit card).
My young daughter is now not as young and is getting ready for college in the fall. I wrote to iTunes to ask how I can transfer her music to her own account so she does not have to share my account with me forever. iTunes wrote back that there is no way to do this. A few back and forth emails have not gotten me any forward progress on this issue.
I had my first "bite" from Apple's DRM the other day. I had to activate a new machine, but the new machine had an older version of iTunes. When I played a tune I'd downloaded (for free of course, I don't buy music with DRM) iTunes informed me I had to upgrade to a new version of iTunes to play it. Apple did this because they needed to close a security frailty in their FairPlay DRM system. It's nibbles like these that remind me of what that the DRM-beast will look like when it's full grown.
We ought to establish a fund to support Chinese hackers. Soon we'll all be needing their services ...
Ends and means
The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: A Blow to the Rule of Law
But in the Schiavo case, and in the battle to stop the Democratic filibusters of judicial nominations, President Bush and his Congressional allies have begun to enunciate a new principle: the rules of government are worth respecting only if they produce the result we want. It may be a formula for short-term political success, but it is no way to preserve and protect a great republic.Madness.
How To Complain about your Wireless Service = especially SprintPCS
How To Complain about your Wireless Service
SprintPCS hides well, but this web site exposes its mailing address. Thank heavens for Consumer Union -- and Google.
Sprint finally managed to push me far enough that I decided to fill out a complaint form from the office of our famously combative state (MN) attorney general. Problem is, I needed a mailing address for the form and Sprint hides its mailing addresses quite well. Happily Google found it for me.
What drove me over the edge? They went too far in hiding information about their calling plans and contracts. After my second call to the desperate and hapless folk who work Sprint's customer service lines it became clear that Sprint considers information on their service plans to be a corporate secret. The information on the web site is hopelessly incomplete and misleading, and they don't provide printed summaries in any form to anyone.
GRRRR. Its worth filling out the bloody complaint form. Hatch wants to run for Governor of MN, if he wants to make his name he can go after Sprint and force them to put their plan information online clearly and completely.
SprintPCS hides well, but this web site exposes its mailing address. Thank heavens for Consumer Union -- and Google.
Sprint finally managed to push me far enough that I decided to fill out a complaint form from the office of our famously combative state (MN) attorney general. Problem is, I needed a mailing address for the form and Sprint hides its mailing addresses quite well. Happily Google found it for me.
What drove me over the edge? They went too far in hiding information about their calling plans and contracts. After my second call to the desperate and hapless folk who work Sprint's customer service lines it became clear that Sprint considers information on their service plans to be a corporate secret. The information on the web site is hopelessly incomplete and misleading, and they don't provide printed summaries in any form to anyone.
GRRRR. Its worth filling out the bloody complaint form. Hatch wants to run for Governor of MN, if he wants to make his name he can go after Sprint and force them to put their plan information online clearly and completely.
Monday, March 21, 2005
Dyer has 8 more articles on his public site
Dyer 2005
If anyone knows of a free web service that would generate RSS updates based on changes to this page let me know!
If anyone knows of a free web service that would generate RSS updates based on changes to this page let me know!
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