Monday Links from the Bench vol. CLXVI

[eek]

They get gobsmacked when all I say is "black".

I generally end up with something moderately undrinkable & too hot.

In most places that would be an americano (basically an expresso with lots of hot water added).

Eek in teaching Zeity to suck eggs mode.

[Ignis Fatuus]

"As far as killer whales are concerned, the semen is collected from an adult male trained to voluntarily ejaculate. The male, positioned belly up and adjacent to the edge of the pool, is trained to present his penis." The article includes photographs of this process, which may be NSFW if you work with large marine mammals

The next time someone asks me what NSFW means, I shall use this as an example.

[doodab]

That is a mere hint of the big problem that will confront people in the future in attempting to assert their individuality and originality.

Hence the sight I recently enjoyed of a man in a silly hat in starbucks ordering a coffee, the description of which was so complicated he had to pause for breath.

[OwlHoot]

It's a tulip summary of a great short story, failing to reflect either the speculative nature of the narrative or the strange beauty of the writing ...

I can well believe it - I was trolling a bit. But that Wikipedia article does touch on a serious point:

On a psychological level, the infinite storehouse of information is a hindrance and a distraction, because it lures one away from writing one's own book (i.e. living one's own life). Anything one might write would of course already exist.

We sometimes hear how our descendants will be overrun with all our rubbish, literally, in the form of everything from nuclear waste to domestic refuse; but that will be the least of their worries.

They'll feel more crushed by all the best literature, art, science, music etc from their past, insights and discoveries that they can no longer have and claim to be original, as it has all been done before.

Being available for instant electronic search and recall, it won't be as easy for people in the future to simply ignore the old and reiterate it, as all but a few specialists today can ignore and be blissfully unaware of the hundreds of thousands of worthy old books gathering dust in a few large libraries.

Even on CUK, one sometimes hesitates to post a bit of trivia on the grounds that it could easily be found by a quick Google search, which everyone will assume one has done anyway. That is a mere hint of the big problem that will confront people in the future in attempting to assert their individuality and originality.

[eek]

Don't worry about it Nick. I loved this bit:



I thought I had posted this one the other day but I cannot find the post.

Even Google won't be around for ever, let alone Facebook



Which reminds me of the rescue attempt on the BBC's Domesday Project which was doomed to fail



And colour me blind but I don't see a link from that BBC article to the recovered archives...

Its here

The remarkable thing is that it shows how likely it is that the early 21st century will become a dark age 50 or so years hence.

Without a paper document things just disappear.

[doodab]

Fair enough. When I post links it's because I think the stuff is interesting, but if it's something I don't know much about then it may turn out to be bulltulip that happens to be interesting, but wrong

Sometimes I'm tempted to post stuff that's bizarrely wrong just because being so wrong is interesting (in fact, I did so the other week) but if that article and the research that inspired it are wrong for all the wrong reasons then all I can do is apologise, while pointing out that, as you pointed out how and why it's wrong, the process of me just posting this crap at least allows for informed correction

Hi Nick, no need to apologize. I did find it interesting, I even got some books off the shelf in order to double check my ranting It just upsets me that a popular science magazine could post such a badly written and seemingly unreviewed article.

[Sysman]

Fair enough. When I post links it's because I think the stuff is interesting, but if it's something I don't know much about then it may turn out to be bulltulip that happens to be interesting, but wrong

Don't worry about it Nick. I loved this bit:

"I guarantee that everyone reading this has clicked on, and believed, a bulltulip Daily Mail story within the last year. Their website has become the most popular news website in the world, largely because of their talent for getting Americans to forward their bulltulip to each other."

I thought I had posted this one the other day but I cannot find the post.

Even Google won't be around for ever, let alone Facebook

Some years ago, when the Google Books project, which aims to digitise all of the world's printed books, was getting under way, the two co-founders of Google were having a meeting with the librarian of one of the universities that had signed up for the plan. At one point in the conversation, the Google boys noticed that their collaborator had suddenly gone rather quiet. One of them asked him what was the matter. "Well", he replied, "I'm wondering what happens to all this stuff when Google no longer exists." Recounting the conversation to me later, he said: "I've never seen two young people looking so stunned: the idea that Google might not exist one day had never crossed their minds."

And yet, of course, the librarian was right. He had to think about the next 400 years. But the number of commercial companies that are more than a century old is vanishingly small. Entrusting the world's literary heritage to such transient organisations might not be entirely wise.

Which reminds me of the rescue attempt on the BBC's Domesday Project which was doomed to fail

Users needed a BBC Master computer running special software to access the Domesday interface.

The whole setup cost around £5,000 putting it out of the reach of ordinary people, as well as most schools and libraries.
Domesday laserdisc Domesday used the now obsolete Laserdisc system

Only 1,000 Domesday systems were sold nationwide.

In the proceeding quarter century, the technology became obsolete, making the content on the discs inaccessible to all but a few enthusiasts.

And colour me blind but I don't see a link from that BBC article to the recovered archives...

[NickFitz]

I'd suggest it's point needs to be added to it's list of failings then.

There are a few other choice spoutings in there such as



which hasn't actually been news since Mr Fletcher and Mr Munson determined their well known curves of equal loudness in the 1930s. Most of the rest of the article is such a jumble of semi related ideas and conflation of similar sounding terms that it is, to use a well worn phrase, "not even wrong".

I'm not convinced by the paper itself ([1208.4611] Human Time-Frequency Acuity Beats the Fourier Uncertainty Principle) either. It seems to me that they take their delta-f from one tone and delta-t from another so they aren't looking at the right things at all.

Fair enough. When I post links it's because I think the stuff is interesting, but if it's something I don't know much about then it may turn out to be bulltulip that happens to be interesting, but wrong

Sometimes I'm tempted to post stuff that's bizarrely wrong just because being so wrong is interesting (in fact, I did so the other week) but if that article and the research that inspired it are wrong for all the wrong reasons then all I can do is apologise, while pointing out that, as you pointed out how and why it's wrong, the process of me just posting this crap at least allows for informed correction

(I'll still get very cross if people start trying to "correct" the idea that people landed on the Moon, or suggesting that JFK was killed by a secret invisible turnip three weeks before his "supposed" assassination.)

[doodab]

Anyway, despite its failings, I think the point was supposed to be that the models used to determine "what the ear cannot perceive" turn out to have been fundamentally flawed, with the result that the perceptual coding algorithms used to date are seriously sub-optimal. There should be enough info in the article to track down the original research.

I'd suggest it's point needs to be added to it's list of failings then.

There are a few other choice spoutings in there such as

I don't think it will come as a surprise to a lot of audiophiles, but human hearing most certainly does not have a linear response curve.

which hasn't actually been news since Mr Fletcher and Mr Munson determined their well known curves of equal loudness in the 1930s. Most of the rest of the article is such a jumble of semi related ideas and conflation of similar sounding terms that it is, to use a well worn phrase, "not even wrong".

I'm not convinced by the paper itself ([1208.4611] Human Time-Frequency Acuity Beats the Fourier Uncertainty Principle) either. It seems to me that they take their delta-f from one tone and delta-t from another so they aren't looking at the right things at all.

[NickFitz]

I don't need to now, having just read the 10 line summary here

It's a tulip summary of a great short story, failing to reflect either the speculative nature of the narrative or the strange beauty of the writing

I can't comment on the research they are probably misreporting but this article is so factually inaccurate the daily mail would think twice about publishing it. They can't even tell the difference between sample rate and bit rate ffs.

Linear predictive coding has nothing to do with the way lossy compression algorithms choose what to throw away. The correct term is perceptual coding, the idea being that you throw away what the ear cannot perceive.

Journalists, eh? Little scamps

Anyway, despite its failings, I think the point was supposed to be that the models used to determine "what the ear cannot perceive" turn out to have been fundamentally flawed, with the result that the perceptual coding algorithms used to date are seriously sub-optimal. There should be enough info in the article to track down the original research.

[OwlHoot]

[I]"Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel ... If you don't know the story, you should read it, because it's awesome.) ...

I don't need to now, having just read the 10 line summary here

It's the way of the future - No one will have time to read great big tomes when they can just skim through the synopsis.

[doodab]

[*]Why Your Music Files Sound Like Crap - "All of the compression algorithms are based on outdated understanding of how the human ear works." Looks like you'll have to re-encode all your CDs if you want to make the most of those gold-plated speaker cables

I can't comment on the research they are probably misreporting but this article is so factually inaccurate the daily mail would think twice about publishing it. They can't even tell the difference between sample rate and bit rate ffs.

Linear predictive coding has nothing to do with the way lossy compression algorithms choose what to throw away. The correct term is perceptual coding, the idea being that you throw away what the ear cannot perceive.

[NickFitz]

There was a good article I was going to link to today. In the four days since I bookmarked it, the company whose blog it was on has been taken over by another company and their website closed down Luckily, a few fragments of the web remain:

• Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel - Tim Maly contemplates the cultural impact of the technological changes that have led to vacuous books on coniferous wood imports to Bosnia and Herzegovina (a mere $156), "object spam" in Second Life, and - this past weekend - a company selling (supposedly) automatically-generated t-shirts bearing rape jokes on Amazon: "Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel twisted through the logic of SEO and commerce." (N.B. his link to The Library of Babel is mangled; I've fixed it there I tweeted him about the broken link, and he's fixed it. If you don't know the story, you should read it, because it's awesome.)
  
  
• The 8085's register file reverse engineered - "On the surface, a microprocessor's registers seem like simple storage, but not in the 8085 microprocessor. Reverse-engineering the 8085 reveals many interesting tricks that make the registers fast and compact. The picture below shows that the registers and associated control circuitry occupy a large fraction of the chip, so efficiency is important. Each bit is implemented with a surprisingly compact circuit. The instruction set is designed to make register accesses efficient. An indirection trick allows quick register exchanges. Many register operations use the unexpected but efficient data path of going through the ALU." A Zeity special, by Ken Shirrif
  
  
• How Does SeaWorld Masturbate their Stud Killer Whales? Rocker Tommy Lee Says “Cow Vaginas” And He Is Almost Right. - "As far as killer whales are concerned, the semen is collected from an adult male trained to voluntarily ejaculate. The male, positioned belly up and adjacent to the edge of the pool, is trained to present his penis." The article includes photographs of this process, which may be NSFW if you work with large marine mammals
  
  
• Coding Confessional - "Anonymous Confessions from Programmers." Such as "I use pictures from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic when client takes too long to send actual images for site." (I use a large collection of pictures of apes for the same purpose.)
  
  
• Why Your Music Files Sound Like Crap - "All of the compression algorithms are based on outdated understanding of how the human ear works." Looks like you'll have to re-encode all your CDs if you want to make the most of those gold-plated speaker cables
  
  
• Why It’s Smart to Be Reckless on Wall Street - Former trader Chris Arnade on the way financial incentives positively encourage investment bank employees to be reckless: "If you make a bunch of money you get personally wealthy. If you lose then you just go home and look for a new job."
  
  
• 5 Easy Ways to Spot a B.S. News Story on the Internet - David Wong offers a simple guide to identifying crap, including a special mention for CUK's favourite crapfest: "I guarantee that everyone reading this has clicked on, and believed, a bulltulip Daily Mail story within the last year. Their website has become the most popular news website in the world, largely because of their talent for getting Americans to forward their bulltulip to each other."
  
  
• My First Message From the Future: How Facebook Died - First in a series of great blog posts by Joe Hladacek: "...hindsight being 20/20, they should have seen – should see – that the Facebook social network is destined to become little more than a stale resting place for senior citizens, high-school reunions and, well, people whose eyes don’t point in the same direction." Also check out his second message: Messages From the Future: The Fate of Google Glass - "Glass just smacked of the old I’m-an-important-technical-guy-armor syndrome. The 90′s cellphone belt holster. The 00′s blinky blue bluetooth headset that guys left in their ears blinking away even while not in use. And then Google Glass."
  
  
• The Left Bank Ape: An exclusive look at bonobos - "Suddenly a screechy altercation broke out between Nobita and another male, Jiro. Kiku, Nobita’s elderly mother, charged over to support her son. Cowed by the two of them, Jiro retreated. He sulked in a nearby tree. It’s interesting, Sakamaki noted, that Nobita is the largest male in this group, and yet his mother helps him in a fight." Sounds like the police catching up with a teenage joyrider just as he makes it back to his mum's council house. (Sorry, bonobos, didn't mean to insult you with that comparison.)
  
  
• Before VFX - "Blockbuster movies without visual effects." Good collection of stills taken before the magic is added, such as this one from Planet of the Apes with green dots standing in for fur:
  
  
  

Happy invoicing!