Closure pare one: Self Destruct

The show with david Bowie was one of the first concerts I ever went to. I also have this tape somewhere. This makes me feel old.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 6:16 PM on March 21, 2013

Google Illiterate

Then I started crying: Hitler was saying exactly what I was feeling, and I had to try really hard not to wake the babies up with my sobbing.

Metafilter: Hitler was saying exactly what I was feeling..
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 12:25 AM on March 14, 2013

I'd be more concerned about major media blogs killing RSS in favor of syndication deals with apps like flipboard.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 8:15 PM on March 14, 2013

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of internal revolt over it.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 6:22 AM on March 15, 2013

And no one can tell me why Reader is being shut down.

Because of G+

Why they don't just add reader functionality to g+, I don't know. I'd probably start using it if they did.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 7:16 PM on March 20, 2013

We used to have these things called books, and some told you where to go

I used lonely planet as my bible in Central America and it rarely steered me wrong, (except for one hostel in Granada which had taken a real turn for the worse.) It's better at general advice on travel and culture than it is at specific recommendations these days, though. I started to rely on trip advisor and wikitravel more often as the trip went on, though. I actually had my book lifted from me twice at hostels and had to track down newer copies. It was the only thing anyone actually stole... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 11:38 AM on March 20, 2013

The maps were what really helped me more than anything else. You can't wander around, say Santa Ana in El Salvador, holding out your iPhone when you get off the bus looking for a hostel. There was one point in my trip in Nicaragua where I got stuck on a bus for 12 hours on a rural highway when a highway was blocked by a protest, and I was going to have to hitch-hike to a different city than I had planned on going to. I could have used the guide book in that situation to find a hostel and orient... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 11:51 AM on March 20, 2013

If I were going to fix it, I'd cut out all the recommendations for restaurants and hostels for each town except for a 'safe bet' at each price range- one that is reliably clean and safe- and refer people to the website for more options. I'd include more maps, more background information about the towns and culture, more suggested itineraries, more phrases in the local language, ideas for backup plans if your plans go sideways, more pictures and more conversation starters. For a lot of travelers... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 12:04 PM on March 20, 2013

rrrrrrrrrrr​aaaaaaaaaaa​iiiiiiiiiiiii​nnnnnnnnnnn

Just an FYI, paul stretch (the program that does these stretches) is more of a synth that uses the original track as a starting point -- similar to the way a vocoder works. It's not in any real sense stretching the song out (which would make it infrasonic, obviously). It's essentially generating random wave forms using a fast fourier transform of the song sampled at certain points for the harmonic content. I don't believe the process is even reversible-- I don't think you can recover the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 8:19 PM on March 19, 2013

Here's a technical explanation of how it works.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 8:33 PM on March 19, 2013

Aside from the word "random", that sounds like it could be a description of any pitch-invariant timestretching algorithm. Is there something the paulstretch algorithm does which makes it a less accurate form of interpolation than others?

He randomizes the phases which is what gives it that 'choir of angels' effect.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 11:53 PM on March 19, 2013

My point was mostly that when you stretch it this much, the sound you are hearing is mostly artifacts from the algorithm and has very little to do with the source sound.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 12:11 AM on March 20, 2013

The Parade of Horrors is Delayed

Hey all you students in the developing world - this is the reason your textbooks will now cost as much as they do in Los Angeles.

Why on earth do you think they wouldn't just pirate them or print them locally instead? Nobody gives a shit about American ip laws in the developing world, nor should they.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 10:51 AM on March 19, 2013

Gone in 60 Seconds: The Impact of the Megaupload Shutdown on Movie Sales

The person I met who was most distraught by megaupload shutting down was a woman I met in Nicaragua, since she wouldn't be able to download American TV shows any more. It didn't really have much impact on her pirated movie consumption, though, since there are shops on every other street corner selling bootlegged DVDs.

I never really knew any Americans that used it. I used it a little bit, but I just went back to torrenting after it went down.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 6:27 AM on March 18, 2013

Really? I know a lot of people who watch Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Girls, and other popular shows by illegally downloading or streaming them, and many seem like big enough fans that they would pay to see them if that option weren't available.

For me, it's the other way around. I'd pay to see game of thrones if that were an option.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 7:29 AM on March 18, 2013

But in a world without piracy, do you seriously imagine that these friends of yours would simply cease to acquire any movies or music whatsoever?

No, they'd spend the same amount, but have much less stuff. I mean, this is transparently the truth. It's not like we have to imagine a world where rampant digital piracy didn't exist. Before cheap CD burners existed, for example. Was that a utopia where all artists were taken care of and making money hand... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 11:26 AM on March 18, 2013

Piracy doesn't need to be justified, paying for information is what needs to be justified.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 6:23 PM on March 18, 2013

Just don't complain when premium television dries up once everyone else realizes how great it is to be a free rider.

People have been saying that this was imminent since cassette tapes came out, and yet more and more and better tv, music, movies, games and books are being released now than ever before. How do you account for that?
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 7:41 PM on March 18, 2013

Then I guess HBO's product (which is the subscription, not a television series) isn't for you. You don't get to call the shots since you are the customer.

I guess you can believe this, but the media companies would be foolish to act as if this were the case. Because people can and will download whatever they feel like, and a few egregiously unfair prosecutions to make examples of housewives isn't really going to stop them from doing it.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 8:26 PM on March 18, 2013

TV--especially HBO-quality TV? Absolutely not. Even if gaffers, grips, editing interns, PAs, etc didn't need to have livelihoods, quality motion pictures will almost certainly always require ensembles.

You'll note that I didn't ever suggest that people could make these things for nothing. You suggested that all the money for media production will one day dry up because of piracy, while the fact is that both piracy and media spending have gone up together.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 8:28 PM on March 18, 2013

How much would you pay for GoT? And if it's less than the going rate, do you have a right to watch it anyway?

I actually have an HBO subscription right now, but only because I got a deal when I signed up for internet and the new season is coming up. I'm cancelling it as soon as it's over, though. I would say ordinarily that I'd pay $15-20 a month for access to HBO's library. Without that option, I'll just pirate it. I'd also pay whatever the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 8:59 PM on March 18, 2013

Make no mistake, if Game of Thrones could be financed by DVD sales or Netflix, it would be. But it can't, because it's tremendously expensive and low-rated.

Netflix just spent over 100 million on House of Cards.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 9:06 PM on March 18, 2013

More to the point, what if I decided that House of Cards was only worth $4/month? Would I be in the right to pirate it?

You'd have a right to pirate it if you thought that a penny was too much to pay, imo. I'm checking out of this thread now, though, because I don't want to be subject to an interrogation. I'm comfortable with what I spend on supporting creative work. Which is sometimes nothing, and sometimes quite a bit.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 9:21 PM on March 18, 2013

China is engineering genius babies

This might be true. A graph of the Flynn effect on IQ looks like a frigging EM optimization step, and that's just from schooling, environment and nutrition. But if they explicitly try artificial selection for intelligence, I highly suspect that they'll be selecting for the concomitant diseases of intelligence: depression, bipolar disorder, etc. Mental illness also follows the Flynn effect.


I think extensive genetic engineering in the human... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 7:35 PM on March 18, 2013

empath: How many of us today, right now, are able to survive in a natural environment, hunt and gather for our food, search for our water?

That's more of a knowledge thing than a physiological thing, though, i think. If you got adopted by a tribe in the amazon, I'm sure that you could adapt fairly quickly.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 8:37 PM on March 18, 2013

Reticulating Splines

Offline mode successfully modded in.

All they had to do was turn off the disconnect timer. EVERYTHING is being done on the local machine except the regional stuff and save games. You can also build anywhere.

So all they need to do is enable local save games.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 2:48 AM on March 14, 2013

Also, the pathfinding is atrocious.

How is it that nobody at maxis knows how to calculate the lowest cost path on a congested network? That's a solved problem.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 3:15 AM on March 14, 2013

I didn't know it would be possible to loathe a game publisher more than I loathe Activision.

Look at the launch of SC2:HOTS in comparison.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 3:20 AM on March 14, 2013

The number of agents isn't relevant to the difficulty of the problem, because all of them use the same table. The only thing that's relevant is the number of edges and vertices in the graph, which is not very many. We're not talking out recomputing routing tables for the entire Internet here.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 3:39 PM on March 14, 2013

Congestion is just a number you add on to the cost. It adds no time at all to the computation. You don't need to compute it over and over again for every sim. You just re do the routing every time a link's status changes. This is something that routers on the Internet do constantly while routing billions of packets. You don't recompute routes every time a new packet goes over an interface.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 3:46 PM on March 14, 2013

Sure you do- the sims are moving, and wherever they move to becomes more congested because of their presence. Other sims trying to use the same arc need to know about that change in congestion if the change happens before they get to traverse that arc.

Don't put the intelligence at the sim level, put it at the intersection level. They're just packets that need to be routed. You can do load balancing, least-cost routing, etc. You're talking about a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 2:28 AM on March 15, 2013

I'm surprised there hasn't been an ftc complaint. This is as clear a case of false advertising as I've ever seen
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 12:03 AM on March 16, 2013

The CEO resigned.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 7:27 PM on March 18, 2013

+

The ssc was a huge boondoggle, and the us did contribute a bunch of money to the LHC.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 3:27 PM on March 15, 2013

Tony Stark, eat your heart out.

Carbon nanotubes cause problems because they're small enough to enter cells. Graphene wouldn't have that problem.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 3:23 PM on March 15, 2013

So what is it smart guy?

Sorry, that came off as way condescending. It's just the fault of terrible high school teachers that people think of math that way, honestly.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 8:56 PM on March 13, 2013

See this stack exchange discussion on multiplication by juxtaposition and programming languages.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 9:41 PM on March 13, 2013

to wit: So, the question is whether a/bc means (a/b)c or a/(bc). And the answer is, DON'T WRITE a/bc, because it will only cause confusion. Some people/software/whatever will make one interpretation, some will make the other, neither one has been endorsed by the Dalai Lama or any other great leader. Put in enough parentheses to make your writing foolproof.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 9:42 PM on March 13, 2013

Because what's being divided by is ambiguous if you don't use a horizontal bar and/or parentheses. You can replace the ÷ with a / or any other symbol you like, and it's still ambiguous. Division is multiplication by an inverse, and the ÷ doesn't really properly mark off what's being inverted. A horizontal bar does, and parentheses do.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 4:38 AM on March 14, 2013

Shouldn't algebraic expressions like this one have exactly one correct interpretation? Asking for more parenthesis to clarify is nice, but wouldn't mathematics be better if it didn't allow for needless ambiguities? I guess we don't have the same standards mechanisms?

If you were using standard mathematical notation for this problem, there wouldn't be any ambiguity.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 10:54 PM on March 14, 2013

Mathematically, 'implied multiplication' is no different from 'multiplication'.

Mathematically, it doesn't matter what precedence rules you use in that case, as long as you're consistent.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 3:16 PM on March 15, 2013

The Personal Finance Scam

For the record, I have not ever done this and I'm pretty sure neither has the guy who described it to me. I have no idea if anyone has ever done this.

Darren Brown did this with horse racing.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 4:33 AM on March 15, 2013

The cauldron of the speckled seas

There's video here.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 7:24 PM on March 14, 2013

..on the other hand I like not being surrounded by randomly appearing death spirals.

YOLO!
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 8:57 PM on March 14, 2013

There's something about paper

Also requires a specialized writing utensil, unlike clay tablets which can be imprinted using only simple reeds.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 7:27 PM on March 14, 2013

It's hard to imagine getting sentimental about an electronic file.

All the people on /r/gaming would probably disagree.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 7:52 PM on March 14, 2013

For The Love Of Wisdom

This isn't particularly practical, but give them credit for inventing the world's only entirely rational system of religious beliefs, deriving its idea of the supreme being from something like a conceptual analysis.

I don't think that theurgy was entirely rational. It definitely did influence Christian and Jewish philosophers, though. I was thinking 'dead-end' in that the enlightenment more or less tossed it aside as being impractical. You don't... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 11:22 PM on March 13, 2013

I tend to dig into wikipedia after listening to an episode, which helps with retention a lot.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 3:11 AM on March 14, 2013

Adamson actually helps you learn about the important issues the (so far, Ancient) philosophers were concerned with, rather than needlessly adding biographical details.

This is an awful problem with science books, too. I don't remember the title, but I recently read a book about quantum mechanics where 90% of the book was just about disputes over who discovered what first and all kinds of interpersonal drama. Complete waste of time.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 3:41 AM on March 14, 2013

Podcasting app on your iphone/ipad or via itunes.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 3:47 AM on March 14, 2013