Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category

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The Audio Files.

Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

This is a couple of days old, but I don’t think it has gotten a lot of attention, and it lightly pushes some of my buttons.

There’s a company called Mobile Fidelity, or MoFi. They press records. They also have some recordings available in SACD format, and sell record accessories and electronics. I talked to Mike the Musicologist, and he owns some of their SACD recordings, which I will take as a qualified endorsement.

MoFi’s big deal was that they supposedly used “original master tapes” for their recordings.

In the world of audiophiles — where provenance is everything and the quest is to get as close to the sound of an album’s original recording as possible — digital is considered almost unholy. And using digital while claiming not to is the gravest sin a manufacturer can commit.

Mike Esposito runs a record store in Phoenix, “The ‘In’ Groove”. He put up a video on July 14th claiming that, contrary to their advertising, MoFi “had actually been using digital files in its production chain” for their re-issues. (And apparently it wasn’t just re-issues of material that was originally recorded digitally.)

(Remember the early days of CD audio and the SPARS code? Wasn’t that a time?)

Anyway, a lot of audiophiles attacked Mr. Esposito for posting the video and implying MoFi’s claims were not legit.

MoFi, for their part, invited Mr. Esposito to visit them in California. So he went out there, and sat down with some of MoFi’s engineers…

That visit resulted in a second video, published July 20, in which MoFi’s engineers confirmed, with a kind of awkward casualness, that Esposito was correct with his claims. The company that made its name on authenticity had been deceptive about its practices. The episode is part of a crisis MoFi now concedes was mishandled.

I think this is that video.

“They were completely deceitful,” says Richard Drutman, 50, a New York City filmmaker who has purchased more than 50 of MoFi’s albums over the years. “I never would have ordered a single Mobile Fidelity product if I had known it was sourced from a digital master.”

…

“Not that you can’t make good records with digital, but it just isn’t as natural as when you use the original tape,” says Bernie Grundman, 78, the mastering engineer who worked on the original recordings of Steely Dan’s “Aja,” Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic.”

As you know, Bob, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the kind of audiophile who spends $5,000 on a turntable for their 78 RPM records. On the other hand, I also don’t have a lot of sympathy for companies that get people to buy stuff by lying to them. On the gripping hand, who am I to look down on these people, when I spend a fair amount of my disposable income on obscure Smith and Wessons and first editions?

Mobile Fidelity and its parent company, Music Direct, were slow to respond to the revelation. But last week, the company began updating the sourcing information on its website and also agreed to its first interview, with The Washington Post. The company says it first used DSD, or Direct Stream Digital technology, on a 2011 reissue of Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” By the end of 2011, 60 percent of its vinyl releases incorporated DSD. All but one of the reissues as part of its One-Step series, which include $125 box-set editions of Santana, Carole King and the Eagles, have used that technology. Going forward, all MoFi cutting will incorporate DSD.

…

Marketing has been a key element of the MoFi model. Most releases include a banner on the album cover proclaiming it the “Original Master Recording.” And every One-Step, which cut out parts of the production process to supposedly get closer to the original tape, includes a thick explainer sheet in which the company outlines in exacting detail how it creates its records. But there has been one very important item missing: any mention of a digital step.
The company has obscured the truth in other ways. MoFi employees have done interviews for years without mentioning digital. In 2020, Grant McLean, a Canadian customer, got into a debate with a friend about MoFi’s sourcing. McLean believed in the company and wrote to confirm that he was right. In a response he provided to The Post, a customer service representative wrote McLean that “there is no analog to digital conversion in our vinyl cutting process.”

…

The fallout of the MoFi revelation has thrown the audiophile community into something of an existential crisis. The quality of digitized music has long been criticized because of how much data was stripped out of files so MP3s could fit on mobile devices. But these days, with the right equipment, digital recordings can be so good that they can fool even the best of ears. Many of MoFi’s now-exposed records were on Fremer’s and Esposito’s own lists of the best-sounding analog albums.

What else is there to say? Other than, if you can’t tell the difference, is there a difference?

Posted in Geek, Music | 2 Comments »

Another thing I did not know.

Wednesday, June 29th, 2022

This is not an endorsement, and I am not getting anything from anybody for this.

In addition to those fancy Japanese toilets, something else I’ve wanted in my house when I win the lottery is a GeoChron. Maybe more than one GeoChron: I don’t know that I need one in every room, but at least the office and bedroom…

Yes, they are rather expensive. But how can you put a value on having your office look like a scene from The Hunt For Red October?

There used to be (for all I know, still is) a PC program that worked as both a stand-alone executable and also as a screen saver, that emulated the GeoChron but with a considerable omount of flexibility. That included additional map packages and zoom ability. As far as I know, though, that hasn’t been ported to other platforms, and I’m not sure if it is even still maintained or works with new versions of Windows.

I hadn’t looked at the GeoChron website in a while, but I did today. Turns out: the GeoChron people have gone digital. It’s a box (“Is like: a very heavy candy bar“) that plugs into the HDMI port of your 4K TV or monitor and provides…a GeoChron. Complete with Internet connectivity so you can download more stuff. They even offer a Ham Radio Bundle.

Still a touch expensive, but: I can get a 4K (Amazon Fire) TV for $200. $30 for a wall mount. $100 for someone to install the wall mount. Suddenly, that $4,500 GeoChron is about $800. This isn’t quite couch cushion money, but it also isn’t lottery winner money.

Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.

Posted in Geek, Radio | Comments Closed

A little late…

Tuesday, May 31st, 2022

…for Memorial Day, and I don’t know how old this story is. (It just came across Hacker News, for what that’s worth.)

From Hodinkee, a story about a Rolex watch. The serial number dates it to 1947.

But there’s more to the story than it being an old watch. It spent 52 years buried in an unmarked grave…because it belonged to a CIA pilot that was killed in action.

The method for recovering the agent in question was not only difficult, but it was also dangerous. This was one of the first implementations of the so-called “All American Pick Up.” It was a technique that Downey and Fecteau had only recently trained for, and this was their first time trying it in the field. The agent on the ground would retrieve some dropped equipment: a harness, a pair of poles, and a length of line. He would then set up the poles, string the line between them, and attach the harness. The C-47 would then come in low and slow, trailing a grappling hook. The hook would snag the line, lifting the harnessed operative off the ground and into the air behind the airplane, where he’d be winched on board.

(Previously.)

Posted in Geek, History, Planes | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: May 4, 2022.

Wednesday, May 4th, 2022

David Walden. There may be some folks out there for whom that rings a bell. For the rest of the crowd, he was one of the pioneers of the early Internet.

In 1969, Mr. Walden was part of a small team of talented young engineers whose mission was to build the Interface Message Processor. Its function was to switch data among computers linked to the nascent Arpanet, the precursor to the internet. The first I.M.P. was installed that year at the University of California, Los Angeles. The I.M.P.s would be crucial to the internet until the Arpanet was decommissioned in 1989.
Mr. Walden was the first computer programmer to work with the team. “The I.M.P. guys,” as they came to call themselves, developed the computer in nine frenetic months under a contract secured by Bolt Beranek and Newman (now Raytheon BBN), a technology company in Cambridge, Mass.
The I.M.P.s served as translators between mainframe computers at different locations and the network itself. Each I.M.P. translated what came over the network into the particular language of that location’s main computer. The translation work of the I.M.P. evolved into today’s network routers.
The work of Mr. Walden and his colleagues was unprecedented. “They had no models to draw on,” said Marc Weber, a curatorial director at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “They were creating out of whole cloth a new class of machine.”
He added, “They took a very new idea at the time and turned it into a living, breathing, working machine with its own software and protocols that became an essential component of the network that grew to connect all of us.”

Noted: the NYT obit is by Katie Hafner. Her book with Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet (affiliate link) covers this and lots of other early Internet history, and I enthusiastically recommend it.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Kailia Posey, who was on “Toddlers & Tiaras” as a child. She was 16 years old, and according to her family, died by suicide.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Posted in Geek, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Things I was going to do, but decided against.

Saturday, April 9th, 2022

I was going to blog that NYT article about Russian soldiers in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, with some snarky commentary about how “We told them not to do it, that it was dangerous, but they ignored us” sounds like some places I’ve worked.

Then I went searching for an image to insert, and instead found this:

Which is why I’m not linking the article, and linking Nuclear Katie instead.

Posted in Geek, History, Media | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 24, 2022.

Thursday, March 24th, 2022

Madeleine Albright. WP.

Victor Fazio (D-California).

Mr. Fazio represented the Sacramento area from 1979 to 1999. As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, he helped bring home funding for numerous projects, including a multimillion-dollar environmental institute at the University of California, Davis. He also lobbied for the funds to protect 3,700 acres of wetlands west of Sacramento as a refuge; dedicated by President Bill Clinton in 1997, it is known as the Vic Fazio Yolo Wildlife Area.

John Roach.

He was instrumental in prodding Tandy to venture into the computer market. At the time, most small computers were sold as kits to be assembled by hobbyists, but Mr. Roach believed that consumers would welcome a model that they just needed to plug in.
His team presented the original TRS-80 prototype — cobbled together from a black-and-white RCA monitor, a keyboard and a videocassette recorder — to Tandy’s chief executive, Charles Tandy, and to Lewis Kornfeld, the president of RadioShack, in January 1977.
The Apple 1 had been introduced the year before, and Commodore and other companies were marketing their own home computers, but the TRS-80 (the initials stood for Tandy RadioShack) quickly became, for a time, the most popular computer on the market.

…

“We were finally able to ship some machines in September and shipped 5,000 that year, all we could assemble,” Mr. Roach said. “Our competitors shipped none.”
At just under $600 (about $2,700 in today’s dollars), the computer was relatively cheap (it was $399 if connected to a separately owned viewing screen). It was available in all 8,000 of the company’s stores.

Posted in Geek, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Happy Pi Day!

Monday, March 14th, 2022

This is the third year I haven’t been able to celebrate as I’d like to. Perhaps next year.

But in the meantime, please enjoy the day responsibly.

Posted in Geek | 2 Comments »

Tweets of the day.

Thursday, March 3rd, 2022

I have to ask you to trust me: this Dan Hon thread gets funnier and funnier to me as it rolls along, but I don’t want to spoil his best punch lines.

Also:

On the flip side, interesting thread from eigenrobot on the Cape Town Convention and seizures of Russian commercial aircraft:

Useful phrases in Russian. Use them at work when discussing projects.

Posted in Geek | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 1, 2022.

Tuesday, March 1st, 2022

David Boggs, co-inventor (with Bob Metcalfe) of Ethernet.

“He was the perfect partner for me,” Mr. Metcalfe said in an interview. “I was more of a concept artist, and he was a build-the-hardware-in-the-back-room engineer.”

Ned Eisenberg, actor. THR. He was a regular on “Law and Order: SVU”. Other credits include “Million Dollar Baby”, “Flags of Our Fathers”, and guest shots on “The Equalizer” (original recipe) and “Miami Vice”.

Posted in Geek, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

I like bagels.

Sunday, February 13th, 2022

Shot:

Chaser:

Posted in Geek, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 28, 2022.

Friday, January 28th, 2022

Dr. Johan Hultin. He was 97.

Back in 1950, Dr. Hultin, a pathologist, was having lunch with William Hale, a microbiologist. As the conversation often does, it turned to the 1918 flu pandemic.

Dr. Hale mentioned that there was just one way to figure out what caused the 1918 pandemic: finding victims buried in permafrost and isolating the virus from lungs that might be still frozen and preserved.
Dr. Hultin, a medical student in Sweden who was spending six months at the university, immediately realized that he was uniquely positioned to do just that. The previous summer, he and his first wife, Gunvor, spent weeks assisting a German paleontologist, Otto Geist, on a dig in Alaska. Dr. Geist could help him find villages in areas of permafrost that also had good records of deaths from the 1918 flu.

So Dr. Hultin went north to Alaska in 1951.

Three villages seemed like they might have what he wanted, but when he arrived at the first two, the victims’ graves were no longer in permafrost.
The third village on his list, Brevig Mission, was different. The flu had devastated the village, killing 72 out of 80 Inuit residents. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave with a large wooden cross at either end.
When Dr. Hultin arrived and politely explained his mission, the village council agreed to let him dig. Four days later, he saw his first victim.
“She was a little girl, about 6 to 10 years old. She was wearing a dove gray dress, the one she had died in,” he recalled in an interview in the late 1990s. The child’s hair was braided and tied with bright red ribbons. Dr. Hultin called for help from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the group eventually found four more bodies.
They stopped digging. “We had enough,” Dr. Hultin said.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) Dr. Hultin wasn’t able to culture virus from the samples he collected at the time. But in 1997:

…sitting by a pool on vacation with his wife in Costa Rica, he noticed a paper published in Science by Dr. Jeffery K. Taubenberger, now chief of the viral pathogenesis and evolution section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
It reported a remarkable discovery. Dr. Taubenberger had searched a federal repository of pathology samples dating to the 1860s and found fragments of the 1918 virus in snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers who had died in that pandemic. The tissue had been removed at autopsy, wrapped in paraffin and stored in the warehouse.

Dr. Hultin got in touch with Dr. Taubenberger.

“I can’t go this week, but maybe I can go next week,” he told Dr. Taubenberger.

He went back and recovered more samples.

Dr. Taubenberger got all of the packages. The lung tissue from the Brevig woman was invaluable, he said, because the snippets of lung from the soldiers had so little virus that, with the technology at the time, the effort to get the complete viral sequence would have been delayed by at least a decade.
Using the tissue Dr. Hultin provided, Dr. Taubenberger’s group published a paper that provided the genetic sequence of a crucial gene, hemagglutinin, which the virus had used to enter cells. The group subsequently used that tissue to determine the complete sequence of all eight of the virus’s genes.

One of the things that truly impresses me about this story (besides the scientific angle) is Dr. Hultin’s interactions with the villagers of Brevig Mission. They let him dig up the graves and take samples: and they let him do this because he treated the bodies with honor and respect.

After closing the grave, he made two wooden crosses to replace the original ones, which had rotted. Later, he had two brass plaques made with the names of the Brevig flu victims, which had been recorded, and returned to the village to attach them to the new crosses flanking the grave.

Posted in Geek, Obits | 1 Comment »

Rules of the Gunfight.

Tuesday, January 11th, 2022

I did some training this past weekend at the KR Training facility. (KR Training, official firearms trainer of Whipped Cream Difficulties.)

Before I talk about this, I feel like I need to address an elephant in the room. It seems like there are two schools of thought in the gun blogging community:

  1. “Why aren’t you running out every weekend and traveling 500 miles, and then 500 more, to attend tactical operator fantasy camp where you learn how to operate tactically in operations using tactics? Aren’t you serious about this stuff? Don’t you have a job that lets you travel and pay thousands of dollars multiple times a month to take training courses?”
  2. “Fark you, I don’t have the time or the money to travel every weekend and play pretend ninja with my gun writer buddies. I have a job that doesn’t involve shooting guns or people, a family to take care of, and I don’t get free training classes because I’m a gunwriter.”

I hate to be lukewarm, but I totally get both sides of this issue. Training is good. Training is fun. I should do more of it. But I don’t have time or money to train every weekend, so I pick my opportunities carefully.

I’m lucky in that KR Training’s facilities are just a little over an hour away from my house (an hour and a half if I stop at Buc-ee’s on the way). I’m also lucky in that KR Training concentrates almost entirely on practical training for private citizens. (I do not get free training from KR Training, even though they are the official trainer of WCD. I would not accept free training if it was offered: I insist on paying real American money for their services. They do not accept Bitcoin or Dogecoin yet, as far as I know.)

In this case, KR Training was offering two classes from John Hearne. Yes, they were a little expensive. But I decided to treat this as a personal indulgence. I’ve heard Karl talk about Mr. Hearne’s presentations at the Rangemaster conferences, and figured this was worth taking a flyer on.

(These two classes were the second and third I have taken in roughly a month, so you can throw stones at me now. However, the first class was Red Cross First Aid/CPR/AED certification: also through KR Training because that was convenient, but you can pretty much do that anywhere these days. And you should, in my ever so humble opinion.)

tl,dr: If John Hearne is teaching near you, go if you can. He’s worth it.

I’m putting in a jump here because this is going to run long. I can feel it.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Endorsements, Geek, Guns, Leadership | 2 Comments »

Tweet of the day.

Wednesday, January 5th, 2022

Explained:

Runner-up:

Posted in Art, Geek | Comments Closed

What we know that isn’t necessarily so…

Friday, December 31st, 2021

Tweet:

Working link.

A lot of this probably isn’t news to people who are as geeky as I am. Some high points:

No good evidence of anything from the Stanford prison ‘experiment’. It was not an experiment; ‘demand characteristics’ and scripting of the abuse; constant experimenter intervention; faked reactions from participants; as Zimbardo concedes, they began with a complete “absence of specific hypotheses”.

No good evidence from the famous Milgram experiments that 65% of people will inflict pain if ordered to. Experiment was riddled with researcher degrees of freedom, going off-script, implausible agreement between very different treatments, and “only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter.”

Evidence for a small marshmallow effect, that ability to delay gratification as a 4 year old predicts educational outcomes at 15 or beyond (Mischel).
After controlling for the socioeconomic status of the child’s family, the Marshmallow effect is r=0.05 or d=0.1 one-tenth of a standard deviation for an additional minute delay, with nonsignificant p-values. And since it’s usually easier to get SES data…

“Expertise attained after 10,000 hours practice” (Gladwell). Disowned by the supposed proponents.

At most extremely weak evidence that psychiatric hospitals (of the 1970s) could not detect sane patients in the absence of deception.

(Previously.)

Posted in Geek | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 27, 2021.

Monday, December 27th, 2021

Man, you take some time off for Christmas, and Death decides to be even busier than usual.

Edward O. Wilson.

As an expert on insects, Dr. Wilson studied the evolution of behavior, exploring how natural selection and other forces could produce something as extraordinarily complex as an ant colony. He then championed this kind of research as a way of making sense of all behavior — including our own.
As part of his campaign, Dr. Wilson wrote a string of books that influenced his fellow scientists while also gaining a broad public audience. “On Human Nature” won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1979; “The Ants,” which Dr. Wilson wrote with his longtime colleague Bert Hölldobler, won him his second Pulitzer in 1991.
Dr. Wilson also became a pioneer in the study of biological diversity, developing a mathematical approach to questions about why different places have different numbers of species. Later in his career, Dr. Wilson became one of the world’s leading voices for the protection of endangered wildlife.

Jean-Marc Vallée. THR. Credits include “Dallas Buyers Club” and the “Big Little Lies” series. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Desmond Tutu, for the historical record.

Sarah Weddington, attorney in the Roe v Wade case. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Wanda Young, of the Marvelettes.

Ms. Young (who was also known as Wanda Rogers) and Gladys Horton shared lead singer duties. “Don’t Mess With Bill,” which rose to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1966, was one of several hits written by Smokey Robinson on which Ms. Young sang lead. (Ms. Horton was the lead singer on “Please Mr. Postman,” “Beechwood 4-5789” and other songs.)

Richard “Demo Dick” Marcinko.

Commander Marcinko climbed the ranks to command Team 6 and wrote a tell-all best seller that cemented the SEALs in pop culture as heroes and bad boys. Though the highly decorated Vietnam veteran led Team 6 for only three years, from 1980 to 1983, he had an outsize influence on the group’s place in military lore.

I’ve read (and thoroughly enjoyed) Rogue Warrior and, believe it or not, Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior and The Real Team: Rogue Warrior (affiliate links). Oddly enough, though, I never met Mr. Marcinko. I say “oddly” because he was actually one of the guests of honor at a convention Lawrence and I went to years back, but I never sought him out. Both of us were busy hanging out with one of the other guests.

Bruce Todd, former Austin mayor.

Todd served two terms as mayor, first elected in June 1991 and retired in June 1997. In his time as mayor, he and the council considered issues such as airport relocation, wilderness preservation and transferring the city-run hospital to Seton. He also helped recruit major employers to the city, like Samsung, AMD and Applied Materials.
He also helped pass the city’s no-smoking law, banning cigars and cigarettes in all restaurants and bars.
Todd also led the effort to get the U.S. Airforce to transfer then-Bergstrom Air Force Base to the city when the base was being decommissioned. He succeeded and also worked to pass a $600 million bond election to transform the base into Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

This is a little old, and has been touched on by other folks, but I did not find a good obit until now: Edward D. Shames.

Mr. Shames’s Easy Company, Second Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division parachuted behind Utah Beach in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. It fought the Germans in France, jumped into the German-occupied Netherlands in Operation Market Garden and held off Hitler’s troops in their prolonged siege of the Belgian town of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.

…

Entering combat as a sergeant with Easy Company, he was among its many paratroopers who found themselves scattered and lost upon hitting the ground behind Utah Beach before dawn on D-Day.
“I landed in a bunch of cows in a barn,” he recalled in a July 2021 interview with the American Veterans Center. “I had no idea where I was.”
He rounded up his men and found a farmhouse. The farmer didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak French, but he took out his maps and, through the farmer’s gestures, found that he was in the town of Carentan, some five miles from a bridge where he was supposed to have touched down. When he got there with his men, he received a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant for his resourcefulness.

Mr. Shames was the last surviving officer of Easy Company.

Posted in Austin, Geek, History, Movies, Obits, Politics | 2 Comments »

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