 |
A Sturm's Eye View, Guaranteed
Free of Harmful, or Potentially Harmful Chemicals -- but Watch Out for the
Ideas! Some of them are Contagious!
A journal of sorts to record Jonathan Sturm's (and others') thoughts and observations on things worth thinking About. Feedback welcome, but be aware that unless you prominently say you want your communication kept private, I may publish it. |
|
|
Tuesday, 17 April 2007
Email to the following once regular readers bounced. If you know their current email address, just let them know The Git has started blogging again and leave it up to them whether they want to inform The Git they want update notifications.
Holden Aust, Brad Austin, Chuck Miller, Stephen Grady, Ward Gerlach, John Kopp, Gordon Jackson. Malcolm Holm, Mike Pepperday, Derick Moore, John O'Brien, Chris Nordmann, Robert Rudzki, David Magda and Gary Sharp.
And while on the topic of email addresses, The Git has problems noticing email addressed to the old Feedback address as much spam is sent there. Hopefully the address as a graphic will keep the current address spam-free for a while.
-oOo-
I have run into 'overclocked harddisks' on consumer (and a few Dell business) computers often enough now that it appears to be a trend in more than a few suppliers -- and something to watch out for.
By 'overclocked' I mean an ATA drive rated for 100 MHz transfer run on a 133 MHz bus. That's a 33% overclocking of the drive databus components. It will for many drives work but means extra heat. It means pushing the margins of correct performance and operating into the danger zone.
Strictly speaking, the faster system's bus is clocked at 66 MHz. As is often the case with "bus rates", especially front-side rates (FSB), the quoted MHz rate is the "equivalent" rate as if transfer were 8-bit wide -- the ATA bus is 16 bit, thus factor x2. If the data bus is 64-bit, as for DDR internal memory sticks, then the effective multiplier is x8 on the basic clock (hence 50 MHz --> DDR 400, and 66 MHz --> DDR 533). More complex multipliers to CPU clocking are possible to better adapt processor and cache bus rate to used memory FSB.
Out of a fairly random sample of well-used tower to desktop machines sold during the past five years or so, as many as half ran ATA/133 bus but had ATA/100 drives installed already by OEM/vendor. Others had ATA/100 drives installed after sale. Several had mixed-rating complement of drives.
An overclocked drive can mean odd problems and needless drive failure. Initial intermittent low-level errors are rarely reported in any visible way to the user -- not, that is, until the errors lead to non-recoverable failure of one kind or another. The most common user observation is just that performance seems sluggish at times.
-oOo-
The Git forgot to mention in the last episode that it was his birthday the day before the last posting. He is now 56 years old and the proud possessor of a pair of quite decent field binoculars for bird-watching.
-oOo-
The Greenhouse:
After 25 years of increasingly late tomato harvests, The Git finally got around to building a greenhouse. The frame consists of recycled two inch pvc irrigation pipe and treated pine. The polythene greenhouse film is held in place with recycled half inch pvc irrigation pipe using screws. It has worked well, producing copious quantities of tomatoes, cucumbers, egg plants and capsicums. The key to greenhouses is ventilation. You will see two doors in the picture above. One is purely for ventilation and can't be used for getting in and out of the greenhouse -- it's filled with bird netting to prevent the starlings and blackbirds from eating the crops. Its area is equal to 20% of the floor area.
Since the greenhouse can get very hot, there's another ventilator at the opposite end of the greenhouse.
| Capsicums |  |
Tomatoes |  |
And here's an aerial view of The House of Steel
-oOo-
Ray Sutton writes:
Hello, Jonathan...
At the risk of being a damned pest, another email for you.
I'm a high school dropout, not any kind of authority, but over the years, I've thought and wondered and puzzled over these topics myself. The scientific explanations, as mentioned in your most recent posts, seem rather inadequate or even contradictory at times, depending on the context.
Particles, of course, can create waves, as with electrons creating an electrical current. But electrons have also been described as a 'wave effect' around a nucleus, rather than as miniature planets around a miniature 'sun'. That prompts a lot of "what ifs".
What if, for example, the physical universe consists of an endless continuum of objects or 'particles' ranging in size from smaller to larger, with us, the observers, stuck somewhere along that range? The old 'worlds within worlds' theory, sort of. The thing that makes that idea attractive to me is the thought that we can't combine a number of 'nothings' into a 'something' - it takes something to make something. So it must take something to make those subatomic particles, just as it takes atoms to make molecules, or solar systems to make galaxies.
Am I "onto something" or "out to lunch" ?
Enjoy your day,
Ray.
The problem is that the "something" of which the "particles" or "waves" is not "something" that we observe. What we observe is our instrument(s) from which we deduce, or infer the existence of "somethings" we refer to as electrons, neutrons, protons etc. Here's a picture of the sort The Git used to pore over as a university physics student.
The straight tracks represent uncharged particles, the curved ones charged particles due to the presence of a magnetic field. What we are observing are the vapour trails left by the particles, not the particles themselves. Physicists have discovered a veritable zoo of "fundamental particles". It is a field rich for philosophers and physicists hoping to make sense of it all. Meanwhile, fundamental assumptions become undermined by fresh discoveries, such as the discovery of fractionally charge electrons. Perhaps The Git will get to discussing such at a later time.
Meanwhile, to answer your question: "Am I "onto something" or "out to lunch" ? Well, two questions come into The Git's mind:
Does it matter?
Who's the best judge of that? You or The Git? :-)
Marcus Chown's book "The Universe Next Door: The Making of Tomorrow's Science", a book The Git highly recommends if you are interested in speculative physics.
Immortality in an alternate quantum reality? Black holes that give birth to new universes? Galactic regions where time runs backward? Mere fiction simply cannot keep up with the wild rush of contemporary science. And no writer makes it easier for general readers to come along for the dizzying ride than Chown, cosmology consultant for New Scientist. Whether assessing the latest evidence for comet-borne life or probing the implications of 10-dimensional models for space, Chown frees readers from the technical rigors of theorizing but ceaselessly challenges us to enlarge our imaginative horizons. The galaxy itself cannot contain ideas that open up onto a multiuniverse of cosmic possibilities, including invisible mirror planets and cosmic laboratories for detonating new big bangs. To be sure, Chown ventures far beyond what scientists have actually proved, delving deep into what they only wildly conjecture. But even the wildest of speculations (that, for instance, each atom is a miniature time machine) show us how brilliant scientists grapple with fundamental questions. Many of these theoretical forays will eventually be exposed as fantasies. But others are bound to revolutionize the way scientists--and ordinary humans--view our cosmos and our place in it. For sheer intellectual exhilaration, few books offer more. Bryce Christensen
-oOo-
The Git has spent much of the last few months reading medieval history. He's mainly interested in medieval natural philosophy, but you really need to read a lot of stuff to get to what is of marginal interest to most historians: natural philosophy.
My studies in the Christian faith quickly led me into medieval philosophy, of which I had read scarcely any after St Augustine (I am referring to the texts themselves--I had read the usual accounts in histories of philosophy) and I found its richness, wide-rangingness and 'modernity' a revelation. So much of it anticipated developments which I had supposed began later. In fact, I now realized, I had scarcely thought of medieval philosophers as philosophers at all, but rather as apologists and propagandists for the Christian religion. However, a great deal of medieval philosophy was not about religion at all, but about logic, conceptual analysis, psychology, mechanics, and a whole range of other topics. The chief reason for its present neglect is that so much of the science- oriented part of it, and also the technical logic, has been overtaken by subsequent developments; but a lot of it was first-rate thinking out of which those developments naturally grew. And some of the metaphysics I found deep in a way that may have been associated in the minds of its authors with their religious beliefs but was not, on analysis, logically dependent on those beliefs.
Bryan Magee (from Confessions of a Philosopher, 1997)
-oOo-
From Pascal Regis:
Whispers from the Offing -- A Tribute to Kevin Coyne
Featuring:
Nigel Burch
Big Mehr and friend
Razz
Goldfish
Dog Latin
Nikki Sudden
Kevin Hewick
Alternative TV
Véronique Acoustique
Grae J. Wall
Jowe Head
Pascal Régis
Leo O'Kelly
Frank Bangay and almost real
Chris Connelly
Heinz Rudolf Kunze
The Otters (ft. Mark Astronaut)
Dave Russell
Joey Stack
Clive Product
Stumble On The Valves
Jackie Leven
+ downlodable bonus tracks: Jon Langford and Sally Timms (Mekons)
Order (£10 including port) : http://lifeandliving.net/whispers
All income from the sale of this disc go to Life and Living and their work with psychiatric service users at the Maudsley hospital.
-oOo-
The Git has a rather fine collection of vinyl records, mainly from the 1970s, and he has been converting them to digital format. Why would he bother doing that? Many of these recordings have not been released on CD, or weren't when The Git transcribed them. Quite often, when one of these old recordings is released on CD, it has been remastered and all too often remastered horribly. Some, like Electronique Guerilla's first album, are quite expensive to purchase on CD. Here is how the transcription process works from a very Gittish point of view.
First, you need a turntable. The Git's old Jim Sugden turntable died some time ago, so it was replaced by the serviceable and far from expensive modern equivalent from Pro-Ject. It came with a carbon fibre tone arm and Ortofon OM-5 cartridge, though The Git had the supplier replace the latter with his Audio Technica moving coil cartridge. This may have been a mistake. When it came time to replace the worn stylus, the cartridge needed to be removed and sent away for the stylus to be replaced. Since there was a backlog of disks to be transcribed, The Git researched which reasonable quality cartridge to purchase as an inexpensive replacement. It turned out that the Ortofon was much more than good enough and remarkably inexpensive.
Next you need to get the signal from the turntable into your computer. Vinyl records were made with a limited bass signal and a high level of higher frequencies. Restoring the signal to a flat frequency response (RIAA compensation) can be performed by your recording software, but it's not generally recommended. The Git purchased a Pro-Ject pre-amplifier that can accept either moving magnet, or moving coil input. There are cheaper and higher quality versions and The Git chose the former. The results are more than good enough for his old ears. Unlike the ears of some of his friends, they have not been severely damaged by Neil Young concerts so the chances are good you don't need to shell out the extra dollars. It's your call.
Few people appreciate that moving a stylus around in a wiggly vinyl groove generates some remarkably high forces. It softens the vinyl sufficiently for each play to create permanent distortion in the form of increased high frequency content even at very low tracking forces. Any particle of dust caught between the record and the stylus creates major permanent damage at that point and results in a click, or pop. So, cleaning the record before transcription is very important. The Git's budget doesn't stretch to a vacuum cleaning system. First, he rinses the record thoroughly before very gently scrubbing the record with a very soft old toothbrush dipped in dilute non-ionic detergent. The idea here isn't to reach into the grooves with the bristles, but to have them flicking about on the high points of the vinyl, hopefully generating turbulent suds to swish any gritty particles out of the grooves. Since the results are extremely gratifying sonically, The Git assumes that what he is doing is much better than doing nothing, or merely brushing the record with a carbon fibre brush. Some pundits will be horrified, but The Git expects that he won't be playing these records again any time soon. Finally, the record is thoroughly rinsed in clean water. You may need to use distilled, or deionised water. The Git's water supply leaves no visible residue.
Very stubborn, waxy residues on records require the addition of a small amount of methylated spirit to the detergent solution. It's likely that this will also remove some of the vinyl plasticiser that keeps the vinyl flexible, so it's probably a good idea not to use this unless strictly necessary.
The Git has a couple of document racks to hold the records while any excess water evaporates. The bulk of the water is removed by dabbing with a clean cotton handkerchief that has seen better days.
The Git was hoping to use his Mac to do some recording, but the software accompanying the iMic USB sound adaptor, Final Vinyl, produced weird results. When opening the resultant WAV file on his PC for editing, he discovered that the sound was mono, rather than stereo and half-speed. As well, the recording level controls were far too small and fiddly to use. The Git has been using Goldwave for sound recording on his PC for several years now. The supplier has been true to his word and never charged for upgrades. The Git has had no problem creating and modifying sound files using Goldwave, though he has on occasion evaluated other software.
If you are old enough to have recorded copies of vinyl records to audio cassette, or reel-to-reel tape, you will remember having to keep the recording level high enough to keep tape noise to a minimum, yet not to saturate the tape. An occasional excursion of signal level into the non-linear area of tape response might pass unnoticed, but overloading a digital recording creates awful sounds that can be ignored by no-one. There is no significant noise floor you are trying to keep the recorded signal above in a digital recording, so there's no pressing need to keep the signal peaks as high as possible. A recording that's a bit too "quiet" can have its volume increased after it's recorded.
The recording leaves you with a 30-50 minute long sound file that needs some treatment before it's ready for commitment to CD, or other format. First, the beginning of the file needs to be snipped where the stylus was placed in the run-in groove. A cue is then placed at the beginning of the file with the name of the first track. The name can be anything you like, but if you are going to be storing the files to be read by a computer, the song title is a good idea. If the results are to be stored as an audio CD, it can be any arbitrary string as the software can automatically number the tracks in sequence. For example, The Git labelled the cue point of the first track of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme "Acknowledgement" (without the quotes). Each section is demarked by labelled cue points, the middle portion when the record was turned over snipped as well as the end of the sound file. When all this is done, the software is instructed to split the file at the cue points into separately labelled files, one for each track. Using the previous example, the first track of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme became "01 Acknowledgement.wav".
Having created the separate wave files, they could then be used by Nero Burning ROM (for example) to directly create an audio CD. Chances are though that the sound needs some titivating first. It's worth bearing in mind that you have by now invested more time than the time it took to play the record. You are a little over a third to halfway to the end of the process. Before manipulating the sound files, you should consider storing them in their current form. If you later decide to re-titivate the files, you don't want to go all the way back to the beginning of the process. Windows WAV files contain a considerable amount of redundant information, so they can be compressed to save on storage space. Instead of PKZIP, or your other favourite file compressor, you can use either Monkey's Audio, or FLAC so that you can play the resultant sound file with suitable plug-ins. The Git will have more to say about audio compression later in this piece.
The main distortions in the recording that we can do something about are:
Pops and clicks are caused by major groove damage. Fortunately, the waveform of pops and clicks are distinctive and the software is capable of analysing the recording and either removing them completely, or diminishing them to a level where they are no longer a distraction. You decide the responsiveness of the software to the pops and clicks, either accepting the default, or changing the sensitivity. The more vigorous your declicking and depopping, the more you affect the overall music quality. The Git usually goes with the default setting in Goldwave as it is not over-zealous in its effect. Any major clicks, he removes manually before the automatic process.
To remove a click manually requires zooming in on the offending portion of the signal. A segment of the signal immediately adjacent to the click is copied to the clipboard, then pasted over the click. Obtaining a satisfactory result requires a little practice and occasionally, a final tweak of the signal. The signal trace can be moved by pointing at it with the mouse cursor and holding down the left mouse button. Practice makes perfect here.
The Git only decrackles an occasional recording, such as Little Stevie Wonder's The 12 Year Old Genius. Yes, The Git is that old ;-) Decrackling has even more of an effect on the wanted music than declicking/depopping. Removing tape hiss more damaging still to the underlying sound. However, it is up to you how much cleaning up of your recordings is needed.
Once you have your finished files, its time to play them. Of course you can play them as-is, but WAV files are somewhat bulkier than they need be. When playing them on the computer, it makes more sense to compress them so that they consume less disk space. There are two sorts of compression: lossy and lossless. There would be few who have not heard about lossy compression CODECs for music. While there are several sorts, the most common is MP3. Unfortunately, this entails removing some of the "unnecessary" musical information in order to make the file size smaller. This is fine on a low-fidelity playback system, but it degrades the music noticeably on a hi-fi even if you lack Golden Ears.
Lossless compression, on the other hand loses no musical information. A player with the appropriate CODEC will play the compressed file with no loss in fidelity. There are two such CODECs that The Git knows of: Monkey's Audio and FLAC. Monkey's Audio is Windows only while FLAC is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux. Here's a comparison of file sizes using John and Beverley Martyn's song, Primrose Hill:
| Original WAV file | 31,089 KB |
| FLAC (level 7) | 16,930 KB |
| Monkey's Audio (extra high) | 16,581 KB |
| MP3 (320 Kbps) | 7,053 KB |
Monkey's Audio and FLAC have varying levels of compression, with the higher rates taking longer to compress files than the lower rates. In each instance for the comparison, The Git chose the second highest as a compromise between time and space-saving. The highest level takes a fair while longer, especially when compressing multiple files, for a diminished rate of space saving. The MP3 is the highest quality lossy compression available and shows dramatically greater space saving, albeit at a noticeable loss of fidelity. dBPoweramp Music Converter is the "Swiss Army Knife" of file converters for the audio enthusiast allowing conversion between a large number of different file formats.
The Git is storing his sound files on a USB external hard disk connected to a Core-Solo Toshiba notebook purchased specifically for playing music. The internal sound card leaves somewhat to be desired in quality of output. The iMic external USB sound adapter, originally purchased for recording on the Mac Mini, also has a very low output requiring the power amplifier gain control to be advanced near to its maximum. A Soundblaster external USB sound adapter has been on order for some weeks now, but has failed to make an appearance yet.
For playing the sound files, The Git is using a minimalist application called Foobar. Foobar has replay gain support, but more than 6dB of gain causes distortion in the iMic. Hopefully, the output of the Soundblaster will be higher. Foobar beats any other sound player The Git has used into a cocked hat for simplicity and power. There should be more applications written so well. Using random track play of the whole music collection is a bit like having a radio station devoted to your musical tastes. Using random album play brings back memories of another life when The Git was a DJ who often played whole album sides.
Burning CDs from your audio files requires you to make a change in the burn settings. Nero and most other CD burning software automatically places a few seconds of silence between tracks. You will either need to turn that off, or eliminate your recorded silence from the audio files. Live recordings just run on produce unexpected silences between the songs if you don't remember to change the burn setting.
The Git can notify you by email when a new post is ready. Just email him to be put on the list, or removed if you are on the list and don't want to be. Apologies for the old email address becoming so swamped with spam that it became impossible to monitor adequately.
Thoughts for the week year:
The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study. -- Georg Hegel
-oOo-
Those who invalidate reason, ought seriously to consider, whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle, that they are laboring to dethrone, but if they argue without reason, (which, in order to be consistent with themselves, they must do) they are out of the reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument. -- Ethan Allen
-oOo-
In order to be understood some things, which are not self-evident, call for good will, without which understanding is not achieved. Therefore intelligence is not in itself enough for understanding: one must want to understand, and try, and be willing to sustain the effort. If one starts out being distrustful, guarded, critical, one often actively prevents oneself from understanding. I am not advocating an uncritical approach, I am drawing a necessary distinction between two stages: a person needs first to have a good grasp of something before he can criticize it intelligently and effectively; understanding has got to come before criticism.... For the most part philosophy is about different possible ways of looking at things. An original philosopher is saying to us, in effect, "You will find you understand things better if you look at them this way." First should come all the processes of intellectual empathy, shared vision, imaginative insight, and "as-if" looking outwards from that particular standpoint. Only then should we resort to analysis. -- Bryan Magee
Current Listening:
Slapp Happy -- Casablanca Moon
Electronique Guerilla -- Electronique Guerilla
Baaba Maal & Mansour Seck -- Djam Leeli
Home | Previous | Next | Old Ephemerides |Site Map |Top
| www.sturmsoft.com/Writing/current.htm | Use this, or the home page when suggesting people visit this site. This is where I put important notices as I feel they are needed. |
| www.sturmsoft.com/Writing/diatribe.htm | Like the old redirector but with no delay. This is for regular readers of The Daily Diatribe. |
Check out:
Franklin & Friends, a website devoted to the village where the author lives: its culture, inhabitants, and more.
The DayNotes Gang for more daily musings on Life, the Universe and Things Computerish.
© Jonathan Sturm 2007
