I’m in the middle of ripping my cassette collection to MP3, and using Audacity to clean up the recordings, split them into individual tracks, and so forth.
One thing I’ve learned is that displaying a track as “Spectrum” rather than the default “Waveform” can be very useful in figuring out where one track ends and the next one starts, especially when the first track fades out and the next one fades in.
Here’s a perfect example I just ran across: Read More
I’ve often been struck by how much French humor relies on puns and wordplay. I suspect that this has to do with how easy it is to make puns in French vs. English. For instance, every time I pass the canned foods aisle at the grocery store, I think of how “ravioli” in French is a near-homonym for “delighted in bed”. And I just ran across the song “Aux sombres héros de l’amer”, meaning “To the dark heroes of bitterness”; but as TehPedia points out, this can also be heard as “O Sombrero of the Sea”.
Courtesy of FSTDT and the Internet Archive Wayback Machine comes 2007rapture.com, by Shelby Corbitt.
Back on Aug. 29, 2004, his site said:
The rapture of the church (God’s children) willl happen JULY 2007.
By Nov. 30, 2004, he had added the only copyright notice he’d need:
©
2004-2007 2007Rapture.com. All Rights Reserved.
By Dec. 6, 2005, however, the Word of God™ had become fuzzier:
The rapture of the church (God’s children) will happen during the SUMMER OF 2007. This could be anytime from June 21-September 21.
(emphasis in the original)
As of Jun. 29, 2007, he had a huge header reading:
THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH IS GOING TO HAPPEN DURING THE SUMMER, THIS YEAR
(JUNE 21-SEPTEMBER 21) 2007!!
To his credit, the site now says:
I SAID :
THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH IS GOING TO HAPPEN, THIS YEAR
2007!!
I WAS WRONG!!!
I THOUGHT THIS WAS A WARNING FROM GOD TO THE WORLD
Meanwhile, Yisrayl Hawkins (formerly Buffalo Bill Hawkins) doesn’t seem to have noticed that the world didn’t end on or about Oct. 13, 2007. Oh, well.
What with the new year, I’ve changed the name of this weblog from “Ooblog” to “Epsilon Clue”, which I like better.
All of the URLs, RSS feeds, and so on should stay the same, so no need to update your bookmarks.
Update, Mar. 25, 2008: In case anyone’s wondering, the name comes from this comment at The Daily WTF:
The designer must have had some clue about Web authoring, as he clearly understood complex Javascript, PHP etc. I can’t comprehend how anyone with even epsilon clue could engineer a pile of crap like this.
I thought I was being satirical when I wrote this post, justifying belief in Santa Claus in the same way that, as I see it, sophisticated believers justify belief in God. But then I realized that my post was already written 110 years ago, in the famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” editorial.
Here are the first two paragraphs of the editorial’s reply to Virginia. Try substituting “God” for “Santa Claus”, and count how many arguments still make sense, and how many are routinely used
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
I admit that I’ve been Poed. I don’t see any significant difference between my parody and this apparently sincere bit of Santapologetics.
Felix Leiter has appeared in 9 of the 20-some Bond movies. But he always looks different (except for Live and Let Die and License to Kill). He’s usually white, but was once black. Not only that, but in License to Kill, one of his legs was bitten off by a shark, but it was whole again in Casino Royale.
There is only one possible explanation: clearly the man is a Time Lord.
Over at External Delivery the Future, Lacie Cuskin is pushing an idea called “External Delivery”, that Christmas presents are delivered by an intelligent agent of some sort. Although ED proponents are careful never to name the agent in question, it should be obvious to the meanest intellect that ED is merely Santa Clausism in a business suit, to make it seem sensible and avoid playground teasing.
Yet radical asantaists who deny the existence of Santa Claus in such vitriolic screeds as The Santa Claus Fantasy, Unwrapping the Gift, and Santa Claus Is Not Jolly, also miss the boat, by addressing a naïve conception of Santa Claus.
Yes, parentism appears to be true as far as it goes. The evidence, from analysis of gift tags to wrapping stations at shopping malls, is too overwhelming. If we could place a video camera by the tree on Christmas Eve, it would not record anything, and certainly not an overweight man with a bag of toys. Satellite photography shows no signs of a workshop at the north pole, and NORAD’s Santa Tracking Station is a known fraud. There is no literal Grinch and no coal in anyone’s stocking. But reflective santaists believe that such a caricature of Christmas tradition is ontologically unsupportable, and it is unfair to lump all those who believe in Santa in with the first-graders.
According to the wealth of dense, scholarly, and unpopular literature on the subject, the true nature of Santa Claus is not something as crude as a jolly old elf, nor even as an entity separate from one’s parents. It would be more accurate to say that Santa Claus is the spirit of giving, who reveals himself most clearly in acts of gift-giving around the northern winter solstice.
Militant asantaists may object that there is no evidence that Santa gives gifts to parents to deliver to children. This is the Santaist Parentist (SP) position, and while we cannot exclude such an interpretation a priori, it is not necessary to a proper appreciation of Santa.
It is as good or better to give than to receive, and such generosity is in itself a gift. Thus Santa is at once the gift given, the gift received, and the spirit of giving. These three parts are distinct, yet inseparable from each other, sharing a common essence. Those who clamor for “evidence” for Santa Claus are on a fool’s quest, for Santa is not a material being, and no such evidence can exist which would satisfy the hard-core asantaist. There is no point pointing at studies showing that letters to Santa are answered at a rate no better than chance. When I write a letter to Santa, it is not a request for a particular gift—though it may take that form—but rather communion with the spirit of giving, and gifts, and Christmas.
A proper understanding of the true nature of Santa leads to a deeper and richer understanding of Christmas stories such as Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and classic TV specials like Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. No one seriously believes that these stories are anything but Santa-inspired multi-layered allegories told in a manner understandable by children. And when I give someone a gift, the experience is much more rewarding with the understanding that while I was the one who picked, bought, and wrapped the gift, I was nonetheless moved by the spirit of Santa Claus in accordance with his wishes for his grand Christmas design.
(Update, Dec. 29, 2007: Turns out I wasn’t kidding.)
In Pinker’s How the Mind Works, there’s a brief passage on artifacts (pp. 327-329 in my copy) that caught my eye because of its connection with creationism.
Artifacts come with being human. We make tools, and as we evolved our tools made us. One-year-old babies are fascinated by what objects can do for them. They tinker obsessively with sticks for pushing, cloth and strings for pulling, and supports for holding things up. As soon as they can be tested on tool use, around eighteen months, children show an understanding that tools have to contact their material and that a tool’s rigidity and shape are more important than its color or ornamentation. Some patients with brain damage cannot name natural objects but can name artifacts, or vice versa, suggesting that artifacts and natural kinds might even be stored in different ways in the brain.
References:
- Brown, A.L. 1990. Domain-specific-principles affect learning and transfer in children. Cognitive Science, 14, 107-133.
- Hillis, A.E., & Caramazza, A. 1991. Category-specific naming and comprehension impairment: A double dissociation. Brain, 114, 2081-2094.
- Farah, M.J., 1990. Visual agnosia. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
(Emphasis added, and list of references expanded from endnotes and
bibliography.)
This seems to me to have a direct bearing on creationist arguments like William Dembski’s Mount Rushmore example:
Designed objects like Mount Rushmore exhibit characteristic features or patterns that point to an intelligence. Such features or patterns constitute signs of intelligence. Proponents of intelligent design, known as design theorists, purport to study such signs formally, rigorously, and scientifically. Intelligent design may therefore be defined as the science that studies signs of intelligence.
It’s December, which means it’s time for the annual War on Christmas™, in which the latest volley was fired by Albert Mohler in a column about a comment of Richard Dawkins’s in which he said that he intends to celebrate Christmas like any normal Englishman who happens to like decorated trees and getting together with friends and family.
We can only wonder which Christmas carols are Richard Dawkins’ favorites. The sight of an avowed atheist joining in the Christmas chorus is a bit hard to imagine. At the same time, there is something comforting about the idea that even the world’s most famous atheist will move his lips to the songs that celebrate Christ’s birth.
Mohler’s obviously limited imagination must be challenged all the time by people mouthing words that they know to be untrue or impossible, like carolers singing Frosty the Snowman, performers in Wagnerian operas full of Germanic gods, or Dana Perino defending Dubya’s latest blunder.
But let’s take a look at what Christmas is today, and how it got to be that way.
I keep thinking off and on about writing a program to apply evo-devo to musical composition (part 2 ). There are tons of problems to solve, of course, but I may have made some progress.