![Gene Roddenberry and the cast of Star Trek at the maiden voyage of the space shuttle Enterprise. [1976]
The next time someone suggests Art and Science don’t influence one another, remember this picture.](http://i.imgur.com/nyE2zOi.jpg)
Gene Roddenberry and the cast of Star Trek at the maiden voyage of the space shuttle Enterprise. [1976]
The next time someone suggests Art and Science don’t influence one another, remember this picture.
My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY
VICE PRES. DICK CHENEY
“
| — |
Transcript for Sept. 14 - Meet the Press | NBC News Ten Years Ago Today. |
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
Political orientation appeared to influence the formation of false memories, with conservatives more likely to falsely remember seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran, and liberals more likely to remember George W. Bush vacationing with a baseball celebrity during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
“
| — |
Confirmation Bias. |
This article says we hear good - better than we theoretically should be able to if we hear via a Fourier algorithm (which simply breaks audio into their constituent frequencies). Well we do hear good - really good. When you start getting into audiophile territory, it starts getting really nuts very quickly. I personally stop well shy of believing a speaker cable makes a discernable difference compared with a coat hanger. But fairly well accepted is the thinking we hear phase shifts within each of those frequencies (which is why equalization - adding highs or lows using an EQ - is “bad” and also why multiple drivers with crossovers are sub-optimal, and that’s before you even get to amplifier design).
The article states that via the Fourier algorithm we theoretically shouldn’t be able to hear a small time differential - but hearing a phase shift e.g. if a signal is 180 degrees out of phase, or even 90 degrees out, is much more nuanced than this. Thus: “The actual algorithm employed by our brains is still shrouded in mystery.” No kidding.
I think a moment of introspection by anyone skilled at listening to music would recognize our ability to hear goes well beyond breaking the frequencies down – which is biologically what our ears physically do – but we actually recombine all that to form mental models of the instruments in our head as we’re listening. We don’t just hear sizzle - we hear a closed hi-hat, or a shaker, or a snare rattle - we make sense of it. This is much more akin to the way we perceive through our eyes - we don’t see shapes, we see nameable objects. Consciousness is really at the core of the way we hear / perceive. And this ability, to recognize individual instruments and e.g. write the notation for all the separate instruments in an MP3 that we hear, is well beyond anything a computer can do. Computers can at best score from monophonic sources.
Our hearing is such a gift. It’s beyond anything we could’ve hoped for as a blessing to our lives. Next time you have a chance to listen to leaves on trees blowing (or my wife would suggest “night sounds”) - take a moment to stop, close your eyes, and drink it in. It is truly a miraculous perception we have to experience and take in how hundreds if not thousands of leaf flutters (or little critters) are arrayed in space.
- The Bible (eBook) – “to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.”
- The System of the World by Isaac Newton (eBook) – “to learn that the universe is a knowable place.”
- On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (eBook) – “to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth.”
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (eBook) – “to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos.”
- The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine (eBook) – “to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world.”
- The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (eBook) – “to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself.”
- The Art of War by Sun Tsu (eBook) – “to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art.”
- The Prince by Machiavelli (eBook) – “to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it.”
