Re: Pi Forums

This is to about 6 people. Many thanks for your efforts on my behalf and your replies. I'm feeling rather weary as I haven't had my after lunch nap and will be getting ready for bed after this. I'll read your replies more carefully tomorrow and hope to get the RPi connected up again. It's not easy as SWMBO gets very concerned when she sees me doing anything that requires mental or physical effort, so I try to do it very early in the morning. (I had a slight stroke recently.)

I'm a bit of a nit-picker, so I like John's comment about the spelling of "complement".

Frank

I can never aspire to be as good a writer as Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, W. C. Fields or any number of worthy gentlefolk who despised spellling. Although the actual provenance of the genre of quotes that contain the meme "I have nothing but contempt for anyone who can spell a word only one way" is unknown, I take it as a truism. At best it demonstrates a lack of imagination.  I do believe that it is a skill [?] which will go the way of the buggywhip industry as spell checkers continue to encompass an ever increasing share of the written word.

Just two little points I'll address there, extracted from your post in reverse order to reflect their dependency:

Jonathan Garrish wrote:

 

There was a time before colour TV when motoring enthusiasts might expect to stop at the roadside to e.g. reseat a leaky exhaust valve with a smear of oil and a bit of roadside grit, or toss a handful of Fuller's earth into their clutch bell housing so as to get  up a steep hill. That period has long gone in the automotive world, but in computing we're still there, after more than fifty years. It's just not good enough and it's not the fault of the users.

Correct, it's the fault of the entire software development community and industry and academia, who despite the known complexity of the systems before them and in total disregard of the daily evidence that they cannot cope with this complexity in a reliable manner, nevertheless continue like lemmings to create systems through manual programming.

They are doomed to failure, as we have discussed many times before, the latest over in this thread about software engineering.  It's extremely blinkered of us, and an utter waste of humanity's time all around the globe.  To put it bluntly, we are behaving stupid.

Fuzzy logic? Why fake analogue when you can have the real thing?

For the reason of the first paragraph.  We are dealing with systems that are vastly too complex to be handled in an analytic manner (both in size of state space and in algorithmic complexity), by orders of magnitude, and those who attempt to do so (all of us) are deluding themselves that homo sapiens' limited mental ability can grasp the extreme complexity of real systems (beyond trivial ones) and program them without error.   They're not the toy programs that we were taught as examples, but we are behaving as if they were.

In the case of control theory, engineers have at least faced the reality of some systems not being analytic for a variety of reasons, either formally or as a result of their complexity or because of limited knowledge of the domain or because of incomplete data acquisition (some parameters may be hidden).  Faced with this understanding, they developed fuzzy logic as an incremental approach to tame the barely tamable in a piecewise manner that the mind is able to grasp.

It's not perfect, and because of the use of heuristics it's partly guesswork, but it's more in line with the inherent limits of our minds than pretending that we can manage these systems correctly through the analytic/synthetic process of conventional programming.  Politico-socio-economic systems are likewise non-analytic and way beyond our ability to comprehend fully, so fuzzy logic is perhaps the best way of tackling that domain.

Harry Seldon's psychohistory has an analytic solution of course, but we're not there yet.

Morgaine.

PS. Jonathan, thanks also for your good point about the mind manufacturing a wide detailed view for us despite our optical system having high resolution only within a very narrow area.  That's another great example of the mind constructing a mental model for us, and making this virtual reality our "perception".  We don't see actual reality at all --- it would be incomprehensible chaos if we were presented with the inputs directly.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

If you like SciFi, it's a must-read!  Although I'm biased, since I have almost all of his books.

You don't need to be interested in SciFi, Stranger in a Strange Land is a much wider commentary on life in general than the SciFi tag would suggest. Heinlein had a way of doing that while also making a good SciFi story.

Fully paid up member of the biased club here too

John Beetem wrote:

 

That's exactly the problem.  From incorrect premises you can make any conclusion. 

Well said. Of course when the premises almost always come from a value judgement you can do anything you like while feeling smug and satisfied that your conclusion is right and everyone who doesn't agree is a heretic to be burned at the stake

Consider the humble mp3 (and ogg). An ingenious solution to a data rate problem that uses human psychoacoustics to toss out the chaff. Given that now everyone takes broadband and huuuuge data storage as a given, one wonders if it would even be considered as necessary to invent today, because instead we could all be downloading 32bit float wavs (or some proprietary Apple aiff with drm and all the trimmings).

 

The problem is that mp3 encoded material sounds so hideous - human ears and sound processing (even mine which are a bit clapped out) are way more sophisticated than you are giving them credit for. If you get a chance try comparing some mp3 encoded music with a lossless encoding - you don't need expensive speakers - the difference is quite staggering even on my car's bog standard stuff.

Most data processing involves data reduction (eg evidence -> guilty/not guilty) - the hard bit is not throwing out the wheat with the chaff.

(BTW - you might be much better off listening to 32 bit integer wavs because that way you have better resolution at the expense of reduced dynamic range, on the other hand it might not make any difference because the 24 bit resolution you get from 32 bit floating point is better than current ADCs anyway.)

MK

MK

Jonathan Garrish wrote:

 

We demand value (i.e. cheap)

I see two sides to value, one is that it's cheap enough to just throw away. Second is that it's built to last and can be economically repaired if necessary.  Seems that we don't do the second anymore.

That period has long gone in the automotive world,

and in a lot of other areas too. However it puts us in an akward situation. The thing either works, or it doesn't. No way for the user to fix it, or to even see what's gone wrong. You need an 'expert' and they're always expensive. Often the expert can't fix it either and wants to start randomly changing bits...  at your expense

Morgaine talks about complexity and our inability to comprehend the system. Absolutely true, but the same applies to the 'expert' these days too. 

ordinary people who would rather that "stuff just worked", so feel free to disagree with my pov.

I don't disagree, I just don't think that's ever been the goal of the system.

I might disagree on whether stuff just working is a good thing or not. As long as it does work everyone is happy, but it leaves us halfway down a slippery slope, only takes a tiny nudge and there's nothing anyone can do once it starts.

More and more our lives rely on systems that nobody understands and it becomes very easy for a small spanner in the works to make a really big mess of everything.

Don't get me wrong, I like stuff that just works as much as the next person, I'm just not convinced the price we pay for it is really worth it.

Michael Kellett wrote:

 

The problem is that mp3 encoded material sounds so hideous

I find a lot of what's passed off as music these days sounds hideous even when it's not encoded to mp3

Me too - but after it's been mp3-ed it sounds hideous^2.

My other pet hate is excessive use of compression and limiting or even clipping followed by filtering - all done to make things sound louder and thus get attention when played on the radio.

http://bbs.espguitars.com/showthread.php?t=26263

for discussion of that subject but it's got worse since then.

MK

selsinork wrote:

 

I find a lot of what's passed off as music these days sounds hideous even when it's not encoded to mp3

Smily superfluous, it's a widely held view.

Part of the problem is that "music" has to some extent disappeared from pop culture as an independent element.  Instead it has been replaced by a composite of music + video + youth girating suggestively while not wearing much + ruthless professional image making + media as product.

Musicianship hasn't  disappeared to any large extent since bands can still play live perfectly fine, but it has become de-emphasized, and any old atonal screeching and thumping sells well when the other elements of this composite are sufficiently compelling.  Music is hugely subjective so it can be hard to separate out simple personal likes and dislikes from musically barren content, but even so, there's no doubt that there's a lot of atonal screeching and thumping around these days.

For a start, voice used to be a melodious instrument.  In some pop genres, it could now be considered percussion.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Music is hugely subjective so it can be hard to separate out simple personal likes and dislikes from musically barren content,

Very true, but I find it helps when there's something recognisably human singing some words you can understand in some semblance of a tune that doesn't cause you to grimace in pain when you hear it generally helps.

I'm reasonably sure my parents didn't think what I listened to when I was younger was music either, so perhaps I'm just getting old

selsinork wrote:

 

I find it helps when there's something recognisably human singing

Now you're just getting picky!!

selsinork wrote:

 

I find it helps when there's something recognisably human singing

Now you're just getting picky!!

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

Now you're just getting picky!!

I'm remembering the line from MIB3 where Agent J says he had to find out the hard way that all models were aliens.

Oh, and I'm contributing to thread drift

selsinork wrote:

 

Oh, and I'm contributing to thread drift

As long as it's not about Pi forums, anything goes.