Ex-NASA bod on Gwyneth Paltrow site's 'healing' stickers: 'Wow. What a load of BS' Current and former NASA scientists have called bullshit on claims seen on alternative "wellness" wallet-relieving blab-blog Goop, run by former famous actress and current linens-for-rich-ladies slinger Gwyneth Paltrow. The "lifestyle" website – which in the past has advocated adding arbitrary amounts of iodine to your daily …
solved with a glass or two of a single malt.
Fond as I am of the Holy Water of Life as made in [Scotland, Ireland, Wales, England[1], India[2], Japan], I'm rather more into red wine at the moment.
[1] Yes - we have a proper, licensed whisky distillery. The Chapter 14 release from The English Whisky Company[3] is a very, very fine thing.
[2] Strange as it might sound, I had a bottle of Indian Whisky recently and it was rather drinkable. Can't remember the name though.
[3] I have no affiliation with them. I wish I did cos then I might be able to get a discount..
...who brew a rather lovely single malt in Brittany. Apparently after the Roman retreat, a largely empty Brittany was repopulated by celts from Wales, who brought not only their language (which evolved into Breton), but also their distilling skills.
Because it's Friday, and there's no single malt icon ---------------^
This post has been deleted by its author
"...a largely empty Brittany was repopulated..."
I think you might have got the ebb and flow of Celtic ethnic groups, driven by the forces of Romans, Goths, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, and others, a bit the wrong way up. Welsh, Cornish and Bretons were just a sub-set of the Celts pushed into the far western parts of their respective lands. Similarly, the other main linguistic group was pushed into (or maintained their identity within) the far north. The Romans withdrew their legions, right, but they didn't up sticks and forcibly de-populate swathes of the landscape.
[2] Strange as it might sound, I had a bottle of Indian Whisky recently and it was rather drinkable. Can't remember the name though.
Could it have been one of the many products from Amrut?
Only Indian Whisky distiller I know of at the moment, although there may be others.
This really gets on my tits. There’s no miracle to wellness - it’s all well known science. Eat healthily (well, most of the time), drink in moderation, exercise hard and do something to keep yourself mentally fit (chess, reading, programming…) There are no shortcuts, and putting stickers all over yourself to rebalance your chakra (?) is just as nuts as rearranging your workstation to promote the flow of ch’i instead of rearranging it so that it’s more comfortable to work at.
Still, I suppose, if the only people getting conned are the people who are into this shit, and if they feel better once their wallet has been suitably lightened, where’s the harm?
"...Still, I suppose, if the only people getting conned are the people who are into this shit, and if they feel better once their wallet has been suitably lightened, where’s the harm?..."
On the one hand, I tend to agree.
But on the other hand, you do get idiots who believe this kind of crap to the extent that they then start to believe the other crap about how medicines and medicinal science are all some big conspiracy to keep us ill.
Which, to be fair, if an adult is stupid enough to buy into it then good luck to them but then when they start to project those beliefs onto kids it becomes beyond harmful.
Silly us eh, preferring science and the scientific method over some random claims by actresses et al.
Silly us eh, preferring science and the scientific method over some random claims by actresses et al.
The thing is, that when even supposedly rational types espouse things like Denon's £1,000/m network cable (which I think they've stopped selling anyway), and the normally fairly down-to-earth Richer Sounds sells a 1m USB cable for £145, it's no good shouting at the non-scientific thoughts of mobile clothes horses.
I was particularly annoyed with Denon, because I used their professional broadcast-quality kit in a previous life and it was worth the money.
M.
Some people just love to spend money of utter crap..... (to steal a phrase from a certain Mr Ratner).... I spend a lot of my hard-earned on tech, but I earn money back from it, so it's (mostly) justifiable (to the better-half)..
It's like the snake-oil of hifi, gold-plated OPTICAL Cables ? Give me a break..... £1k for a "directional" Ethernet cable for high-end hifi..... Pseudo-science at best, dangerous at worst !
I literally laughed out loud and spat my tea all over my keyboard, clicking the link to the toilet roll holder, thus prompting some more Tech expenditure, when
"Silly us eh, preferring science and the scientific method over some random claims by actresses et al"
No different from the Royal Touch - or Papal blessings - or religious relics that are still treated as cure-alls today even in developed countries like Germany.
It was announced today that Turkey's national education curriculum will stop teaching evolution to secondary school pupils. "Education official says students too young to understand 'controversial subject'" It will only be taught at universities.
It would seem that we are entering a new Dark Age, where facts* are deprecated in favour of a faddy idea or 'alternative fact' which props ups the loudmouth of the day.
@TonyJ and @AC make a good point about how this is harmful when kids are taught this bullshit.
As far as Monster cables et al go though, I just laugh - especially when the music being played is from a digital source**, and especially a compressed one.
I use cheap cable (£7 for 30m), decent speakers (Mordaunt Short), decent separates (mostly NAD, with a little Sony and some Technics for good measure) and keep the cable runs as short as possible. It's a setup which, to my ears, is brutal on bad MP3 rips (better off with a cheap stereo - a good one will throw the compression artefacts into sharp relief!) and sublime with lossless and good quality CD or better recordings.
* in the sense of something which is demonstrably provable or can be shown to have happened.
** not that digital audio is bad - my ears certainly aren't good enough to tell the difference between a good MP3 and a CD, for example - but technically, a good analogue recording on a format like reel to reel should be better than CD because the CD has been sampled (at 44kHz) and the analogue recording hasn't. It's just that, even if the marketing lies of super expensive cables are true, the sample rate will have a much larger impact on the quality of the sound vs. the deficiencies of the lower quality cable.
Sorry but whenever anyone starts talking about their home audio/HIFI setup - you're really no better than Paltrow et al.
There's never been so much bullshit talked especially when it comes to cables and interconnects with HIFI enthusiast twats. Essentially all that matters is this - if it sounds good to you, great. Nobody else needs to know, or gives a shit, what set up you use. In fact this applies to most other things people discuss on this site - if you're happy using your custom made Linux PC then great for you, if you use a Mac and it works for you, that's fine. What does it matter to anyone else, and why do you think they care what you specifically use or do?
It's the amount of BS that's talked by such people (including Paltrow) that really gets on peoples tits. If she said I'm selling these stickers and they are a blatant rip off and have no real magical properties, I'd actually have more respect for her and be more likely to buy them!
@andy 103
You see, that's the thing about conversations. They evolve. They disappear off into little curious sidetracks and eventually come back to the original subject via a circuitous route. Or not at all. That's the fun of it.
@Martin an gof brought up the matter of Hi-Fi and I ran with it. I'm a geek - and yes, I love listening to my stereo. And playing on my computers, with my bikes and my cars*. But your central point was pretty much mine too - "Essentially all that matters is this - if it sounds good to you, great. Nobody else needs to know, or gives a shit, what set up you use. In fact this applies to most other things people discuss on this site - if you're happy using your custom made Linux PC then great for you, if you use a Mac and it works for you, that's fine." Two thumbs up. No point having a fight about this, or much of anything else.
However as to "why do you think they care what you specifically use or do?" er… because some people do. Not anyones kit specifically - but some people are interested in the minutiae of other people's interests. If you discussed your stereo, I'd be interested in what it was because that tells me a little about what informed your opinion. If you're not interested that's cool. Scoot on to the next comment, maybe (if you're lucky) typed by someone less geeky than me.
You'll note by the way, that I didn't say that my HiFi / Car / Computer etc is the best and that anyone who has or uses something different is an idiot. As you say, if "it works for you, that's fine."
The problem, as mentioned elsewhere, is when kids get a thorough education in bullshit and not in actual fact.
* just messing with you. I know you don't like going off on a tangent - accept my apologies.
The problem, as mentioned elsewhere, is when kids get a thorough education in bullshit and not in actual fact.
Close. Very close.
The problem is essentially that kids get a through education in "argumentum ad verecundiam", that of the argument from authority. "Trust me, I know because I'm the teacher." or "the book says so, and the book is right". Teaching via this methods encourages charlatans to come out with people saying "this has SCIENCE in it. BELEIVE my claims or be ANTI SCIENCE", despite this approach actually being religion, not science. Science merely asks that you observe and record carefully, and tell other people the results in a coherent manner to ensure that they can confirm the same result so they can test your claim out if they think it's wrong. Nothing more.
Secondly, ever longer periods of education leads the people leaving the education system to think that they are all knowing, in a classic Dunning-Kruger effect rather than realising that for the most part they are merely being trained to a point that employers have some confidence it's worth paying them while providing further training and paying for somebody else to be providing the training.
"Sorry but whenever anyone starts talking about their home audio/HIFI setup - you're really no better than Paltrow et al"
No, not really. Like a bottle of wine, you get what you pay for, by and large. Yes, there is a lot of nonsense about hi-fi components, very emperor's new clothes.
Cheap stereo systems are fine if you don't care what the music sounds like particularly, or use an mp3 as your main sound source. Spend a little more and you can hear a definite improvement. Where the silly stuff happens is when the hi-fi buff spends ridiculous amounts of money to gain an imperceptible increase in sound quality, by the time most people can afford that level of kit their ears have degraded to the point of making it a waste of time and money.
I had a fairly cheap hi-fi, which sounded ok. I got hold of a very expensive one, and yes it sounds substantially better (Quad 900 series if anyone is bothered), but only if I have the time to sit and listen. My wife's appalling music still sounds dreadful :)
digital media with resistor ladder DACs fashioned from graphite pencil lead, and we did fine
You had digital media? Luxury! We 'ad all us fingers chopped off t'feed t'whippet and had to knit us replacements using us teeth and whatever bits of broken glass we could pull out of t'bed..
Kids today eh?
re: resistor ladders
I was suitably amazed when Gert's VGA Adapter for the Raspberry Pi appeared, using GPIO pins and a ladder network to provide up to 1920x1200 pixels, albeit only at 18 bits...
M.
"I use cheap cable (£7 for 30m)"
I use twin and earth cable, because it's what I had hanging round in the garage, but cheap doorbell wire would probably have been good enough. And I'd bet that no matter what I spend on cables, it won't sound any better despite them being the analogue part of the path in my setup. Once you've got a decent cross section of copper in your speaker wire, it's the quality of your DAC, amplifier and speakers that matter, so long as you route the speaker cables sensibly, and remember not to wire them into the mains... :-)
I use twin and earth cable
T&E is a bit difficult to work with, being somewhat stiff. When I engineered at a local radio station, my boss was quite partial to using 1mm2, 1.5mm2 or 2.5mm2 mains flex for speaker cables. The copper is about as pure as specialist cables and (if you use the 3-core variety) there's a "twist" in the cable which is always a good idea. Sounds at least as good as dedicated speaker cable (and better than some thin bell-wire) and pretty cheap to boot - about 50p/m from TLC, for example.
It's even possible to get 4-core cable which you could use for bi-amping purposes.
More for your PA gear than at home, mains flex comes in some very robust formats and works particularly well in Speakon connectors, and with some amplifiers having two speaker outputs on one connector, wiring speakers up is a doddle.
Off topic? Me?
M.
Reel to reel has a resolution of about 12bits, CD has a bit depth of 16bits. Sampling at 44.1kHz covers all the frequencies a human can hear. I'll leave it to you to which sounds better. Reel to reel is the definition of BS.
Reel to reel has a resolution of about 12bits,
Citation needed. Reel-to-reel is certainly not BS.
I'd contend that "bits" isn't really "resolution", it's "dynamic range" and yes, I'll grant that tape in general doesn't have a fantastic dynamic range compared with some things, but 12 bits?
As for resolution, this (for tape) depends to a huge extent on the speed of the tape and the formulation of the tape (bias frequencies etc.). A good cassette might have a usable bandwidth of 12kHz - equivalent to a digital resolution (sample rate) of 24 or 25kHz, but home reel-to-reel ran faster and had wider tracks; 3¾ips was a common speed, and twice that of cassette, but home players usually had 7½ips and maybe 15ips options, and 30ips was common in studios.
Track width has a bearing on analogue noise, as does tape speed, and in theory digital sources should be free if this kind of noise, but they can introduce noises of their own, many of which are not as pleasant to the human ear.
Given a good formulation of tape, a well set-up recorder and player and a decent source, ¼" tape could outperform CD for bandwidth, if not often for dynamic range (not having any figures to hand, I'd suggest that it came close with metal tapes).
But comparisons are difficult because the recording and playback mechanisms are fundamentally different and other factors also come into play; digital media never suffers from "wow" or "flutter", for example, or simply not being at quite the right speed. As for convenience...
M.
The harm comes about when they believe all this crap and so-called alternative medicine* is going to heal them or their loved ones of real diseases. Placebo effect notwithstanding, there have been cases of people dying because they trusted in the power of positive thinking or in homeopathy rather than the best that medical science can offer, however nasty the latter is, it is at least normally based on some evidence that it can help.
*What do you call alternative medicine that works? Yes, you guessed it, "medicine".
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