--------------------- I saw this on the interweb and laughed and laughed.

I would hope shineyblurry is NOT a creationist with his strong religious beliefs, but if so it's dedicated to him.

*language*insults*dissing religion*wall of text* (if these things offend DO NOT READ)

Dear Creationists,
You are stupid.
Genuinely stupid.
By every conceivable metric that we can assess intelligence, intellect, mental ability, reasoning and sense. Even the very ability to string words together in coherent ways. You fail at this. You are stupid. There is no way of getting out of this accusation; it is as close to an absolute, proven fact, that a scientific assessment can get.

Not ignorant. No, that’s something else. Ignorance is merely the lack of knowledge. That’s fine. I cannot blame someone for merely not knowing, or not being exposed to information. You don’t get a choice in ignorance and merely not knowing. For a start, you’re born ignorant of everything in the entire world. New born babies don’t even know what things in the world are part of their own bodies and what things aren’t – they really do have to learn this for themselves. So, no, you’re not just ignorant because if you were, I wouldn’t be here writing this.

No, this is something fucking different, far fucking worse. What you stand not only accused of, but proven guilty of, shits and pisses all over the innocence of ignorance and goes into dark territory of deceit and lies. This is wilful ignorance. This is prideful ignorance. You take your ignorance and wave it around at every opportunity to say “hey, look at me, I’m so fucking stupid” and expect people to respect you for it. Do I want to blame you for it? When your elders, and priests, and preachers, and the unqualified crank pseudo-scientific quasi-philosophers they get to back them up, have all conspired to brainwash you into thinking this is a good thing? Yes, I fucking do. You have made a choice to stay ignorant, and be happy with it. You’re a fucking idiot, and you damn well know it. You know it, and you Just. Don’t. Fucking. Care.

Why do I bother with you? Just why? Why do I drag myself down to that sort of level?
Let’s look at some clear facts here.
I have a fucking masters degree. I took four years out of my life learning quantum mechaincs, management, nuclear physics, organic, inorganic, analytical, green, environmental, atmospheric chemistry, mathematics, and a fuck-ton of life skills and problem solving skills possessed by a tiny fraction of people.

I can write, I can draw, I can play and compose music, and I can program a computer to do a little jig. Importantly, I know the difference between “there”, “their” and “they’re” – and fuck knows that’s a rare skill. I’m even nice on occasion and, if I try, even likeable. I’m just going to blow a trumpet and say I have most talents bar singing (sigh).

I wrote a whopping four-hundred-fucking-page book to get a doctorate. It’s sat there on a table right now, all bound and shiny with gold letters and my name on it, looking thick enough to bludgeon someone to death with. To get that far, I was locked in a room with two experts who read it and who spent nearly three hours ripping it to shreds and finding any excuse they could not to give the final award to me. At the end of it all, half a dozen people with the same level of qualification and beyond have all conspired to say “you’re good enough to be one of us”. I fucking starved. I fucking wrote ’til I dropped. I stayed up late and got up early. All to get that. And as blasé and modest as I try to come across in public, I wouldn’t have done any of that if I didn’t think it was all worth it.

And I’ve taught students. People even better than me, who have fought their way through the same shit and more, have said I’m good enough to be their proxy or their replacement to teach the next generation. I’m actively passing on knowledge, whether established or cutting edge, to students who one day will grow up to be the next me. Some days I hate those little shits, but to be fair to them, one day a good chunk of them will also be locked in that room with a pair of experts, shitting themselves and wanting to all go away. They will come out of it alive, as One Of Us, and they will fucking well deserve every bit of it. I am a cog in that machine, and damn well proud of it.

In short, I’m smart. I’m intelligent. I’m rational. I’m reasonable. I’m brainy as fuck. By every conceivable metric, I am at the top of the grey matter tree. If I believed in the absoluteness of the IQ test, I’d be bragging my ass off about being in the 98th percentile (I dunno, actually, last time I took one I was 15).
That’s me.

You, however, as someone who thinks the planet magically poofed into existence 6,000 years ago, you’re at the bottom of that tree. I’m may well be in the 98th percentile, but you, you dumb fuck, wouldn’t even know what “percentile” means without Google – which, by the way, has been built by the kind of people who know what “percentile” means without using Google. Because they had to have some way of knowing what it meant before they fucking built the thing – since you, you dumbfuck imbecile, need every little fucking thing explained to you in small words that don’t tax your brain too hard.

You, because you manage to be mentally retarded in such a way that it’s actually an offence to those with genuine learning difficulties, couldn’t fucking understand the mere basics of anything I could possibly teach you about anything. About chemistry, biology or physics. Even the fucking basics of logic, or language, or how to frame an argument, or what evidence is, or why it’s important, or how science even works. Hell, the hurdles I would have to leap just to get you people to the point of discussing actual evolutionary biology or actual geology or actual radiometric dating would require me to type thousands of words, and spend months of my life. And it wouldn’t be worth it because you would ignore it. You wouldn’t even address the basics. I could try to exemplify every nuance, meaning and deconstruction of, say, the phrase “evolution is a religion”, and you’d zone out as soon as I broke into polysyllabic words and then, just as a little bit of drool came out, you’d say “but evolution is just a religion”.

It’s all just fucking voodoo shit to you, something you’re actively scared of and don’t want to understand. You’ve rendered yourself physically incapable of understanding and basic comprehension and so I find myself almost constantly, every time I see one of you dumb shits opening your mouths, struggling not to outright scream from the rooftops. Every single word in this extensive rant has been compressed in my head into a single thought and that thought fires in my brain every time I see you people speak or type or even making a motion to open your mouths or put fingers to a keyboard.

You sit and worship people like Kent Hovind, whose entire thesis wouldn’t even count as a winning entry in NaNoWriMo (which requires 50,000 words in a month) and has a Flesch reading age of a pre-teen (by contrast, the Flesch-Kincade reading complexity for my own thesis goes to the part of the scale where “reading age” stops being a meaningful concept, and a single chapter is larger than Kent Hovind’s entire derp-fest, and there’s fucking diagrams to boot). Or you shout “amen” after every little tiny piece of faeces that oozes out of the mouth of Ray Comfort – a man, lest we forget, who thinks the word “bibliophile” is a fucking insult derived from “paedophile”. These aren’t just people amongst your ranks, these are your fucking experts.

You repeat mantras that have been refuted countless times. Even if you ever get around to addressing one of these refutations all you can ever come up with is restating the point again or whining about some other pathetic and irrelevant detail. I’m not even going to bother with examples here. I’m breaking plenty of my usual rules about dealing with you stupid-as-fuck individuals already, so I’m going to break another and tell you to do your own simple cursory fucking research on this. Not that you’d manage that, as anything you ever cite must always come from an approved source like “CreationWiki” – a site, may I add, that actively makes a point, and a proud point at that, of stifling any potential disagreement. Do you see that on skeptic or “evolutionist” websites? No. You don’t. You want to know why? Because we want the world to see the best you dumb-fucktarded intellectual rejects have come up with, in all their mundanely pathetic glory, just so everyone can see how fucking terrible each and every one of your so-called arguments are. Sometimes, we don’t even bother responding, we just quote you verbatim (that means “unaltered” (which means “we didn’t change it” (ooh, look, nested parentheses (that means “brackets”) I bet that’s blown your tiny fucking mind))) because even casual scrutiny makes your points look terrible, and frankly, a full refutation just isn’t worth the fucking effort. Not because we can’t, but because – as I said above – I’d practically have to teach you the English Fucking Language from scratch to point out the flaws.

You, who thinks a fucking single man and rib-clone woman and their two sons populated the entire earth without any freaking-frakking-fucking incest occurring because “hey, don’t ask awkward questions”, hold in high regard people who aren’t even worthy of pissing in the academic shadow of people like me. So where does that place you in that pecking order? You intentionally refuse to understand simple things; like how irrelevant evolution by natural selection is to abiogenesis; like the fact that “macro” and “micro” evolution are just things you made up (at least in the way you morons use those terms); or like how natural selection has nothing at all to do with eugenics. It’s all OH-YOUR-FUCKING-GOD-IT’S-HITLER all the fucking time. I mean, seriously, you intentionally avoid learning. You avoid understanding. You actively train yourself to not to understand and you revel in all this. You memorise your silly little one-sentence replies that mean sweet fuck all, and by some magic expect educated people like me to bow down to your right of free expression; well here’s my “free expression” in response you fucking lunatic, you’ve damn well driven me to it over the years. You have no intellectual rights to this “debate” at all because you cannot even speak the language it requires. Even worse, you seem to think this actually qualifies you more. It doesn’t. It never will. Get with the fucking programme already; if you cannot comprehend basic facts, you cannot expect to be invited to the debating table as an academic equal. You’re not my academic equal. In terms of intelligence and knowledge you’re fucking scum rotting at the bottom of a dark and forgotten barrel while I’m basking in the sun. I would love, genuinely love, to help raise you up to being on my level. I would love it. But you wouldn’t listen. I would tell you to read X, Y and Z. Hell, I’d even write my own summary of X, Y and Z, but you wouldn’t listen or care. It would fall on intentionally deaf ears.

You know what the worst thing is? Some creationist out there, probably you because it’s being addressed to you, is probably going to find this rant and say “oh look at the little evolutionist, running out of points and resorting to insults”. Well fuck off. You think this is my attempt to prove you wrong? No. This is my attempt to insult you. This is my attempt to degrade and belittle you, your beliefs and your reasons all in one; because they’ve already been shown to be wrong. I don’t need to add to that. If you want to complain that I’ve ran out of legitimate responses by writing this, then that just proves every single point that I’m making in this profanity ridden rant; that you don’t fucking listen, and are even proud of the fact that you’ve left yourself bereft of the ability to do so.

You’re not stupid because you believe the world appeared out of nowhere sometime more recently than the domestication of the dog – and no, I’m not going to tentatively say something like “evidence suggests that”, no, it’s a Fucking Fact that the dog became domesticated in the tens of thousands of years ago. You’re a fucking shit faced idiot because of why you believe it. If you haven’t got the gist of this already; you’re proud of being stupid, you actively refuse to learn, you don’t examine anything critically, you fall for any piece of shit “evidence” your masters tell you. You don’t question them. You don’t realise they’re just out there wanting to keep you stupid, keep you ignorant and keep you not wanting to learn about the universe from sources that actually took the time to look at the universe. They want to keep you that way because you buy into their shit, with money. Your actual hard-earned money. You actually value these people with your working time. That’s galling to the rest of us who have a working and fully functioning brain that we deign to actually use.

You pay them. You donate to them. You buy their books and DVDs that they produce for fuck-all money and sell at a premium. You show them to your kids so they grow up stupid and buy more DVDs and books by the Comforts and the Hovinds and the Hams and the Gishes of this world. You show them Jesus riding a fucking dinosaur and pictures of Noah mucking out a boat that’s chock-full of animals that somehow managed to survive and reproduce to form every living thing we see on the planet in a geological blink of an eye – and you think this is right? You don’t think this is the most ridiculous idea in the world? If it wasn’t for the coincidental fact that you’re backed by a non-falsifiable belief shared by a significant proportion of the population, you would actually be declared clinically insane. No joke, there are actually people with more coherent and rational beliefs in their head being secured in mental health wards.

Despite being as embedded as you possibly can in the evidence for it, you don’t realise that there’s an entire industry that makes a fortune from retarding your ability to think. You accept this, and refuse to actually exercise your innate abilities to think, question and explore so long as you say the magic words “but I am thinking, questioning and exploring”. No you’re fucking not. If you were, you’d be in my position. You, too, would find yourself locked in that room, actively battling and fighting with people tearing your ideas apart and demanding that you defend them and stand by them and justify every single thing you say. But you’re not. You never will be. Though, let’s be fair to the non-doctorate holding non-creationists reading this for a brief moment; you don’t even have to be in that position of getting an academic qualification, you just want to be in the position where you’re willing to explore, and learn, and discuss and adapt. You refuse even that, and you think it’s a good thing.

There are a lot of people I think are stupid. Really fucking stupid. I mean, you might think it’s a long way down to the shops, but that’s peanuts compared to this stupid. There are people who think the World Trade Centre wasn’t hit by planes, but by holograms. There are people who think the skies are filled with mind-altering chemicals that can be dispersed – from miles away, no less – by spraying vinegar in the air. There are people who think we’re not being faced with a potential disaster of epic proportions because of how our society has polluted the planet. There are people who think vaccines cause autism and will find any old piece of shit evidence to prove it no matter how many times even the mere correlation is disproved.

But creationism is something else. It has that industry supporting it and perpetuating it, and it has people who buy into it so willingly. And you, because you think that everything came from nothing in a fucking click of a magic man’s fingers, are part of this. You’re out there derping on daily on something that we, using the entire knowledge collectively gathered by the human race, know is a lie. Honestly, you probably think it’s a lie too – but you’re both too damn proud of yourself and too damn proud of your stupidity to admit it. That’s your problem. It’s not about fossils, or genetics, or radiometric dating, it’s about your unwillingness to learn and better yourself. And it always will be.

In conclusion. Fuck you. Go fuck yourself. And may the god you believe in have mercy on your pathetic, idiotic, morally and intellectually bankrupt soul."

I could see how one might think the dashcam owner set it up. He certainly sounds like he makes a "boom" noise before it happens.

If that were the case, beyond anything else I'd say it's not abuse, but an irresponsible prank. He/someone probably thought it would be funny to hide a container of compressed air in their trash is all.

*sigh* Could they possibly give anything more away with the trailer?

Anyways, it will always be an issue compressing a dense 384 page book into 1:30. The movie is just going to be disappointing.

Side note: there doesn't seem to be added romance. That's Ender hugging his sister.

tl;dr: No, not really and no, probably not.

-

MP3 compression methods are pretty good these days. A well encoded mp3 sounds quite good at 224k. 320k is ideal, but 224k sounds fine to me.

I think most people would be incredibly hard pressed to tell the difference between a well encoded 320k MP3 and a FLAC file.

To showcase this and hopefully answer your question through demonstration, I've put together an odd sound file here for ya: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/837649/soundtest.wav

It's a 24bit 48kHz wav file of a piece of bright and full audio thrown together just for this (using 24-bit 48kHz audio sources). The audio loops a few times and each time it loops it's in a different format or quality.

The odd part is that I've dropped the audio volume down all the way to just barely above the 16-bit noise floor before exporting into each format, then cranked the volume back up again. Just to see what would happen.

Anyway, the play order is as follows:
1. Original 16-bit audio (sound normal, as it should.)
2. 16-bit audio re-gained (noise city - the 16-bit FLAC was the same.)
3. 24-bit audio re-gained (Sounds as good as the original.)
4. FLAC 24-bit re-gained (Sounds as good as the original.)
5. MP3 8 k re-gained (What?)
6. MP3 64 k re-gained (Sounds like a bad MP3, because it is. but, do note it's mostly just dull and a bit unstable sounding, not all weird like the 8k one.)
7. MP3 128 k re-gained (Pretty good, but still a bit dull. Not horrible though.)
8. MP3 224 k re-gained (Sounds as good as the original? Pretty close, I'd say.)
9. MP3 320 k re-gained (Sounds as good as the original as far as I'm concerned.)

This is just one test though. There are most certainly songs or sounds out there that wouldn't fare as well as this one. No idea what those would be though, as everything I've MP3-ified in the last decade or so sounds absolutely fine to me.

I am still going through his last video which I think he takes on compression, but I can tell you right now as for mp3, it is cd-quality, but it is not cd. Even at high bitrates, the high frequencies get hit hard. It is pretty sad we continue to let our music suffer with a lot of people still compressing to mp3. If you look hard enough though you will find people using FLAC, and apples high bitrate AAC files are great. Anime fansubs which are probably more fickle about quality and standards then the Hollywood movie pirate scene are now all using AAC in their mp4 file instead of bad old mp3. Although in its defense, MOST movie rips are AC3/DTS, or at least offer it aside long its MP3 stereo track.

Thanks for the reply and sharing your expertise -- sounds like you'd confirm everything that the video said.

This probably just displays my ignorance more, but specifically with regards to the MP3 format, do you think it adds any noticeable compression artifacts even at high-quality settings? Part of my problem was that I was thinking of MP3 *bit*rate as sampling rate (128 kbit/s = 128 kHz, which is not at all correct). But still, MP3 is a lossy format (obviously since one can turn a 650M CD into ~60M of 128k MP3s, or still a large filesize savings even for 320k) and even my relatively untrained ear can sometimes hear the difference at low (say, 128k or lower) bitrates.

I guess that a music producer wouldn't record/master anything in a compressed format like MP3, so that is sort of entirely separate from the point of this video and your comment. But just out of curiosity, do you think that people can detect differences between a 16 bit 44 kHz uncompressed digital recording (flac maybe?) and a very high quality MP3 (say, 320 kbit)?

This goes beyond my knowledge level of signals and waveforms, but it was very interesting anyway.

That being said, OK, I'm sold on the concept that ADC and back doesn't screw up the signal. However, I'm pretty sure that real audiophiles could easily listen to several copies of the same recording at different bitrates and frequencies and correctly identify which ones are higher or better quality with excellent accuracy. I bet that is true even for 16bit vs 24bit, or 192kHz vs 320kHz -- stuff that should be "so good it is impossible to tell the difference".

Since some people that train themselves to have an ear for it CAN detect differences (accurately), the differences must actually be there. If they aren't artifacts of ADC issues, then what are they? I'm guessing compression artifacts?

In a visual version of this, I remember watching digital satellite TV around 10-15 years ago. The digital TV signal was fine and clear -- almost certainly better than what you'd get from an analog OTA antenna. BUT, the satellites used (I believe) mpeg compression to reduce channel bandwidth, and that compression created some artifacts that were easy to notice once somebody pointed them out to you. I specifically remember onscreen people getting "jellyface" anytime someone would nod slowly, or make similar periodic motions. I've got a feeling that some of the artifacts that we (or at least those of us that are real hardcore audiophiles) can notice in MP3 audio files are similar to an audio version of that jellyface kind of issue.

Lossy compression was not kind to this video.

Yeah. The sad part is that even with 56k dial-up modems, my neighbors and I cannot never go higher than 31200 (very rare) and 3 kB/sec (assuming data is already compressed and no line noises). It has been like this since the 1990s/90s and still is like that today (still have my external serial USR Sportster 33.6k dial-up modem as a back up when my cable goes down!). I can't even get DSL (20K ft. to CO!). Crappy phone line systems here in this old city.

It seems like such a waste to be compressing those springs thousands of times a minute... or to be driving the rotation of heavy cams for that matter.
Someday this may all be electronic. Renault is playing with that aren't they?

Youtube basically broke the video with their shitty compression, thus the effect is totally lost.

Try this version instead:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c47_1361476125

You can afford...being the prime question here.
Most cars these days (read: not performance cars) are made on the cheap.
Forged connecting rods, and billet valves / cam shafts / high tensile head bolts are not cheap, therfore they dont go into the vast majority of modern engines.

Putting a turbo on your engine alone would vastly increase compression ratios, stressing just about every internal part in the car. The poverty pack econo-cars can not handle any more than about 4-6lb's of boost before things start heating up, warping, and shaking themselves apart violently.

Cost to get things up to spec?

erm....well a good set of H beam forged con-rods can cost you anywhere from 600 upwards (generally upwards...a lot upwards), and thats just the part, not including installation. Getting the valves reworked, vavle springs, cam shaft....thats ~2k+ if youre doing it on the cheap.

Then you need an intercooler to take the heat out of the intake air (as the turbo compresses intake air, and therfore heats it up) so as to keep the economy levels up....and piping to go with it, your looking at another 1k at least.

Then you need an ECU mod, piggy back if you can get away with it, around the 1k figure, otherwise a full standalone can cost upwards of 1.5k.

Then you need to program and tune, upwards again of 1.5k.

To turbo a non-turbo economy engine povery-pack car, you are looking at LEAST 5k+, and thats doing it on mega budget, you wont get any reliability or safety out of it.

Before you even get to put the turbo on, which itself is about 300-1.5k depending on what turbine you purchase, you also need a turbo manifold to redirect all of the exhaust gas into a turbo, and have an outlet pipe that allows waste-gate dumps into your exhaust. So you also need to get your cat-back system redone too, which is about 700-1500 to get it done right.

Doing it right? Start counting from 10k....and keep going.

Doing it right would be to upgrade the breaks (bigger discs, bigger calipers, bigger master cylinder), the suspension (coilovers), and doing some serious chassis strengthening to take the increased loads (front/rear sway bar upgrades, front/rear strut tower bars etc..)

Its not cheap unfortunately

the yt comments link to this image: http://i.imgur.com/ViW4U85.jpg
(device seemingly powered by compressed air)

Oh yeah, there's whole books devoted to push vs pull technique and it's widely accepted in the racing world that pull is far more effective, it also doesn't compress the nerves in your shoulder, giving better feedback and control. Pushing is more laborious, slower and has less control. And there's some debate of pulling and insticts but no real conclusion.

In my younger/dumber days I did this to myself. Not a big deal. Unless the bar is stupidly heavy, rest it on your chest then 'roll' it down to your hips. At that point you can sit up and either dump it to one side or continue to roll down and past your knees at which point you can stand up. Awkward and uncomfortable -- you'll compress your abdomen and it might be hard on the hips -- but not impossible.