How To Spot A Psychopath

I’m busy writing stuff, so let’s see if I can’t get you all to generate a bunch of content for me in the comments.

So I’m spinning the Wheel of Contentious Topics, buzz buzz buzz, around and around it goes, it’s slowing down now… “gun control”, “abortion”, “religion”, “Kirk or Picard”… and it’s stopped on “health care in the USA“!

The previously-mentioned TechSkeptic just wrote an excellent post about the bizarre US health-care-reform situation. In brief, opponents of real reform are standing next to their rusted-out AMC Gremlin and insisting that all it needs is a lick of paint and some new seat-covers to be as good as any other car in the world today. And you shouldn’t believe what people from other countries tell you about the cars over there, because that’s all Communist propaganda.

I’m on the other side of the planet, and so don’t actually spend a lot of time thinking about the plight of sick Americans. But I do watch The Daily Show, and the US health-care situation is an interesting example of a common problem.

I wonder if the USA will ever find its way out of this mess, where elected representatives choose talking points that are blatantly counterfactual, safe in the knowledge that a bunch of right-wing authoritarian voters (I strongly recommend Bob Altemeyer’s book The Authoritarians, which is a free download) will believe them. This “authoritarian follower” population gives the cheerful promulgators of all sorts of lies guaranteed support from that ironclad 30% of the US population that never gave up on Dubya. And, often, a lot more than 30% of the US voting population fall into line.

(The 2008 presidential election had a very large voter turnout, by US standards, but almost four out of every ten eligible voters still didn’t care enough to turn up. Here in Australia we probably have just as many people who don’t care who gets elected, but we make them vote at least pretend to vote anyway, if they want to avoid a small fine.)

I don’t mean to suggest that purest BS raining from on high upon a grateful populace is a phenomenon limited to the USA. The whole world has always had this same problem. But mass acceptance of definite and objective governmental lies seems to me to have reached its fullest flower during the Dubya administration, and it hasn’t died back much now that he’s finally gone.

(While I’m recommending books you can read for free, allow me to point you to Harry Frankfurt’s much-less-frivolous-than-it-sounds On Bullshit. Every modern human should also own a copy of How to Lie with Statistics, but I’m afraid you’ll probably have to pay for that.)

Right-wing authoritarians, as described by Bob Altemeyer, do actually understand the concept of being lied to, and also understand that their chosen authorities are often motivated to lie to them. But, often, authoritarian followers simply ignore this knowledge when they’re listening to their chosen authorities.

This is the same sort of compartmentalisation that allows so many Americans to be perfectly fine with food stamps, bank-deposit insurance, unemployment benefits, Social Security and the threadbare safety net of Medicaid - especially if they’re the beneficiary - but vehemently opposed to “socialism”. The broadness of the definition of socialism that people use in these arguments makes pretty much every taxpayer-funded, universally-available government service technically “socialist”, and therefore presumably abhorrent. Nobody seems to have a big problem with fire brigades, garbage collection, highways, bridges or public libraries, though. But, just as a segment of the US population would be perfectly happy to be ruled by a king (or a Bond villain, for that matter) as long as he wasn’t called a king, many Americans are perfectly happy with “socialist” policies as long as nobody calls them socialist.

Apply no “socialist” government controls to any market you like and the result will invariably be corruption, cartels and frank fraud, giving rise to endlessly repeated boom-and-bust cycles, a minor example of which you might just possibly have noticed recently.

(On this subject, Upton Sinclair’s classic The Jungle is another free book you might like to read. See also Charles Mackay’s even older Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.)

There’s a lot more behind the weird American authoritarian hatred for anything-called-socialism than mere common-or-garden cognitive dissonance, though. Bob Altemeyer has, for more than 40 years now, been doing psychological research on why authoritarian followers and their usual leaders, “social dominators“, behave in the way that they do. He’s ended up with a very large stack of evidence of far higher quality than is usual in the social sciences, and discovered some very surprising things. Once again - read the book. I found it entirely fascinating, and often blackly hilarious.

Aaaaanyway, getting back to the subject of the USA’s adoration of dreadful health care, it is obvious that the USA could randomly throw a dart at a list of other countries in the developed world (and a few less-developed countries…), adopt the health-care system of whatever country they hit, and have a guarantee that it’d work better than what they’ve got. Provided, that is, that the USA actually managed to implement the new system properly. All bets are off if the new system turns into one of those military-industrial-political boondoggles the USA is so good at, where Congressmen and Senators secure re-election by making sure that every state gets a finger in every pie. The EU bows in awe at America’s ability to add such amazing amounts of open avarice to every kind of normal bureaucratic friction.

To people in other countries, like for instance Australia where I live, it’s difficult to even believe that for a significant fraction of the US population, the best health-care option available is to join the crowd in the hospital emergency room - whether or not your condition actually constitutes an emergency, of course - and hope for the best. We foreigners are similarly staggered by the fact that for an even larger segment of the US population, contracting a serious illness makes it probable that you will end up bankrupt.

We Aussies have a pretty standard underfunded-but-more-or-less-functional public-health safety-net. We pay half as much per capita for health care as the USA, and outlive you by around 2.8 years. I don’t think it’s just the Vegemite that’s responsible for this.

The UK’s population only outlives the USA’s by a bit less than a year, but despite that segment of the UK’s population who use the free ambulances as taxis, their National Health Service only costs them about 41% as much per capita as Americans pay.

And the list, of course, goes on. And on. And on.

So, despite what I now know about authoritarian believers, I’m still staggered by the sheer balls of the legislators and other talking heads who claim that the US health-care system is actually a good one.

It’s as if they’re standing up and baldly declaring the USA to be a Buddhist nation, and all of their buddies are going along with it.

Hmm. It’s possible that my “get readers to write stuff so I don’t have to” strategy has gone slightly awry. Commenters may have some difficulty in out-rambling the above.

Do, nonetheless, feel free to try.

A reader writes:

My CPD-G500 is getting the twitches and I fear it will soon slip out of usable duty. I work in Photoshop and Illustrator and Motion and After Effects, I also edit with Final Cut Pro (where the twitching is getting most noticeable - the image twitches and folds at the bottom of the screen.

I would like you to tell me what you finally decided was the best CRT monitor. I’m not sure how you feel about LCD screens but I can’t work on them, they feel slippery, tricky, I don’t believe what I see and don’t trust it at all.

I’ve been checking CRT monitors for sale on the Web, and of course end up at eBay. There are 19- and 21-inch monitors that I’ve looked at, only one Sony G500, no G520, and there is a 19-inch G400 but it’s in Melbourne and I’m in Sydney; a long way off for a drive to pick it up.

What do you think I might do?

Philip

Your twitching-and-folding image is probably fixable, but you’d need to find a good old-fashioned CRT TV repair guy - they’re a dying breed - to get it done without delving into the realm of high tension with your own uneducated hands. Working with one hand behind your back helps, but CRT repair really, really isn’t the right place to start applying what you’ve just learned from repairfaq.org.

Occasional image “twitching” is a classic dry-solder-joint or failing-insulation problem; a little re-soldering and the slathering of some neutral-cure RTV silicone sealant over the old, cracking insulation on the high-tension cable to the side of the picture tube is likely to cure it. The “folded” image sounds like it’s just an image positioning problem, which is another thing that can be down to components wearing out (electrolytic capacitors changing value, for instance), and which may be fixable with trim-pots on the board or something similarly simple.

All CRTs will die eventually, though; they naturally get darker and darker as the years go by, and eventually the brightness control can’t compensate. A standard old-TV-repair-guy trick is to wind up the electron-gun voltage on old CRTs; that’ll make them die even faster, but will at least give you a decently bright picture again.

If you’re determined to get yourself a new CRT, I think you’re going to find your choices constrained by what you can get (without paying $1000 for shipping from overseas…), rather than what actually is the very best CRT for your purposes. So what-to-buy recommendations from me would be of limited practical value - and I never really used enough different kinds of CRT to have very strong preferences. But, for what it’s worth:

1: Aperture-grille tubes (Sony Trinitron, Mitsubishi Diamondtron, ViewSonic Sonictron…) are brighter than shadow-mask, and many people prefer them. But aperture-grille computer monitors always have horizontal vibration-damper wires for the grille that cast a noticeable shadow…

…across the screen. One wire for small-to-medium tubes, two for 21-inchers, possibly even more for aperture-grille TVs. This is one of those things that many people aren’t annoyed by until they’re told that it exists, then can never stop seeing. You need not thank me if I’ve just ruined aperture grille for you.

(People seldom notice this problem in aperture-grille televisions, because unless you’re sitting ridiculously close to the screen, you won’t be able to see them.)

2: Samsung’s mainstream CRT monitors were always good quality (not the best possible quality, but good enough for almost any purpose), reliable, and excellent value. I don’t know whether they ever made a flat-screen 21-incher, though.

3: The gripping hand is that the big names just don’t make many CRT monitors any more. As you say, you can find second-hand CRTs here and there, but they’re unlikely to be a whole lot younger than the one you’ve already got.

I’ve poked around on the monitor-manufacturer sites - Sony, NEC, Philips, Samsung and so on - and it’s surprisingly difficult to even find product pages for CRT monitors these days, much less CRTs that’re still on sale. Every now and then there’s a couple of old 17-inchers still being sold in South Africa, Bangladesh, Montenegro or India, but if you’re in the USA, Australia or most of Europe, you’re out of luck.

ViewSonic still have a few CRTs, but I think they top out at a 19-inch unit. Lenovo have a relatively cheap 19-incher, too, currently on special… in Canada.

And these are all plain old consumer monitors - higher-spec ones for graphics work are ever rarer. Eizo, for instance, used to have a lineup of hooded CRTs that came with a calibrator, but they seem to only have LCDs now.

And just finding a company that still makes CRTs is only half of the battle. Let’s presume you’ve decided that, say, this 20-inch-viewable-diagonal LG looks good. Now you have to find a dealer that still sells them. Which, so far as I can tell, nobody does.

Any decent computer store will be able to order in pretty much any product from a company that has a distributor in your country, but the demand for CRTs is so minuscule now that there could easily be zero stock of whatever you’re asking for in Australia, so you’d have to take the absurdly-expensive corporate-procurement route to lay your hands on one, or buy some dedicated video-preview screen with more sockets on the back than you ever thought possible; such units have list prices that range from the merely alarming to the downright hilarious.

(Note that there may be a heap of new-old-stock CRTs sitting in some dealer’s warehouse or self-storage unit, which they’d be glad to unload. It can’t hurt to ask. Just don’t get your hopes up.)

If you were in the USA, you could find tons of dealers still selling CRTs of one kind or another. A lot of them are definitely not what you’re after - tiny little screens, monochrome monitors for ancient computers or digital X-ray systems, workstation monitors with funny plugs and/or fixed scan rates, $100 monitors that cost at least $80 to ship, used screens sold as-is, “special order” items that may not actually be available any more, and of course a cavalcade of weird-branded Chinese products that’re probably junk. But there are some real, well-reviewed dealers selling real, new CRTs, and if you were in any major city in the USA it’d probably only take you a few hours of fossicking to get one delivered for a reasonable price.

But you’re not in the USA. So you may find yourself having to join us LCD-monitor pod people.

Fortunately, I really don’t think there’s any objective reason for your mistrust of LCDs, any more.

Many mass-market LCDs are still not as good as mass-market CRTs for really colour-critical work, but almost nobody is actually doing that sort of work. If your CRT needs to have one of those light-blocking hoods over it and you recalibrate it once a month, then you probably do need another CRT. If not, though, then any LCD that doesn’t have a cheap narrow-angle 6-bit twisted-nematic panel in it should, today, be more than good enough for almost any purpose. You’ll need to colour-calibrate it to get accurate colour response, but you need to do that with CRTs anyway.

It helps to have a CRT on hand for video editing, so you can see how your video wizardry looks with classic fuzzy pixels. But unless your target audience for some reason includes a lot of people still using old CRT computer monitors, the preview CRT you’ll want will be a television (probably connected via composite), not a computer monitor. There are still tons of CRT TVs in daily service around the world, but cheap and nasty Dell PCs have been coming with LCD monitors as standard for long enough that I think CRT monitors are probably in the minority now, in affluent countries at least.

A lot of mass-market LCDs have somewhat “cartoonish” default colour reproduction, with weird colour temperature and over-response that gives a “punchy” look, like that from cheap digital cameras. That’s fine for happy-snap photography and playing games, but it can give weird results for graphics work. You can fix it very easily with even a cheap colour-calibrator, though; the Pantone Huey and one or another ColorVision Spyder (like the one I reviewed years ago) can be had for less than $US100 now.

It’s entirely possible that someone reading this is in Sydney and has a 21-inch CRT mouldering in the spare room that Philip might like; if so, drop me a line and I’ll pass your info on to Philip. If you know of a great source of well-priced decent-quality CRTs in Australia or elsewhere, do post a comment about it!

The other day, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of the Apollo landing sites. This gave various news organisations the chance to remind us all that if you ask the man in the street if he believes there was ever a man on the moon, there’s a discouragingly decent chance that he’ll tell you he doesn’t.

The new pictures won’t make any impact on the conspiracy theorists. You could bundle them into a flying saucer, fly them to the moon, and hover 10 feet above the footprints and Apollo descent stages, and they’d say you obviously must have come there in that same saucer half an hour ago and set all this stuff up. I mean, it’s been 40 years and the footprints haven’t even blown away yet! How dumb do you think we are, man!

Clearly, the only way we’re going to stop hearing from these people is if we give them something to talk about which they find more exciting. Ideally, I’d like them to become convinced that this supposed “moon” doesn’t actually existd at all, but I think that’d be a tough sell. If we guide them carefully, though, we may still be able to make the next We-Never-Actually-Did-X conspiracy theory much more entertaining than the unutterably depressing moon-hoax one.

How about this, then:

We never split the atom. The Manhattan Project was a fake.

Or it was real, but it was actually a collaborative research project between the US Government, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Howard Hughes and the reptilian cabal that really ruled both Britain and Nazi Germany. Under the cover of so-called “atomic” research, this covert “xenofascist” project developed the occult death-from-a-distance technology that was what really killed Kennedy, when he was planning to spill the beans on that disappearing destroyer.

This, naturally, means that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not hit by atomic bombs. It’s possible that there was actually a huge conventional bombing program using giant pyramidal strategic bombers, flying from their bases just inside the South Phantom Pole, and given almost unlimited range and maneuverability by the use of a hybrid orgone/Vril fuel source, with antigravity lifters for propulsion. It’s clearly more likely, however, that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events were actually the result of an earth-penetrating electrical seismic concentrator, based on Nikola Tesla’s well-known power-broadcast and earthquake machines.

Tesla refused to help the xenofascists combine his technologies, which is why they had him killed in 1943. If he had helped, the earthquake gun would presumably have avoided the embarrassing misfire on its first activation. That shot missed not only by 3,900 kilometres in distance, but also by some 37 years in time, and caused the Tunguska event.

(So Tesla and Tunguska are connected - just not in the way everybody thinks!)

Where was I? Oh, yes.

“Nuclear power” is actually produced by means of black magic, but it’s hard to tell exactly which kind, on account of the Malicious Animal Magnetism that so horribly destroys anybody who looks inside one of the “reactor vessels”. This explains why the original promises that nuclear power would make electricity too cheap to meter came to nothing; it turns out that the sheer quantities of alchemical ingredients, large animals, human blood and, of course, babies you need to keep the Old Things from escaping a “nuclear” power plant make such plants very expensive to run.

Oh, and “nuclear medicine” is also a hoax. The supposed “shielding” around “radioactive” items is just more camouflage for sacred geometries and resonant crystals.

And as for nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, which has the word “nuclear” in its name and so must have to do with radiation and atoms splitting and stuff, those supposed “superconducting magnets” do have liquid nitrogen in them, but it’s just to stop anybody from using a hacksaw to discover what the device actually contains. Inside, there are actually carefully broken-in audiophile-grade power cables, wrapped in a helix to match human ethereal DNA, and all running from a single button cell covered with so many battery-boosting stickers that it could power a small town.

Right. All we need to do now is boil this down into a bumper sticker.

A few times a year, all the gadget blogs get excited about some new lighter-than-air vehicle. Sometimes it’s a little one for the determined hobbyist, a big one for specialised cargo, or a huge one that’s never even going to exist.

And then there are the modern Goodyear-Blimp tiddlers that’re shamelessly described as “Zeppelins”, despite only being a third - often less than a quarter - of the length of the proper ones.

I mean, look at the “Zeppelin NT“. It’s 75 metres long, and can only carry 14 people, or a payload of less than two tonnes. Zeppelin bombers in World War One were already more than twice as long, and carrying 16 tonnes!

This, for example, is the LZ1, the very first of the Zeppelins. It was already 128 metres in length.

I, therefore, officially demand that we bring back the hydrogen-filled zeppelin!

They’d be very safe, especially with modern technology; giant bags full of hydrogen need be no more dangerous than giant fuel tanks full of kerosene, which I remind you are usually mere feet away from the jet engines that’re burning the fuel. Modern control systems could intelligently manage multiply-compartmented cellular gas-bags, to automatically keep the zeppelin in the correct attitude, manage altitude, and keep the thing flying even if someone flies his Learjet straight into the side of the airship.

If people just can’t get past their irrational terror of hydrogen, then you could of course just fill your zeppelin with helium, like the old American ships. But hydrogen gives more lift and can be easily manufactured from water; the world’s helium supply all comes from natural gas. Lots of scientists and engineers are beavering away at finding efficient hydrogen-storage technology, too, because we’ll need such technology for fuel-cell cars to become practical. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of the same tech came in handy for managing lifting hydrogen in airships. And, heck, some of the hydrogen could also be used as fuel!

The one great advantage of a dirigible airliner is that legroom is not an issue. You don’t get vast lifting power - even the gigantic, 245-metre-long Hindenburg only had a payload capacity around the same as that of a 70.6-metre-long 747-400 freighter - but you can have as much space as you like. You just don’t get to fill that space with heavy stuff. Modern lightweight composite materials would be very helpful, here; we could probably make a 75-kilo grand piano if we wanted to, these days.

(One of the indications that the huge design-concept “Strato Cruiser lifestyle zeppelin” I liked to above is not a workable device is its hilarious inclusion of a topside swimming pool. That would weigh at least a hundred tonnes, and maybe a lot more; a standard Olympic pool contains at least 2,500 tonnes of water. It’d get a lot lighter when the airship turned and the water all sloshed out, of course.)

This, for instance, was just the dining room on the Hindenburg. It also had a lounge, a writing room, a smoking room (which contained the single lighter permitted aboard the vessel…), bathrooms, a crew mess hall, and small, but private, cabins for the 50-to-72 passengers.

“Oh, but what if someone tried to hijack the zeppelin, or blow it up?”, I hear, from the people who don’t mind having their shoes examined before they’re allowed onto a plane.

Well, if the hijackers are only armed with box cutters, passengers could just run away from them through the modern zeppelin’s acres of lounges, bars and tennis courts. And if terrorists had, let’s say, a two-part shaped-charge-plus-thermite guaranteed-747-killer of a bomb, you could stand back and let ‘em set it off, straight out into a gas-bag. The venting gas might catch fire, but the straight hydrogen inside the gas cell cannot support combustion by itself, and automated systems could dump the cell’s contents out the side of the airship, or pump it into other cells. The damage would be a reduction of total lift by a few per cent, at worst. The frame of the airship could be a tensegrity structure of light composite beams and pressurised gas cells, so there’d be no single component an attacker could break to bring the whole ship down.

Even if the terrorists were running around with satchels full of bombs setting them off wherever they could, they’d still only be able to damage the gas cells adjacent to the passenger areas. You wouldn’t even need to have gas cells in such locations, if you didn’t mind making the airship somewhat larger.

Let’s see - what other objections might there be?

Oh, yes: “What if a storm catches you? You’d be blown around like a toy balloon! Storms were a big problem for the old hydrogen airships, you know!”

Well, yes, they were. But that was because the old passenger dirigibles - and the early military ones - had a cruising altitude that seldom exceeded 2000 feet, and was often much lower. Like other aircraft of the time, they didn’t have pressurised passenger compartments, so they simply couldn’t fly too high without everyone needing oxygen masks and eight layers of sealskin.

Back in WWI some bomber airships were made as “height climbers”, flimsier in structure to make them able to attain great altitude; doing so was rather dangerous, and horrible for the crew, especially when the engines started freezing up. Even when flying at modest altitude, the old dirigible engines often needed in-flight maintenance, which was a very exciting task. None of these problems would apply to a modern zeppelin, with a pressurised cabin and reliable engines, or even fuel-cell-powered electric motors.

With modern technology to manage the gas bags, modern engines, vectored thrust for much better maneuverability and pressurised gondolas, modern dirigibles would only need to worry about weather during takeoff and landing - and they could probably delay landing a lot longer than a 747 can. The rest of the time, they’d deal with storms in the same way that regular airliners do - by flying over them.

This does creates obvious limits to the routes airships could fly, though, since they couldn’t make much headway against fast high-altitude air currents. We could easily make dirigibles twice as fast as the Zeppelins were, but that still only gets you to 260km/h. If you’re happy to go in the same direction as a jet stream, though, it’ll boost your speed by an easy 50-to-100 knots.

I think the main actual reason why nobody’s brought back the zeppelin is that they wouldn’t be cost-competitive with heavier-than-air craft, in the same way that ocean liners couldn’t compete with planes. Airships might be able to compete for some exotic cargo applications, perhaps, as per the above-linked SkyHook JHL-40, a hybrid zeppelin/rotorcraft, but they certainly couldn’t deliver passengers from A to B anything like as cheaply as an airliner.

In a fantasy world where everybody wasn’t utterly determined to turn every field of human experience into a money-making operation, however (hey, how’s that all working out for you, world?), and assuming that we actually could make 38,000-foot-capable pressurised zeppelins if we wanted to (”…we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t…”), then airships certainly would be competitive, if one’s aim was to travel in a pleasant way.

Ocean liners of the sky, able to cover 5000 kilometres a day and take off and land virtually anywhere, which cause people to actively compete to buy a house near the airport, just to be able to watch them. Sounds like an improvement to me.

Ever since I started this blog, people have been complaining, quite rightly, about the dumb comment box, which was tiny and had no preview feature.

Blog comment boxes are generally unsuitable for posting really big comments, because it’s painful to edit a lot of text in even a large preview box, and because if something times out or otherwise dies when you click “submit”, you can easily end up losing everything you wrote. But there’s a large grey area between “quick one-liner” comments, small enough that you could dash them off via SMS if you had to, and “comments you obviously have to write in a text editor”. Numerous people found themselves lost in this grey area, and many comments were hideously maimed.

I presumed it would be difficult for me to fix this, and back-burnered the problem for years on end. (I also hand-corrected comments that were screwed up because the author couldn’t preview them. It was the least I could do.)

As it turns out, though, it’s piss-easy to give a Blogsome blog a proper JavaScript live comment preview. All you have to do is paste some stuff into one of the template files.

So now, at long last, there’s a proper comment preview on How To Spot A Psychopath. Do tell me if it doesn’t work properly in whatever browser you’re running; I’ve only checked it in Firefox, Chrome and IE6 on Windows.

(Bonus points if you have to tell me via e-mail, because the preview box screws up your browser so badly that you now can’t post a comment at all! Oh, and because the preview is done in JavaScript, it of course won’t work if you have JavaScript disabled or blocked, or if you’re using some antediluvian/mobile-phone/C64 browser that doesn’t support JavaScript at all.)

Yes, I am suitably embarrassed about not having taken the five minutes to do this at some previous point in the last two and a half years.

(I still have the silly CAPTCHA thing, where if you’re not logged in you’re told to fill out the CAPCTHA to post your comment, and then you discover that you actually can’t comment at all unless you’re logged in, and further discover that the CAPTCHA disappears entirely once you are logged in. I consider this slight imperfection in my blog to be evidence of its hand-crafted nature, and may take another two and a half years to fix it.)

A reader just pointed me to this comparison of the recording quality of the Samson Zoom H4 Handy Digital Recorder, the Zoom H4n, and Sony’s PCM-D50 portable audio recorders, on Brad Linder’s blog.

These things are little high-quality digital audio recorders. They’re smaller than most portable compact-cassette recorders - actually, they’re approaching the size of an old microcassette dictation recorder - but they have sound quality that the old concert bootleggers could only dream of. These sorts of recorders come with built-in microphones, of far higher quality than the mics in any small portable recorder before low-power portable audio-processing hardware and low-cost Flash RAM made this sort of device possible. You could have put super-high-quality mics on an old cassette recorder if you wanted to, but it was pointless; nothing you could stick in even a large pocket could record good enough audio to justify expensive mics.

(Yes, I know there were some relatively small analogue-tape field recorders that gave very good results - usually because they recorded on something better than a cassette - if you plugged a quality mic into them. There was probably also some integrated-microphone doodad that recorded on small reel-to-reel tape or Type IV cassettes with Dolby S or something, about which I just haven’t happened to hear. But modern digital field recorders are still amazing, all right?)

Anyway, Linder set up all three recorders next to each other, and talked and then played guitar into the built-in microphones. Then he posted the audio from the three recorders, for his readers to audition.

Overall, the commenters opined that the H4 was OK, the H4n was better, and the PCM-D50 was best. They were pretty much unanimous that the difference between the H4 and the Sony was as plain as day - compared with the Sony, the H4 was “muddy” or “muddled”, “disjointed”, “scrambled”, or slightly noisier; one commenter called it “not even worth talking about”. One guy even said he heard wow and flutter. There was general agreement that the Sony was clearly superior.

The only problem with all this - which another commenter soon discovered - was that Brad actually screwed up. Instead of pasting in the embed code for all three recorders, he pasted in the H4 code, then the H4n code… and then the H4 code again. He just labelled it as the Sony PCM-D50.

So the first, and the third, sound clips were precisely identical. On account of being the same sound clip twice. But the one that was labelled Samson Zoom H4 sounded lousy, and the one that was labelled Sony PCM-D50 sounded great.

Psychoacoustics: It ain’t just a river in Egypt.

Wait. That didn’t come out right.

This happy accident reminds me of the techniques James Randi has so often used on people with alleged supernatural abilities. I’m re-reading his classic Flim-Flam!, which contains a number of examples. When, for instance, a woman said she could use dowsing to find ancient ruins just by examining a map, without even a scale or North-pointer, Randi tested her on three maps in sequence, all of which were actually of the same well-explored part of Peru, but rotated and scaled differently.

Needless to say, her exceedingly vague results put “ruins” in different places every time, and not a one of ‘em even managed to hit Machu Picchu, which was exactly the sort of thing she said she could find.

(Audiophiles usually seem to address psychoacoustic problems by adding as many more uncontrolled variables to their sound comparisons as they can. I presume this is some sort of demonstration that their perception of sound is not merely superhuman, but super-mega-ultra-hyper-human.)

This looked like another boring spammy e-mail asking me to link to a site full of crap or post someone’s ready-made advertorial in return for a kickback, but it turned out to be a lot more entertaining.

From: Strickman Ripps <sri-australia@live.com>
To: <dan@dansdata.com>
Subject: Hey Dan, what about this idea?
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 16:32:40 -0400

Hi Dan. My name is Jeremiah Pietroniro and I am working with Strickman Research out of NYC. We are looking for people who have made suggestions about operating systems in forums over the course of the last few years. We think that your readers might be just the people we’re looking for. If you are interested in posting something to get their attention and get them to speak with us, we have a proposal for you.

I’ve included a form letter that explains in greater detail what and who I am talking about. Thanks for taking a moment to check it out.

Jeremiah

Subject: Research Proposal

Dear Administrator:

My name is Jeremiah Pietroniro and I am with Strickman Research in New York City. We have been hired by Microsoft to conduct a paid, international blog and forum research study, finding people who have commented on various versions of their Windows OS. You have probably already been contacted by Microsoft about this research study. We are looking for people who have previously made suggestions or expressed their wishes about certain features or functions they would like to see in future versions of Windows and/or features that they currently appreciate in the Windows 7 Beta.

We are wondering if we could pay you for your assistance in reaching out to your site users? We would like to find these people by announcing our search in a system-wide email to all your users. In order to preserve the integrity of our findings, we must withhold Microsoft’s name from this study. We kindly ask for your understanding and cooperation in this. It is imperative that Microsoft’s name not appear in any further written or verbal communication.

We are proposing a $500 US up-front payment to your website (via Paypal) for sending out our call for submissions by email to all your users. (Please see the text of our proposed email below.*) You would receive an additional $25 US per person for each person from your site that qualifies for and participates in our research video interview, for which they would be paid $100 US.

We realize that privacy is a concern and can assure you that any respondents who choose to participate will only be contacted in connection with this project and their personal information will not be stored or shared for any other purpose.

We thank you for your consideration and for providing such a great platform for the tech community.

Please let me know your thoughts about this proposal or any facet of our project. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Jeremiah Pietroniro
Strickman Research
66 W. Broadway #602
New York, NY 10007
australia@strickman-ripps.com

Proposed e-mail from Hosts to Members

Subject: your opinion + 20 minutes = $100

Dear Member:

Strickman Research, a marketing research firm, has contacted us for assistance in reaching out to you with this invitation to participate in a paid research study. If you qualify for the study, they would ask for no more than 20 minutes of your time and would pay you $100 US:

What are we researching?

We are looking for people who have left comments on various blogs and forums about operating system software they’ve used. We are looking for people who have previously “published” their suggestions online and expressed their wishes for certain features or functions they would like to see in future versions of various PC operating systems. Such comments can run the gamut from very technical to very broad, for instance comments like: “I wish it would boot faster.” or “How can I share files between my home computers?” would suffice. The wishes and suggestions can be implied in a question where one is hoping to find a solution to a particular problem.

We are looking for comments published online between 1/2005 – 12/2008. More recent, positive assessments of newer operating systems published in 2009 may also be pertinent.

How do I participate?

If you left a written comment on a blog, forum or informational website which was, broadly speaking, a suggestion or wish for a certain feature or function you would like to see improved in your computer’s operating system, please find your specific comment or comments online and paste the address/es in an email to us at australia@strickman-ripps.com

Please include:

1. The link to your comment/s including the date when it/they was/were posted

2. Your username on that/those site/s

3. Full name

4. Email address

5. Phone number

6. Location (CityState/Country)

7. Best time to be reached

What should I expect?

Once we have received your email, and reviewed your comment/s, a representative from Strickman Research will contact you by phone to ask you a few qualifying questions. This call will take no more than 10 minutes of your time. If you qualify (95% of applicants should qualify) we will schedule you for a recorded internet video chat at your convenience that would take no more than 20 minutes of your time and for which you would be paid $100 US in the form of a VISA cash card.

What if I don’t qualify?

If you do not meet the criteria for our research study, we will most likely let you know in the first few minutes of our phone call. We will not trouble you any further and we will not store or share you contact information.

What if I have other questions?

Please email us. We look forward to hearing from you.

Many thanks for your consideration,

Jeremiah Pietroniro
Strickman Research
66 W. Broadway #602
New York, NY 10007
www.strickman-ripps.com

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Insert movie times and more without leaving Hotmail®. See how.

(That’s right - Mr Pietroniro is sending his super-secret big-buck Microsoft marketing messages from a Hotmail account.)

My favourite part is definitely “…to preserve the integrity of our findings … It is imperative that Microsoft’s name not appear”.

I really don’t know what to make of this. It’s weird. I mean, even ignoring the DON’T TELL ANYBODY IT’S COMMISSIONED BY MICROSOFT OMG part for a moment, look at the bizarrely huge payouts they’re offering. You usually only see promised rewards of this magnitude in classic “Make Money By Filling Out Surveys!” scams.

“95% of applicants should qualify”, times the number of applicants even moderately popular sites like mine could drum up in response to a “$US100 for a 20 minute survey” offer, would start running into the millions of dollars in only a day or two. All you need to make it past the starting gate, after all, is a comment on a forum somewhere in which you express your wish that future operating systems will include one of those fascinating doughnut-making machines. Write your comment, e-mail the survey people, wait for your promised 95% chance of making $US100 in 20 minutes.

Perhaps Strickman Research only have enough people in their phone bank to handle a small number of surveys a day, which’d keep the total cost down. But then, of course, a more accurate description of the deal would be that “99% of applicants will never even get a call”.

(The payment, via “Visa cash card”, may be on the dodgy side too; those things are apparently often something of a rip-off all by themselves, and I’ve no idea how, or even if, the deal would work for people outside the USA.)

Keeping the identity of the sponsor a secret is not actually, by itself, an ethical problem. You need to disclose who sponsored a survey if and when you publicly release the results, but there’s no need to disclose the sponsor to the people being surveyed - actually, disclosing the sponsor can often prejudice the results. This especially applies in situations like political polling, where telling someone that the survey is being run by the party they hate, or indeed by the party they love, may plausibly cause them to say things they don’t really believe just to move the poll results one way or another. (This is kind of the opposite of a “push poll“; there’s a lengthy analysis of these issues here.)

This same argument definitely also applies to people’s computer-operating-system preferences. There are plenty of people who have a more distinct preference for a particular OS than they have for any political party.

But then again, people are perfectly happy to offer Microsoft advice on improving Windows for free, all the time, all over the place. This offer is only extended to people who’ve already expressed such an opinion, and I find it hard to believe that just being honest and saying “Microsoft is soliciting user feedback about features you’d like to see in future versions of Windows” wouldn’t be just as effective.

Do they really think they’ll gain access to some wellspring of OS-design inspiration by offering large amounts of money from a secret source?

Actually, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing turned out to be some kind of scam, that doesn’t actually have anything to do with Microsoft at all. While fishing around to see what the heck is going on, I found this blog post, from someone who just received an instant message from another “Strickman Ripps” person. That blogger has, I think not unreasonably, decided the message could be from a scam artist, based on this same weird promise of lots of money for no real effort, from someone with another darn Hotmail address.

Even if this really is a genuine offer from a rather unprofessional company whose services Microsoft have actually retained, offering someone a substantial lump of money in return for (a) publicity and (b) keeping something about the publicity deal secret… that just smells wrong, to me.

Accepting restrictions on journalistic freedom in return for “access” to news sources is bad enough. Accepting restrictions in return for a plain old pile of money is way over the line.

I’m not suggesting that some survey about computer operating systems is a major journalistic-ethics battleground. I think it’s actually only a couple of notches above the everyday situation where entertainment reporters can have their very own five-minute interview with Mister Big Movie Star, on condition that they don’t ask him anything about his bizarre religion.

But I’m generally in favour of letting cats out of bags. Especially if some PR agency with an advanced Web site demands that the cats remain within said bag.

That $500 would have been a nice contribution to my new-PC fund. But it now occurs to me that you readers can all pretend you read about the deal somewhere else and never saw the word “Microsoft” anywhere, then write an OS-feature-suggestion comment on your favourite scrapbooking or Twilight fanfic forum, then apply for your 95%-guaranteed hundred bucks, and after you get your money, kick back a little of it to me!

What could possibly go wrong?!