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My partner felt a need to contribute to the blizzard of postal spam that preceded the Australian election of last weekend. So she signed her name to a letter declaring her belief, and that of some other women here in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, that Australian Liberal Party Prime-Ministerial candidate Tony Abbott is, among his many other fascinating qualities, no friend to women.

I can save you the trouble of reading those last few links, by just saying that Tony's a conservative Catholic. He actually studied to be a priest before deciding to switch to the less stigmatised profession of journalism, and thence to the even more upstanding life of a politician. The current watch-this-space, don't-get-too-attached-to-her Labor leader Julia Gillard is, downright astonishingly by the standards of modern Western politics, an admitted atheist.

The upshot of the election was a hung Parliament, in which the two major parties fought each other to a standstill, leaving Gillard as a "caretaker Prime Minister" and a few independents, plus exactly one Green, holding the balance of power.

Voting - well, technically just getting your name ticked off on the list, and then doing something which resembles voting - is mandatory in Australia. (The penalty for not getting your name checked off exceeds nineteen dollars!) But the process is enlivened by our preferential voting system. This allows one to at least indicate who one would like to run the country instead of the ratbags of Major Party A or the scumbuckets of Major Party B, while still being able to say that if you have to have ratbags or scumbuckets, you'd prefer the ratbags. Or the scumbuckets.

Which is to say, I don't think it's excessively presumptuous to say that the women who signed the anti-Abbott letter are not delighted beyond all human reckoning with the Labor alternative. They'd just prefer it.

Yesterday we received a letter, about the anti-Abbott letter. I find this second letter delightful in every way, and I wish its anonymous author - who's phoned us too, but regrettably only been able to leave a message - another 73 years of good health and Apoplectic Capital Letters.

I suppose I should show you the actual anti-Abbott letter first, but it's kind of boring while the reply is hilarious, so here's a compromise: Read on for the original letter, or click here to skip straight to the reply!

(My few additions below are in [square brackets].)

Dear [recipient's name]

We are writing to you as concerned members of the community. This election is critical and we are asking all women to seriously consider how they vote.

Australia is at serious risk of returning to an ulta-conservative Abbott-led Government. Women need to consider Mr Abbott's track record on a range of issues that impact women and their lives.

Whilst Mr Abbott has tried to distance himself from comments he has made by shrugging them off as a joke, we don't believe they are a joking matter.

Over the years Mr Abbott has made his views clear on the role of women in our society:

"I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation...simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons".
[to a reporter, back in 1979]

"For myself, I don't support "women's" causes. I support conservative causes."
[posted by Mr Abbott on his Web site in September 2008]

"I won't be rushing out to get my daughters vaccinated against cervical cancer."
[from 2006]

Just last week Mr Abbott said at a press conference:

"Are you suggesting to me that when it comes from Julia, 'No' doesn't mean 'No'?"
[August 2010]

This is a clear reference to the anti-sexual assault campaign slogan. Mr Abbott should know that sexual assault is never a laughing matter.

We believe that Mr Abbott and his Government would take back all the gains that women have achieved over the last 50-odd years. Please consider how you vote on August 21 - don't send Australian women back to the kitchen.

Yours sincerely,

Marg Acton, Helen Chapman, Kate Cooke, Irena Kesa, Naomi Parry, Sharon Dart, Libby O'Donnell, Jude Cooke, Chrissy Girard, Ashleigh Cummings, Anne O'Grady, Jackie Manners, Mary Travers, Angela Cleary, Samantha Clarke, Gay Thew, Kathy O'Hara, Susie McMeekin, Reenie Kuypers, Sarah Terkes, Xanthe Stavrakis, Genie Melone, Jo Hibbert, Susan Ambler, Sam Thompson, Lesley Sammon, Deanne Dale, Lorraine Vogel, Suzanne Langford and Sara Rose.

Residents of the Blue Mountains.

---

Authorised by Elizabeth O'Donnell, 9 Vale Street, Katoomba, 2780.

And now, the response!

(The links in the text below were added by me. Everything else was in the original. It was, sadly, just two sheets of plain photocopied 24-pin dot-matrix printout, with no green ink or underlining. I have taken care to reproduce its exact content, though.)

To The LABOR Women of the Blue Mountains

What a lot of misguided people you all are. To align yourself with the Labor Party tells me that you are possibly not very well educated, domineering, rather spiteful and definitely 'Greenies' — who believe in the scam of 'Global Warming' which is actually caused by Natural Solar Processes which also control the Ocean Tides — the Change of Seasons — the Sun Shining — Winds blowing — Earth Quakes — and Volcanos

The Labor Party — the Unions — the Greenies or anyone else does not have the Power to change the way the Universe has 'worked' since time began. Nothing Julia Giilard can do will make any difference to the Atmosphere --- but it will make a huge difference to your Bank Account in a NEGATIVE way but - will boost the Bank Account of Magabi's personal Bank balance plus the Bank Accounts of Leaders of Third World, Asian and African Countries.

I am amazed how low you women have gone to dig deep into some garbage back in 1979 to 'print a portion' of something Tony Abbott said when he was a very young 20 to 22 year old. I would hope he would have different ideas now as a very responsible adult - than he had when he was in his twenties — it is a pity you women don't learn from him.!

I did think very carefully before I voted and made very sure I put Labor no. 84 and the Greens no.83 on the big voting sheet — it was a task to fill out all the numbers but well satisfying.

Tony Abbott is well aware of womens needs being a married man with three beautiful daughters --- Julia Giilard will NEVER have the insight into womens needs as Tony Abbott does — being a Husband and Father of three daughters,

I was born at Wentworth Falls in 1937 - went to school at Wentworth Falls Primary and then Katoomba High — when it was in Parke St Katoomba .

My Father had a business at Wentworth Falls.

I have four Children and eleven Grandchildren and five Great Grand Children and have seen many changes over the years including a number of Prime Ministers and Politicians including the Great Sir Robert Menzies and John Howard. Then came the hateful — spiteful Labor Party who are so manipulative and eventually 'stabbed their own Leader in the back' so as Julia Gillard could fulfil her aspirations as Prime Minister --- and this is the Party you want people to vote for --- you must be joking.!

I think YOU lot, are the ones who should be giving a lot of thought about the Politicians you are so wrapped in.

Sincerely

Mountain Nanny

(After a bit of redistribution, the previously-safe-Labor seat in which we live went to the Liberals.)

Imagine my delight at receiving the following:

From: “Clink Admin” >admin@clink.com.au<
To: dan@dansdata.com
Subject: A review?
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:21:37 +1000

Hi Dan,

I was wondering if you would do a review of something on my website, address in signature.
Not sure if anything on there is along the lines of stuff you would normally but think there may be a couple of items that fit in.

Would love if you would do a review of my Vortex Analogue Interconnects, these have proven very popular cable.
http://clink.com.au/audio/stereo.htm (bottom of the page)
So would be great to get an independent and unbiased view of these.
Would only ask you to do a cable review though if you feel it is something that has an impact on audio quality.
If your of the school of thought that they have no impact then prefer not to have a review done as it would be very short, probably in the under 10 words variety of short.

Gregory
Cinema Link, Sales
675 Elizabeth St
Waterloo NSW 2017
Ph: (02) 9698 4959
www.clink.com.au

[There was a bit more to this e-mail; I’ve corresponded with Gregory previously. He asked if I’d like to check out one of his HDMI switches, which I don’t actually have the equipment to test but which seem quite handy; by linking to them and other pages of his without so much as a nofollow, I hereby repay Greg for what’s going to happen to him in the rest of this post!]

My answer:

Yeeeahhh… you haven’t read much of my site, have you :-)?

(Or this blog, for that matter.)

It’s the “school of thought” part that I think is the problem. There’s no need to separate people into pseudo-religious “schools of thought” over a question that can be settled by scientific means.

We know, with the same certainty that we know that the GPS system and personal computers work and for many of the same reasons, that none of the conventionally-measurable electrical characteristics of analogue cables have any effect on the sound. Well, except in particularly pathological cases where some truly bizarre cable architecture adds substantial reactance or something, in which case it only makes a system sound better if there was something wrong with the system in the first place. Like, your speakers have 14 drivers wired in parallel and thus have far too little impedance for your amp to happily drive, so hooking them up via carbon spark-plug leads or something that add a lot of resistance un-ruins the sound.

(See also those occasional fringe-audiophile products that are actually quantifiably bad, like
this amplifier, plus a veritable cavalcade of dreadful valve amplifiers. All of which have users who insist that they sound GREAT.)

[Oh - in case you’re wondering, yes, Cinema Link have fancy digital cables, too…]

The analogue-cables-sound-different response to the electrical-engineering argument is to say that DC-to-daylight frequency and phase analysis just doesn’t measure some special something that they know when they hear it, science doesn’t know everything, et cetera.

But a vanishingly small percentage of the people who say this ever bother to do even a simple single-blind test to see if they, themselves, can actually hear any difference between their special cables and lamp cord. Such tests really are not difficult to do at all - all you need is a trustworthy friend to flip coins, swap cables and make notes, some very elementary experimental design, and a spare afternoon - but they’re amazingly unpopular. Un-blinded tests remain immensely popular, but it’s trivially demonstrable that those don’t work.

This is my favourite recent example, but there are countless others, covering the entire breadth of live and recorded sound. Vision and hearing are subject to an immense amount of processing by the brain before consciousness gets to perceive them.

(Another favourite of mine: Famous concert violinists are often certain that they can tell the difference between a priceless antique violin - especially if it’s their Stradivarius or whatever - and a high-quality modern instrument. But when you do a blinded test, the results, once again, drop to chance levels! They can probably pick the Strad blindfolded if they’re actually holding it in their hands, but that’s all.)

Some audiophiles go so far as to say that no matter how perfect the experiment design, with no possibly-sound-colouring ABX switchboxes or skull-resonance-changing blindfolds involved, these sorts of differences just can’t be detected by science, in the same way that God will never permit Himself to be detected by scientific investigation. Exactly how these people figured out that the new cables sounded better is, in these cases, something of a mystery.

(The people who insist that cables need “burn-in time” have a particularly neat way out of blinded tests; they can just assert that the… phlogiston, or whatever… leaks out of burned-in cables when you disconnect them. But I’d be willing to bet quite a lot of money that swapping out their expensive burned-in wires for hidden $2 interconnects and bell-wire speaker cables would pass entirely unnoticed.)

I’m inclined to go easy on people who buy fancy cables and reckon they sound good. We all fool ourselves frequently, which is why science is so important, but a fooling of oneself that leads to essentially harmless happiness is not a major crime.

But I really must insist that people who’re in the business of making and selling fancy cables have no right to make any claims about the “sound” of their products, if they haven’t at least hired a few first-year electrical-engineering students to spend a day doing an independent test.

If, when blinded tests were done, they at least reasonably frequently showed that fancy cables sounded better, then it’d be no big deal to sell such products without doing the tests yourself. But what we instead keep seeing is that in a blinded test people can’t tell the difference between Monster Cables and (literal) coat-hanger wire. (Monster products may be overpriced and often sold in a blatantly dishonest way, but surely they ought to beat coat-hangers!)

Given this, I cannot help but consider the basic rationale for products such as your cables as being as unproven as the notion that a chiropractor can cure diabetes, or that all poor people are poor because they do not adequately desire wealth.

It’s not the Middle Ages any more. We know where lightning comes from, we have machines that routinely fly hundreds of people thousands of miles in (relative) comfort, and our doctors have figured out that it’s a good idea to wash your hands before operating. Every day, people in First World nations are surrounded by proof of the effectiveness of scientific inquiry that’s so bright, loud and ubiquitous that we, apparently, have developed the ability to tune it out when it suits us. But that doesn’t make it a good idea to do so.

You’re not a quack, and I don’t think you’re a scam artist, either. Your cables aren’t outrageously expensive relative to the price of the components and assembly - they might as well be free, when compared with the truly out-there cable vendors. And you don’t sell $1000 power cables, either (…do you? Tell me you don’t!). But this doesn’t mean that sending samples of new cables to your existing customers and using their testimonials in advertising is an acceptable way of proving your claims.

If testimonials were a good way of proving the scientifically dubious, I’d be torn between devoting all my time and money to Transcendental Meditation in order to develop the ability to fly and walk through walls, or devoting just as much time and probably even more money to Scientology in order to develop the ability to control space and time.

At the end of the day, I suppose you do end up with “schools of thought”, but the members of those schools are not “people who reckon special cables sound better” and “people who don’t” (or “people who reckon Uri Geller has paranormal powers” and “people who don’t“; I’m sure you can provide many of your own examples). They’re “people who believe this question is amenable to rational investigation” and “people who don’t care”.

You’re allowed to not care. Everyone’s entitled to his opinion. But nobody’s entitled to be taken seriously.

Gregory replied:

Thanks for taking the time to reply in depth, and for the informative links.

I’ve taken a little more time this time to read some of the pieces on your site and understand a little more of your thoughts on audio cables.

So I’ll take that as no, or at least I’ll take it as something that would be detrimental to my business health.

To which I replied:

…and you are thus acknowledging that if you made an attempt to figure out if your fancy cables worked, you’d find that they didn’t? :-)

[Greg’s, regrettably, not yet found time to reply to that.]

As I said, for hi-fi this really doesn’t make a whole lot of difference either way. Even the really wacky Shun Mook or Peter Belt (…or just about anything else that 6moons thinks is fantastic…) sort of hi-fi cultism doesn’t really hurt anyone - certainly not by the standards of the usual kind of cult. Some nut out there has probably bought speaker wire instead of nutritious food for his children, but that is hardly a probable situation.

That doesn’t mean that the same patterns observable in truly harmful things like crazy cults and medical quackery aren’t valid when you see them in other contexts, though. One I find particularly common, which is very much on show in the audiophile world, is the peculiar and inexplicable situation in which the better you investigate something - eliminating extra variables, reducing experimenter bias, reducing the ability of subjects to fool themselves - the less effect that something turns out to have.

When “lousy test” shows “huge effect” and “better test” shows “medium effect” and “further-improved test” shows “not much effect at all”, it may be that the latter two tests were false negatives.

But it usually does actually mean that “perfect test” would show “zero effect”.

A reader writes:

This seemed right up your alley. I saw this on Gizmodo this morning:

I initially dismissed it as totally fake. After all, it's just a string of pin adapters, and you can't get a flash drive to talk to a parallel port.

But then I thought some more. What if one were to replace the crystal in the USB drive with one of a much lower frequency, and then write a virtual device driver which implements USB using the parallel port pins? This would, of course, make the USB device useless on a regular USB interface, but it seems like it would be possible. And there's also the question of "why on earth would you want to?", but if you're the type to ask that question, you probably wouldn't have seen it in the first place.

Do you have any insight as to why such an approach would or would not work technically?

Ammon

(Anyone can do it!)

This reminds me of the hardware dongle, one of the many wonderful creations of the copy-control industry. Nowadays I think copy-protection dongles are all USB, but there was a time when some lucky users had to daisy-chain multiple parallel-port doodads in order to run multiple protected apps at once.

As you say, there'd surely be some way to connect a USB thumb drive to a parallel port, but not with standard computer-store products. (No, you can't just take a USB-to-parallel adapter and turn it around.)

I'm sure this sort of trick has actually been done many times, to connect modern storage to legacy systems. I don't think it'd be a huge job for one of the modern easy-to-program microcontrollers (Arduino, etc). If you've got some 35-year-old industrial computer that still works fine except its moving-parts storage keeps crapping out when the mining dust or machine-shop shavings get into it, hacking up some way to replace its ancient hard (or floppy, or optical, or tape) drive with Flash RAM is attractive.

There's more than one part of the hack-as-presented that couldn't possibly work, but what I immediately noticed was the green USB-to-mini-DIN adapter, which is probably one of those standard adapters for connecting a USB mouse to a PS/2 port, several of which can usually be found in the desk drawers of anybody who's been using a PC for the last ten years.

Those mouse adapters are, as you say, just pin-adapters, containing no logic; you could in principle do the same job with paper-clips and tape. Mice that work with these distinctive green adapters all have USB and PS/2 compatibility built in, and use one or the other depending on what they reckons they're plugged into. I think any of the green adapters will work with any such mouse, but they won't work with a USB-only mouse, and they definitely won't work with USB devices in general.

This sort of thing is one of the standard causes of support people banging their heads on the desk.

Theorem: The guy who's daisy-chained adapters so he can plug his XT keyboard into his iPad is preferable to the guy who's managed to plug a PCI card into a memory slot by just pushing really, really hard.

Discuss.