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Author Topic:   Coffee House Musing
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(3)
Message 7 of 380 (885605)
04-20-2021 12:43 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by AZPaul3
04-18-2021 8:57 PM


Re: Astronomy
And even before CCDs analog astronomy was rarely about looking through the telescope but rather was all about photography.
When it comes to telescopes, why does size matter so much? Telescope size has nothing to do with magnification of the image. So why is getting a bigger telescope such a big deal?
It's all about light collection. Most objects we want to view are not visible to the eye because they are far too faint -- and the more distant they are the fainter they are as per the inverse-square law. Very little of their light reaches us. The larger a telescope is, the more light it can collect, including that very little light from those faint objects.
But even with the largest telescope possible, the astronomer would still not be able to see most of those objects. Which is why they had to resort to astrophotography, exposing that film for hours at a time to collect enough light from those distant faint objects.
Even in everyday life photography has gone digital, so it makes sense that astrophotography would have done the same.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 8 of 380 (885606)
04-20-2021 12:45 PM
Reply to: Message 3 by Percy
04-20-2021 9:20 AM


Re: The Larger Picture
Even my coffee cup is programmable and has an app now
So you can drink your coffee only if you have a compatible phone? Eg, if you have an iPhone and an Android coffee cup then your phone will refuse to talk to your coffee cup?

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Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(4)
Message 9 of 380 (885609)
04-20-2021 2:09 PM
Reply to: Message 5 by Phat
04-20-2021 11:53 AM


Re: Astronomy
This whole math thing is no replacement for woo.
Rather, woo is sadly a wide spread replacement for actual thought. With math we can analyze what we observe and figure it out. With woo all you can do is either wave your hands a lot or else clamp your hands over your eyes and ears in order to avoid learning anything.
For example, Dawkins' WEASEL program producing a specific sentence (eg, Shakespeare's "Methinks it is like a weasel", my MONKEY uses the alphabet in alphabetical order) by randomly selecting letters to string together. Using single-step selection (ie, creationists' misconception of evolution working by having something complex like a modern animal cell just falling together in a single event) that would be virtually impossible (making a million attempts every second it would take about 195 trillion years to have a one-in-a-million chance of success -- nearly 10,000 times longer than the universe's estimated age of 20 billion years). But Dawkins' WEASEL uses cumulative selection using evolutionary processes such are in wide spread use by life itself, in which small random changes are retained and form the starting point for the next small random change. Dawkins wrote it as a simple BASIC program, started the program and went out for lunch. It had generated the target string before he returned from lunch.
I didn't believe that, so I tested it (BTW, that's not your beloved woo approach). Not having a program listing for his WEASEL, I wrote my own program using his description as my specification (in a page that collected WEASEL programs, my program was described as being the closest to the original) using a compiled language (first Pascal, later ported to C) instead of a slow interpreted language like BASIC. When I ran my program on an XT clone (Norton Factor 2), it generated the target string (the alphabet in alphabetical order) in less than 30 seconds -- modern PCs run about a thousand times faster or more so the program appears to run instantaneously.
I didn't believe that either, so I did the math. It turns out that, while the probability for success for a single small-step attempt is small, when you bundle that with 100 such attempts happening in parallel (just as life itself would do it within a population) then the probability of all of them failing becomes very small -- hence the probability of at least one of them succeeding becomes very high -- and then the probability of all of them failing consistently over many generation becomes vanishingly small -- hence the probability of success within the population becomes a virtual dead certainty. It cannot fail.
My page on that is MONKEY, which links to my mathematical analysis of the probabilities involved, MONKEY PROBABILITIES (MPROBS). Both were originally published on CompuServe in 1990.
"Everybody's got something to hide, except for me and my monkey!" (Lennon and McCartney)
Doing the math shows what actually happens. Depending on woo would have you believing a falsehood and would keep you perpetually in the darkness of ignorance.
 
Another example is Kent Hovind's false claim that if the sun were actually as old as science says it is (about 5 billion (109) years old) then that ancient sun would have been so incredibly large and massive that its incredibly greater gravity would have "sucked the earth in". He bases that on the rate at which the sun "burns its fuel" -- that would be the loss of mass from hydrogen fusing into helium, though I suspect that "Dr" (fake PhD bought from a diploma mill) Hovind (self-proclaimed expert on math and science) doesn't understand how the sun "burns its fuel" and thinks that it's through combustion (eg, he explained that crashing the Galileo probe into Jupiter wouldn't turn it into a star because there's not enough oxygen in the Jovian atmosphere to sustain combustion) which doesn't result in any mass loss anyway (according to my high school chemistry). That rate of mass loss, 5 million tons per second, times 5 billion (5×109) years results in a truly astronomical number of tons lost over that period of time.
Hovind never reveals that number, but rather lets his audience stew in their love of woo as he waves his hands and feeds them outrageous lies -- in jazz dancing, that use of "jazz hands" is intended to distract the audience from seeing how he's messing up his footwork. He even explicitly forbids his audience from ever doing the math or listening to anybody who has done the math.
Why? Because that would dispel the woo and expose his deception. Do the math and find that that rate over that much time would result in a solar mass loss of 7.88923×1023. However, the sun's current mass is about 2500 times greater such that that astronomically large mass loss accounts for a few hundredths of one percent of the sun's total mass. Adding it back in order to arrive at the ancient sun's original mass has virtually no effect on the ancient sun's size or mass. Hovind's hand-waving assessment of the ancient sun "sucking the earth in" is totally false.
My page on that, DWise1: Kent Hovind's Solar Mass Loss Claim, presents different versions of Hovind's solar-mass-loss claim and its refutation. Then the rest of the page gets into a lot of fairly simple solar astrophysics in anticipation of objections that creationists might try to raise.
BTW, I emailed Hovind for information on this claim, mainly asking what his source was or did he come up with it himself (I have found one other use of this claim from more than a decade before Hovind became active). Not only did he try to avoid discussing his claim, but he also tried twice to pick a fight with me over my AOL screenname, DWise1.
That is what happens when one dedicates oneself to woo and against reality.
You don't believe me? Just do the math.
 
ABE:
For fun and edification, here is a film about the sun that I watched in elementary school and learned a lot from. It's Dr. Frank Baxter and a writer (played by Eddie Albert whom I didn't know about at the time) interviewing "Our Mr. Sun":
 

That BS nonsense from Hovind trying twice to pick a fight with me over my screenname, DWise1, led me to include this explanation on my index page:
quote:
Over the years, most especially in on-line "creation/evolution" discussions, creationists have often engaged in personal attacks against me just because of my AOL screen name, "DWise1". In fact, one infamous professional creationist, Kent Hovind, went so far as to twice attempt (via email) to pick a fight with me over my screen name in order to avoid answering a very simple question about one of his claims, namely what his source was. I informed him that the story behind that name is really very mundane and has nothing to do with what he was railing against and I presented it to him.
So then why "DWise1"? Here is the story:
In every multi-user computer system, there are corporate policies for assigning user names. One common one is to append the first letter of the first name to the beginning of the first n letters of the last name (since there's always a limit to the length of the user name), adding numeric digits if the resultant user name has already been assigned. For example, one Dilbert comic depicted a "Brenda Utthead" complaining about the user name they had assigned her.
When I went to work at Hughes Aircraft in 1985, that was their policy, so my user name was "dwise". At the same time, they had bought some of the first Macs, non-networked floppy systems which we used to combine text and graphics in our presentation visuals. To identify my data floppy, I labelled it with my user name, "dwise". Then when I had filled that one and start on a second data diskette, I labeled that one "dwise2" and, for symmetry, I relabelled the first one, "dwise1". Then one day a co-worker read the label of the dwise1 diskette and started to laugh. I didn't get the joke until he told me to read it out loud; up until then I had not realized that it sounded like "The Wise One" and we all had a good laugh over the unintentional pun.
Then when I signed up for AOL several years later, in the middle of the sign-up process I suddenly had to think up a screen name. All I could think of was that accidental pun and so chose "DWise1" as my screen name.
Well, there you have the story. Nothing at all to it. And others have also chosen that name, albeit on other domains, of course -- in each domain there can be only one of any user name.
Edited by dwise1, : to the first paragraph added "With woo all you can do ... "

Edited by dwise1, : Added "It cannot fail."

Edited by dwise1, : ABE


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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 15 of 380 (885730)
04-24-2021 9:31 PM
Reply to: Message 14 by Percy
04-24-2021 5:49 PM


Re: The Larger Picture
... but they're in the Matrix guarded by my toaster which hasn't let me pass since I tried to use it to warm up a fried egg.
Wow! You still have a Flying Toaster? Those things were so cool!

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 17 of 380 (885756)
04-25-2021 3:34 PM
Reply to: Message 16 by ringo
04-25-2021 11:44 AM


Re: The Larger Picture
My dance teacher friend (our relationship is mainly that I assisted her for about 14 years) has an iPhone. As a retired software engineer, Apple software just drives me crazy in how it keeps me from performing the most basic programmer tasks. Even the "Genius Bar" geniuses have told me that the most basic functionality that I need, being able to transfer individual files between my phone and computer (ie, PDFs or photos), was impossible with an iPhone. In addition, photos and videos of my grandsons (all the way across the country in Florida) are unnessecerily complicated because of incompatibilites between Apple and non-Apple devices. A classic example was when I had an AVI file from my camera of a dance routine we had done the week before and tried to display it for the class on a brand-new Mac. That brand-new Mac could not recognize that decade-old AVI file. "Not manufactured here." Well fuck you very much, Apple!
In our two European trips, my friend and I traded our photos afterwards. This second and last time (she died last year on Veterans' Day) she couldn't share her photos because her new iPhone had a proprietary photo format that was incompatible with everybody else. Well fuck you very much, Apple!
My dance teacher friend keeps castigating me for not switching to Apple, but who would ever want to drink that Kool-Aid?

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 19 of 380 (885763)
04-25-2021 4:14 PM
Reply to: Message 18 by jar
04-25-2021 3:45 PM


Re: a bite off the Apple
Apple was smart in their marketing, but it screwed a lot of kids up.
Apple donated a lot of Apple computers to schools. Generations of kids and teachers grew up with Apple computers. Every time we see anyone on TV using a computer, it's most likely an Apple computer or iPhone (in European productions, I saw a lot more Windows computer and phones in use). Then those kids went out into the real world economy and had to work with Windows computers because that's the route that business had taken.
So just who the frak would ever want to make their device appear to be a fracking severely impaired Apple device?
How do you edit a text file? How do you do a hex dump of a file? How do you do anything at all meaningful on an Apple device? You can't even right-click on a screen object. Absolutely useless!

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 20 of 380 (885777)
04-26-2021 12:17 PM
Reply to: Message 16 by ringo
04-25-2021 11:44 AM


Re: The Larger Picture
My phone is a Samsung, so in a pinch I can use it as an immersion heater to make instant coffee.
I had a TNG tricorder app on my Palm Pilot. One of its built-in scanner settings was for heating up a microwave burrito. Unfortunately, my Palm Pilot didn't have the required hardware upgrades so I was never able to properly test that feature.
For my coffee, I stay old-school and still use my Bialetti Moka Express.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(3)
Message 61 of 380 (887838)
08-23-2021 2:35 AM
Reply to: Message 60 by Tanypteryx
08-23-2021 1:12 AM


Re: Dark Energy does not add any extra "space" to Space in a galaxy.
Perhaps not my place to pipe in, but my take without having followed the whole matter with extreme diligence is a bit different. Most of the discussion as well as pooh-poohing (especially by the religiously-motivated anti-science forces as I have observed in the creationist community) sound as if Dark Matter and Dark Energy were something very definite albeit hypothetical.
I see them as place-holders. Kind of like imaginary numbers, which to my knowledge nobody can really define (ie, just what exactly is the square root of -1 when all real squares can only be positive ... kind of like the negative mass you would get when you surpass the speed of light). Or the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (nearly half a century later, I could be a bit rusty about the actual name) in which you differentiate by taking the limit of Δy over Δx as Δx approaches zero (IOW, you're approaching dividing by zero (T-shirt quote: "Sure, it's all just fun and games until somebody divides by zero.")). In the case of Δx, you solve the problem by finding a way to factor the Δx out of the denominator. In the case of the square root of -1, you just keep track of those imaginary factors in the hopes of either eventually eliminating them or else have them indicate something very interesting and quite useful (eg, from my EE classes over 40 years ago, raising the natural base, e, to an imaginary power generates a sinusoidal waveform -- I've been meaning to get back around to relearning all that this past year-and-a-half).
Then I heard of Einstein having to resort to a factor, Λ, that he couldn't define but which he still needed in order to make the math work out. A place holder for some factor that he didn't know about, but which seemed to play a role (since without it the math would not work out).
That is how I tend to view Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Most of what we observe conforms to our understanding and yet there also things which we observe happening which we cannot account for. We don't know what it is, but we are able to work out the effects that it has. So we assume placeholder factors to account for those effects as we try to figure out what it is.
So whenever I heard any heated objections over whether Dark Matter or Dark Energy is real, I just tune them out since they don't understand the discussion. The effects that we ascribe to Dark Matter and Dark Energy are real. We just don't know what's actually causing those effects. Though at the same time we can do a proper job of describing what those effects are.
Like after Herschel had discovered Uranus through observation, astronomers started plotting its orbit and discovered anomalies in its position. The math for determining its orbit was correct as far as we knew, so either we would have to completely scrap and replace our knowledge of orbital mechanics or ... there was some external force causing those anomalies. On the basis of that latter hypothesis, the position of yet another planet, Neptune, was predicted through calculations and confirmed through astronomical observation. As the anomalies of Neptune's orbit similarly led to the discovery of Pluto.
And isn't that how scientific knowledge advances? We think we have it all figured out but then something doesn't quite fit. So we try to figure out what went wrong and we discover something else. I've heard and developed in my topic, So Just How is ID's Supernatural-based Science Supposed to Work? (SUM. MESSAGES ONLY), that while religion offers "all the answers", the answers of science raise ever more questions which are the driving force and direction of further research; in science, an answer which raises no further questions is perhaps worse than useless (eg, the ID's favored "God of the Gaps" standard answer of "goddidit", which not only answers nothing but also blocks any further research into the matter).
Anyway, just a lay-person's handful of loose change.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 144 of 380 (890112)
12-25-2021 11:10 AM
Reply to: Message 143 by Tanypteryx
12-25-2021 9:47 AM


Re: JWST Launch Success
The last 23 years of my career as a software engineer I worked at Odetics and then in their Telecom/Zyfer division which they sold off to Frequency Electronics Inc (FEI). Odetics' robot, Odex (see video below), was just a side project. After they made their fortune in data recorders for satellites and space craft, they started to branch out into other fields, including robotics with their Advanced Intelligent Machines Division (which created Odex). I joined the company in 1995 for their Solid-State Recorder (SSR) projects which replaced their mechanical data recorder with solid state technology (very special ICs, some of which were built on sapphire substrates instead of silicon in order to make them more resistant to the radiation out in deep space). As it turned out, while we could reign supreme with mechanical data recorders (due to some very neat tricks by our mechanical engineers that I never learned about), we could not compete in the solid-state recorder market (especially when competitors were gaming the system, but that's another story) ... and the market was looking to solid-state instead of mechanical which took our salesmen completely by surprise, which it shouldn't have.
One of our last big mechanical data recorder projects was the Galileo probe to Jupiter. Despite the complaints, we really pulled their cookies out of the fire.
After the launch, Galileo's high-gain antenna failed to deploy, leaving its low-gain antenna as the only communications channel with the spacecraft. That meant that all that data had to be transmitted at a far lower data rate. In order to support that work-around, our recorder had to do things that it had never been designed to do, such as repeatedly stopping and backing up over and over again. And despite all that, our data recorder came through and returned the data that it had recorded. It had problems towards the end from being made to do things it had never been designed for, but it still succeeded.
 
Funny story. Our break room at Odetics had TVs which would carry the NASA Channel at appropriate times, since much of the company's business was intricately tied in with NASA. As I seem to recall, during the deployment of Galileo's atmospheric probe some kind of parachute was used. In the press conference around that event, a correspondent from a magazine known far more for fashion news than tech asked the question: "What color is that parachute?" The NASA spokesman was literally speechless. I shit thee not, that was literally the question! I swear to God and three other white men! (old Redd Foxx joke that I've been dying to use for nearly half a century).
 
BTW, one of the most popular YEC claims revolves around the fact that the earth's rotation is slowing down. Yes, the earth's rotation is slowing down, but nowhere near at the rate that creationists propose. Their rates are hundreds of times too great because they do not understand leap seconds.
For the last two decades of my professional career, I worked every day with GPS receivers and hence with leap seconds. Please refer to my page, DWISE1'S CREATION / EVOLUTION PAGE: Earth's Rotation is Slowing, for more information.
 
 

We would see Odex everyday in a display case on our way to the cafeteria, but I saw it in action one day when a group of Japanese students visited so they pulled Odex out to play.
In 1992 there was a PBS miniseries, The Machine That Changed the World about the computer. Fascinating. I have the entire series on VHS; I can only hope that I will have a VHS machine handy to play it to my grandsons a decade or more in the future (subject of various works worrying about all our stored data requiring obsolete technology to read it). In their episode on robotics, they pointed out how very problematic a two-legged robot is so they settled on at least six legs, such that three legs would be holding the robot up while the other three were moving to their new positions. Odex did that same thing but with four legs holding the robot in place while the other four were positioning themselves to the new location.
Edited by dwise1, : "and finger pointing"

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(3)
Message 149 of 380 (890322)
01-01-2022 11:40 AM
Reply to: Message 147 by ringo
12-30-2021 11:56 AM


Re: JWST Launch Success
One place I used to work, one of the young women bought a new car.. Somebody asked, "What color is it?"
She answered, "Blue."
Somebody commented, "I hear those are good."
Similarly, in the US military's messing facilities they serve a "fruit juice" beverage which is flavored powder dissolved in water, kind of like Kool-Aid. I encountered it both in the Air Force and the Navy, where it's called "bug juice."
From the NavTermFAQ *:
quote:
Bug juice - A substance similar in appearance to Kool-Aid which is served as a beverage aboard USN ships. Its color has no bearing on its flavor. Largely composed of ascorbic acid. Used extensively as an all-purpose cleaner/stripper for bulkheads, decks, brass fire nozzles, and pipes.
Bug juice comes in a variety of "flavors" which are suggested by color: red, green, yellow, blue, and I forget what else. The running joke is:
Q: "What's your favorite flavor of bug juice?"
A: "Red."
 
Personal war story, I shit thee not. As we were being adjusted to military life in USAF basic military training which seemed to be symbolized by the color green, the standard joke is that we would know that we had been arrived at the state of being fully military when we started to defecate green -- I think that's an old Army meme.
Halfway through basic I contracted measles and spent a few days in the Intermediate Care Facility (ICF) before being transferred to the base hospital. In the ICF, they maintained bug juice dispensers from which we were to drink copiously to fight the fever. They tried to prevent monotony by rotating flavors each day. The first day I drank blue, the second day I drank yellow, and the third day I defecated green. I had arrived!
 

 
* FOOTNOTE:
NavTermFAQ stands for "Naval Terminology FAQ" which is officially named "Naval Slang, Jargon and Terminology FAQ" -- NavTermFAQ.txt is a far more convenient filename to store it under. While primary US Navy, it also includes British naval slang (eg, Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, Royal Australian Navy, Royal Marines, Royal New Zealand Navy, and militaries of the former British Empire).
It is split into two parts which are linked to through the Haze Gray & Underway's FAQ page. That page contains links to a shipload of military FAQs. Their naming conventions indicate to me that this is a collection of resources from Internet newsgroups, which were the Internet's first discussion forums.
Edited by dwise1, : Provided context by qs'ing ringo

Edited by dwise1, : Minor typo: "where", not "which"


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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 207 of 380 (891641)
02-07-2022 11:48 AM
Reply to: Message 205 by Tanypteryx
02-07-2022 11:27 AM


Re: I hate science
Closed captioning on the TV makes it possible to really enjoy what I'm watching. What I need is closed captioning for every day life!
If they ever try to work out the kinks in Google Glasses then that might be a possibility.
Though I suspect that it would be like closed captioning on YouTube, where it often it often chooses words that are quite different. Then compound that with their language translation feature -- ie, voice recognition of that other language coming up with the wrong words which are then fed through the translation into English to arrive at something that bears no resemblance to the video. For example, I was watching a German video on creating and using yeast water (Germans were very much into making yeast water (Hefewasser) in the beginning of the pandemic, much like we all were getting into capturing wild yeast to make sourdough due there being no yeast in the stores). Let's just say that I'm so glad I could follow the spoken German well enough because the closed captioning made no sense at all.
Speaking of close caption, one day I changed the language on my Roku to German to see if the search feature would find more German content. It kind of worked but not by much, so I changed it back to English. After that, Amazon Prime would subtitle everything in German, especially wording on displays (as in The Expanse. No idea why that kept happening, but it did solve the problem of my not being able to read text on the TV screen.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 209 of 380 (891643)
02-07-2022 12:03 PM
Reply to: Message 206 by ringo
02-07-2022 11:42 AM


Re: I hate science
I have that problem with the TV. And with DVDs, the music and sound effects are way too loud but I can barely hear the dialog.
Because I have cable and my friend didn't, I would record shows (eg, Doctor Who) during the week and we would watch them on Sunday.
Like you, she hated how sound editing is done such that the music and sound effects are way too loud and get in the way of hearing the dialog. If I turned the sound down because of the music then she couldn't hear the dialog and I'd have to turn it back up and then she'd complain about the music. Closed captioning would have been the ideal solution, but I could never find any way to turn that on.
My sound system didn't help. She was something of an audiophile (single her entire life, so she could afford such toys) whereas I'm not as picky (family man who not only couldn't afford any toys but then would never be allowed to play with them anyway) so the TV speakers were fine for me but she'd always complain about them. So to satisfy her I bought a soundbar sound system which still wasn't satisfactory (though we both agreed to keep the subwoofer in night mode).
When I would try to adjust the sound with that sound bar, one setting would not be loud enough but if I went up just one notch then it would be too loud. I could never get it just right. Then recently the sound bar stopped working -- I don't know whether it's the sound bar itself or the optical cable port on my TV (one of the HDMI ports also went out on the TV). Now the granularity of volume control is very greatly finer such that one notch on the sound bar is like 20 or 30 notches on the TV. Go figure.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 213 of 380 (891660)
02-07-2022 4:05 PM
Reply to: Message 210 by ringo
02-07-2022 12:22 PM


Re: I hate science
... my parents used to speak Low German when they didn't want us to understand what they were saying.
That would have very likely also worked even if you kids could speak German (ie, Hochdeutsch). Even many Germans have trouble understanding some of the dialects. Swiss German (Schwyzerdütsch) is a prime example, but so is Schwäbisch and Bayrisch.
In 1973, I went to work in West Germany for the summer with a construction firm in the Black Forest. With five years experience in classroom German, I had fairly high confidence in my ability to understand the language, but then they had never taught us about dialects. For the entire first week on the job I could not understand anything I was told; if you had told me that was a different language I would have believed you. Then I met a Prussian ex-pat, an office worker at the construction firm, whom I could understand and he explained to me about Schwäbisch and that even Germans couldn't understand them.
BTW, he was the first to inform me of a bit of post-war history. In the late 1940's, the Soviet occupiers kept the eastern part of Poland they had taken at the beginning of the war and made the eastern parts of Germany part of Poland (ie, East Prussia and what looks like a crescent moon on the old maps), expelling the Polish population from the eastern part and the German population from the western part. That sudden influx of even more displaced persons made the housing situation even worse in Germany. That Prussian had lived through that expulsion as a child.
Also, my German ancestor came from Baden, so he was either Schwäbisch or Alemannisch (a bit to the west of Schwaben and not any easier to understand). Contact with the Alemanni tribe is what gave Germany its name in French and Spanish.
I liked the subtitles better because, though I only understand a little German, the dubbing didn't ring true.
That happens a lot for a number of reasons:
  1. It's just the way that language works. That makes it a gold mine for language learners as it provides them examples of what they've been studying. For example:
    1. In French, the impersonal pronoun (in English: "you", "they", "one") is expressed with "on". After having read that, I kept hearing it being used in French content. They -- er, "One" -- even uses it instead of "we" so that "Are we going now?" becomes "Is one going now?" ("On part?").
    2. There was a German TV version of Valkyrie that somehow made it to US cable (Sundance or IFC, I think). I especially remember a scene where the von Stauffenberg family is chatting as they're having a meal. Nobody says more than one or two words at a time, but because of how German works (especially the use of cases) it was all perfectly intelligible. The translators had quite a job to render that into English.
    3. This is a parody of the phenomenon rather than an actual example. In the 1964 US comedy, What a Way to Go!, a wealthy widow recounts her many marriages in which they married poor and were very happy, but then her husbands would become obsessed with success which ended up killing them.
      The pattern of the movie's narrative was that she would imagine her marriage when they were poor (and "lebten von Luft und Liebe") as a particular genre of film. Her marriage with an artist in Paris (Paul Newman) was like a foreign movie with subtitles. One would deliver a single line of dialogue which generated several sentences of subtitles, then the long and protracted response would be translated with a single English word. That parodied many Americans' perception of subtitled movies, something that was new at that time.
  2. They are trying to work around a cultural, linguistical, or historical reference that they assume the subtitle audience wouldn't understand. For example:
    1. In the second OSS 117 movie, OSS 117: Lost in Rio (OSS 117: Rio ne répond plus), Hubert de la Bath is assigned to deliver a blackmail payment of 50,000 francs to someone in Brazil. He asks his boss whether that's in new or old francs and his boss replies new francs. Assuming that the English speaking audience wouldn't know about the franc's revaluation in 1960 (I learned of it in the late 60's through a Bond novel), it went something like this:
      Le chef: "... 50,000 francs." ("... 50,000 francs.")
      de la Bath: "Nouveaux ou vieux?" ("New or old?", but subtitled as "Could you repeat that?")
      Le chef: "50,000 nouveaux francs." ("... 50,000 francs.")
    2. This is a linguistical example. In a French rom-com a successful businessman tries to escape his family's pressure for him to marry by entering into a business deal wherein he gave her a place to live and she would pose as his fiancée to his family. They start out hardly able to stand each other, but over time they start to like each other and, true to the genre, end up falling in love.
      Linguistically, English has lost having familiar versus polite forms of address whereas French (and German and Spanish and Italian) has retained that feature, so dialogues often make use of that. So in this film, they would address each other in the familiar ("tu") when his family was present and would switch back to the formal ("vous"), but as they start to like each other they slip into the familiar more often.
      Then in one scene as they're conversing over a dinner that he made, they start out with "tu" but as it turns into an argument he abruptly switches to the polite address to which she responds "Oh, so now it's back to 'vous' again, is it?" Not easy to express in English and I forget just how the translators did it except that they made a good attempt, but I remember it as an example of something more easily expressed in the other language.
    3. This attempt to get around an "unfamiliar cultural reference" was totally unnecessary. I'm pretty sure this was in the second Swedish Millennium movie, The Girl Who Played With Fire (the first was Men Who Hate Women (Män som hatar kvinnor), but in English that had gotten changed to The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo). A female cop puts down a sexist colleague as being extremely primitive by asking "Are you from Jurassic Park?" (literally, though in Swedish, but she did explicitly say "Jurassic Park"). Who will ever know why, but the translator must have thought that the English-speaking audience would never have heard of Jurassic Park so the subtitles had her say something like "What are you, a troglodyte?"
  3. Sometimes the subtitles mismatch for political reasons. And sometimes for other reasons, whatever they could be.
    Both of these examples are in German, so first a cultural note: Germans like to have their foreign movies dubbed into German, but they'll keep the songs in the original and subtitle them.
    1. On the student charter flight back from Europe, we shared some of our experiences. One had been to East Germany where he had seen West Side Story. Instead of translating the songs, the subtitles would describe the lyrics in Marxist terms, such as describing the song as protesting the exploitation of the workers, etc.
    2. In Müchen I saw Cabaret dubbed into German. The scene where they meet came off kind of odd with her starting off stumbling with the simplest German before she breaks into fluent German asking him for a cigarette. Na ja.
      Then in the big finale song ("Life is a Caberet"), the line, "That's what comes from too much pills and liquor.", was instead rendered as "zu viele Pillen und Ficken." Odd, that.
On a different note, I assume you've also seen these memes on YouTube which take Hitler's enraged rant from Downfall (Der Untergang) and give it new subtitles in which he rages against something current (eg, the Watchmen movie changing the ending, Star Trek: Discovery). I tried watching one and it proved impossible. I could hear what Hitler is actually saying and the subtitles mismatch it so completely that my brain rebels -- I have to stop before I suffer terminal motion sickness (which happens when your senses send conflicting messages to the brain).
I couldn't figure out what the title meant - 72 Metpa - until I remembered that the Cyrillic "p" is our "r". 72 meters.
I had four semesters of Russian nearly half a century ago. I've forgotten most of it, but I do still try to read what I see in film, usually storefront signs. In the documentary, Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom (covering the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv from 21 November 2013 to 23 February 2014), I saw early on a storefront sign in cursive Cyrillics, so I sounded it out. "Sushi", which elicited a chuckle. Ironically, that same restaurant later served as a make-shift battle aid station for the wounded protestors especially after the government troops had started shooting them (and later raided that aid station).
 
There was a German TV series sequel, Das Boot, which also dealt with the Resistance back in port at La Rochelle. I swear that I could recognize that same road used in the beginning of the movie. I saw it when it was included with my Amazon Prime subscription, but now it's only available for sale.
The submarine pens that you saw in Das Boot and also in Raiders of the Lost Ark are the ones that are still intact in La Rochelle. You can see them on Google Earth at 46° 09' 30.96" N, 1° 12' 37.37" W, but I was not able to find any street view where I could see them, so the photo at that Wikipedia link is the best I can offer.
The biggest problem for submarines was their limited range under battery power. For example, in The Winds of War an American destroyer before the war (and hence could not be torpedoed) held off a German submarine until the sub's batteries ran out and it had to surface and leave. In a documentary, they listed the first uses envisioned for nuclear power and nuclear submarines was on that list.
In Cartegena, Spain, we saw the submarine, Peral, the first fully capable military submarine. Launched 8 September 1888, she had one torpedo tube, two torpedoes, and her interior was crammed full of batteries. She had no way to recharge her batteries while underway, so for the most part she was a proof-of-concept vessel. She was withdrawn from service in 1890 and is now preserved at the Cartagena Naval Museum adjacent to the naval base.
Across from the naval base there's a hill between the harbor and the sea. Into that hill we could see two tunnels that had been started. Our tour guide told us that they were part of a submarine pen project Spain was building for Nazi Germany, were never completed.

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 Message 210 by ringo, posted 02-07-2022 12:22 PM ringo has replied

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 Message 216 by ringo, posted 02-08-2022 11:47 AM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 214 of 380 (891661)
02-07-2022 4:16 PM
Reply to: Message 211 by kjsimons
02-07-2022 12:50 PM


Re: I hate science
That is a nice feature.
I was from the generation that fell in love with stereo and then quadrophonic so that every group would play around with those features. Having abandoned pop music towards the mid-70's (I saw the 50's Revival as a sign that rock music had run out of ideas, which some could argue was the case given Disco, the 80's, etc), I don't know how sound systems have fared since then.
A friend at work, about my age, told me about having introduced Beatles music to his granddaughter. She liked it and would listen to it a lot on her iPod, but with only one earphone instead of both. He said that was because modern music is no longer recorded in stereo and you can hear everything in just one earbud, so the kids have taken to using just one earbud. He said that one day he had her put the other one in her other ear and she was so surprised to learn that there were words to those songs.
Edited by dwise1, : added "so that every group would play around with those features"

This message is a reply to:
 Message 211 by kjsimons, posted 02-07-2022 12:50 PM kjsimons has replied

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 Message 215 by kjsimons, posted 02-07-2022 4:43 PM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 217 of 380 (891687)
02-08-2022 8:22 PM
Reply to: Message 216 by ringo
02-08-2022 11:47 AM


Re: I hate science
Plattdeutsch (AKA "Low German" because it's in the low lands of the north) uses different consonants than Hochdeutsch (because it's in the high lands and mountains of the south). The changes of the second Germanic sound shift (die Zweite Lautverschiebung) had started in the south and worked its way northwards stopping around Köln (Cologne). It explains the patterns of differences in English's German cognates (eg, deer -- Tier, garden -- Garten, earth -- Erde, pipe -- Pfeife, thief -- Dieb, give -- geben) and also why those differences do not appear between Dutch/Frisian and English. And they do not appear much between English and Plattdeutsch.
Another thing I had noticed in Plattdeutsch (and Dutch) is the practice of making a vowel long by doubling it. Hence, we get the word for "boat", "Boot" (as in "Das Boot") with a long "o" that has it sound like the English word "boat" (not like English "boot" as in something you wear for marching and as I keep hearing Americans mispronounce it).
Somewhere I had been told that while most standard languages are based on a particular dialect (eg, Parisian French, Tokyo Japanese, Oxford English), Hochdeutsch is basically an artificial language that nobody speaks as a native dialect. Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German formed much of its basis, but for pronunciation they basically combined the consonants of the south and the vowels of the north. Or so I've been told.
BTW, we only had English in my family, since our German ancestor from Baden had been killed during Quantrill's Raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863. He had married an Irish girl and after that my father's side was primarily Irish while my mother's side was completely Scottish. I chose to study German in high school because of my 1-16th German ancestry, plus I had failed to learn conversational Spanish whereas I flourished in my grammar-intensive German class (it meshed with my engineer's mind). I'm the only one in my family who knows German, so it's my job to track down our great-great-grandfather in Germany.
In The Enemy Below, ...
The first-season Star Trek episode, Balance of Terror (which introduced the Romulans and their cloaking device), is supposed to have been based on The Enemy Below. Someone even pointed out that the heading home is the same in both works.
Robert Mitchem also played the destroyer CO in that scene I had described from The Winds of War (1983) in which he interposed his ship between a German sub and a convoy (again, this was before 08 Dec 1941) until the sub's batteries had depleted enough to force it to surface and disengage. He remarks to his officers how the Navy works in such cases: "Either you're a hero or you're a son-of-a-bitch."
"Tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belongs, tomorrow belongs to me!"
Somehow I remember that as having been in German: "Das Morgen gehört ja mir!" I was surprised when I saw the movie again and it was in English. I forget how it was when I saw the dubbed version in München in 1973, but I would assume that the song had not been dubbed.
I had also seen the stage production at my university around 1974. I kind of seem to remember that in the play when they perform that song it's in English at first but then the final verse is sung in German. That might have been where I had heard that.
Look into the history of Kraft durch Freude (KdF -- Strength through Joy). Through it the Nazi party inserted itself into everybody's life. They organized after work activities, concerts and shows, excursions (eg, ski vacations), stays at their resorts, sea cruises, etc. Basically, they made available to workers activities that before only the wealthy could enjoy. At one point, KdF had the largest and most active travel agency in the world. And many of the activities and shows were steeped in German culture, meaning that the party had appropriated them for their political purposes. The VW Beetle started out as the "KdF-Wagen" since the savings plans for buying one was administered through the KdF. Of course most of that went away once the war started. Though a lot of television programming during the war would include German culture.
Edited by dwise1, : Gender correction: "der Morgen" = "the morning", but "das Morgen" = "tomorrow" as a noun

This message is a reply to:
 Message 216 by ringo, posted 02-08-2022 11:47 AM ringo has replied

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