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I agree. I also get much more out of playing Bach than listening to him. I almost never listen to Bach for pleasure, but I know a few fugues and the like. Playing them makes you feel like a god; listening to them feels like an assault.

The exception, for me, is the Goldberg Variations which I find have a stately and refined beauty. It's one of very few in the classical canon that I find myself returning to over the years.

Left unaddressed is whether polar bears can ever make it back to Greenland once winding up in Iceland. I'm guessing the answer is only very rarely, based on the rest of the article... But then again Iceland is 200 miles away and wouldn't have guessed they'd make it there so frequently in the first place.

Regardless of if there's any hope those bears could make it back to their population, it's clear that such hope would be an inconvenient truth for Icelanders -- at least, for the article's authors -- who would prefer to shoot them when they appear and be done with it. And I'm not saying that's not for the best.

As a side note, if we really want to know the answer without googling, we can put on our deducing hats: "Visits by five polar bears in 2008 (two bears), 2010, 2011, 2016 and 2024."

Your comment just made me realize something. The 5 milliseconds which Lyles won by is shorter than the time it takes sound to travel between his lane and Thompson's. If the starting gun were on the outside of the track (it's not), then Thompson would have actually run the race faster, if measured from the time he perceived the sound.

In reality the gun is usually on the inside of the track, so it would be Lyles overcoming this (negligible) advantage.

This is an accurate and well-written portrait of Pitchfork bookended by musings on the current state of music criticism as a business.

I did some reading into rongorongo a few years ago and I came away with two conclusions:

1. It is very likely the scripts developed after contact with Europeans. That is, the islanders saw Europeans writing things down and then over the years (ships stopping on rapa nui were quite infrequent) began to do likewise.

2. The script found on rongorongo articacts …doesn't really seem to be much of a script at all. No one has ever been able to decipher anything, none of the natives of the 19th century could ever shed any light on their meaning, and the glyphs don't seem to be present in the ratios one would expect from language / writing. They are script similar to the way Aztec (not Mayan) codices are script. Perhaps they had meaning to one person, or a handful of people, but they probably weren't standardized in any significant way.

The paper doesn't directly contradict either, but it has quite the title and the authors do sort of equivocate on both points and present this and that as equally likely even though I don't think that's the consensus.

In any case, it seems the thread running through a lot of writing on the topic is the implication that it would be more interesting or culturally important if the islanders had developed writing on their own. Perhaps that's true, but I find the more likely sequence of events fascinating enough -- because of the implications. If Rapa Nui had been left alone, it's entirely possible that rongorongo would have developed into a fully fledged writing system. That is, only the seed of seeing some infrequent visitors writing on parchment is required for a very small and isolated community to begin to develop writing. (The Rapa Nui died off / were genocided.)

Consider: Egyptian heiroglyphs appear in the archeaological record on the order of 100 years after writing in mesopotamia. That these heiroglyphs share no DNA with cuneiform is generally used as strong evidence that the two civilizations developed writing independently. I've seen that version of history taught and written as fact in the past, although I don't know what the consensus is now. Learning about rongo rongo has colored my view of that. Perhaps some itenerant Egyptian genius made his way back from the East and began to experiment with making symbols which have meaning and seem to give those who wield them power.

If you're thinking "The highest rate I need my signal to be able to replicate is X, so I should set my sampling rate to 2X," then you're wrong and this article gives several reasons why.

As far as I can tell, though, it doesn't mention what may be the most important reason (especially to the folks here at hackernews): resampling and processing.

This is why professional grade audio processing operates at a sample rate many multiples higher than human hearing. It's not because of the quality difference between, say, 192 and 96 kHz, but rather if you're resampling or iterating a process dozens of times at those rates, eventually artifacts will form and make their way into the range of human hearing (20 kHz).

Indeed. And they've applied the translator even to the comments, without making it clear, which seems ethically dubious to me.

Why do people not run uBlock Origin? What's the case against?

The movie Machete was made after the trailer. The trailer was sandwiched, with other fake ones, in between the two parts of the Tarantino / Rodriguez double-feature Grindhouse. I remember because I saw Grindhouse in theaters and years later saw the actual trailer for the real movie Machete and did quite the double take. What a B-movie clusterfuck.

In the 1690's the Scottish invested an enormous sum of money and human capital to settle this region. The goal was to build and profit from an overland route to ferry cargo from the Pacific to the Atlantic, similar to the Panama Canal today.

Due to disease, less-than-accommodating natives, and geopolitical climate, the scheme failed miserably. Many argue the crippling financial effect on Scotland was a key factor in the 1707 Acts of Union which merged Scotland and England.