One of the other videos on his channel is literally “256 colors is enough for anyone”, which is one of the commandments of TempleOS, so your flashbacks are well-informed ;-)
100 karma · joined July 8, 2011
Probably everyone reading HN in the last 8 years has seen the excellent video by Monty / xiph.org specifically addressing Neil Young and sample rates/bit rates (for delivery, 44.1kHz/16-bit is really truly all you need), but one thing very appreciated with this website’s audio streaming is the option of uncompressed audio, which is much more significant than any high-sample-rate file would be. And they even have a 320kbps fallback! Finally even Neil Young can see the benefit of being 12x more data efficient for 99.98% of the perceived quality.
Do you know of a playable/emulatable binary of this anywhere?
Happy to answer, and sorry for the long-delayed reply, hope you still see this and it’s not too wall-of-text-y.
A slight misconception/communication here; I actually attended Red Cedar School from age 5 to 18 (when I graduated), so I never attended a standard public school. From age 16–18, I spent half the school day at an offshoot of a public high school, studying movie post-production, but that was also relatively radical in both its trust of students to be independent learners and its lack of formal classroom setting. The difficulties I had with the pseudo-public film school were primarily with recognizing and respecting hierarchy and the student-teacher relationship. I talked with the school director/principal, the class instructor, and the students all equally as peers, and I critiqued curriculum, challenged teachers to back up their statements, and had little patience for students that screwed around or disregarded rules. Because of this I was often labeled (sometimes formally) as arrogant or standoffish to teachers, and aloof or condescending with my actual peers. I really took it to heart to learn and improve from this though, and I adjusted in about a year. I’m also very glad for that experience—understanding the structure of power and chain of command as part of nearly everything in society is pretty crucial to success, and that is one thing I just wasn’t exposed to in the fully democratic, completely equal-opportunity model of Sudbury schools.
As to “knowing as much as the other kids in a class”, I go into every class expecting we’ll all have the same pre-requisite knowledge for the subject, and if I know less than that, I study until I learn what I need (or more), so that’s never felt like an issue to me. Culturally though, I’m definitely the odd one out—just like a public school student in Vermont wouldn’t know about hardships of building a Spanish Mission model in school (as apparently every student does in California), there’s a core set of curriculums presented in public schools that bond public students together from across the US, and I have no knowledge of it. That can certainly be isolating—I’ve never had 1st-period gym (or any mandatory PE at all, we were outside when we wanted to be), never had notes passed in class, never been in detention, etc. and so I can’t participate in a huge part of most people’s common experience growing up. On the other hand, talking about junior high doesn’t happen much in your thirties anyway, so that’s not really an issue for me anymore :-)
Post high school: Like many students in Sudbury-Model schools, I took the SAT’s after studying for them intensely for several months, and I scored about as well as a traditional-curriculum student—much better than average in reading/writing/language, slightly worse than average in math/geometry. As my first real standardized test though, I was left fairly disgusted by the experience as proxy for college-worthiness, since every multiple-choice question was simply “confuse the test-taker into choosing the wrong answer”, and easily guessed by understanding the psychological tricks behind the test construction, even for supposedly difficult math problems. I ultimately ended up not going to college—the cost/benefit didn’t make sense for what I wanted to do—so instead I moved to the SF Bay Area when I was 19 to work on films—managing finances, meeting with clients, working with deadlines—I had no problem with any of that (though I was really poor… movie production is not a money-making market).
Now, I’ve worked at Apple for over 10 years, and the only difference between my colleagues and me is my tendency to still flatten the level of managers and direct reports, but fortunately the culture there leans heavily toward shallow hierarchy and candid discussion anyway. I’ve never once felt hindered or at a disadvantage for having gone to such a radical antithesis of the entire public school system.
Would I send my kid to a Sudbury School? Yes, definitely, if the student body was rich enough (numbers and diversity of students, not wealth of course), and if my kid clearly enjoyed it there. The school by its nature forces you to be introspective and consider your own needs, and some students do ultimately decide they need a different environment. It’s not a perfect fit for everyone as a start-to-end school, though for me the entire experience was ideal.
Red Cedar decided to change just after I graduated in 2002, from a true Sudbury school to “heavily influenced by Sudbury philosophies”, dropping high school ages in the process. They’ve actually had great success since; ultimately the Sudbury Model was just too radical for the (very very low population) surrounding area, and the numbers of students were very few — my graduating class was me and one other! Their website is http://www.redcedarschool.com and you can see it’s still a long way from a typical school!
The title grated on me a little—this, like most news articles about Sudbury Schools, ledes with some vague anti-authority/anarchy line. The only “rule” that the school might be considered hating is in the imperial sense (namely, the US education model that remains largely unchanged since the industrial revolution), but as to rules within the school, there are hundreds—all brought before committee, voted on, and enforced by students and staff alike, as in any full democracy.
The depth of writing and research on this model of education and its successes (or failures) for students are way way too broad for this margin to contain. If you’re interested in some further reading, there’s a number of publications from former students and founders at http://bookstore.sudburyvalley.org , and a pretty good TL;DR on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School (check out the brevity of those sections!)
It’s a really unusual experience using it, because the never-quite-tuned sound is part of a piano’s character. With Hermode tuning engaged, every chord has a ringing pure bell-like quality, especially with 7th/diminished chords (which sound immensely satisfying).
Since few instruments in the real world can tune so precisely, Logic amusingly has a slider to make the Hermode tuning “less perfect” if desired.
Screenshot for comparison: http://i.imgur.com/U4ZlgY9.png
Unfortunately, in 3D, the temporal limitations of 24fps become apparent, perhaps again because the visuals start to become real enough that your brain no longer works as hard to synthesize reality. But now if you increase the frame rate, you end up with the first problem again, and maybe even worse—when watching The Hobbit in 48fps 3D, I was painfully aware of every camera movement, no longer feeling like a passive observer hovering in the air. It’s clear that if 3D really is the way things are from here on, many new techniques are needed, from the styles of acting and lighting designs to the way the camera moves and scenes are edited.
I’d guess one compromise would be splitting the difference, 3D projected at 36fps—something tells me that won’t come to pass though, and so maybe indeed 3D never will work…