Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…
That’s exactly what I thought, she’s so young…It was totally wrong of her parents to indoctrinate her in that way. As for her brother…now that I think about it he did seem pretty feminine…I wonder what he’ll do when he finally realises that he’s gay…
Caz, as I say, "there may be trouble ahead…" If Matthew is gay, then I doubt whether his father will be too pleased about it…
leave debbie alone she has the rites to believe in whatever she wants to. If she feels that the way of life she is following is right for her then let her live that way she has not told you how to live your life so mdont comment on her
XxleannexX adderley – sorry, but I will absolutely comment on aspects of this society and world that I find interesting/wonderful/exasperating/wicked. I did, however, enjoy your Freudian slip about "she has the rites to believe in whatever she wants to". Rites can be constraining like chains. Rights can liberate us.
Deborah Drapper and her family is an example of what should be the new generation of young people, it is an awakenning call to all who having eyes want to see and having ears want to hear, and with a heart of good will be reborn in spirit and water, water that springs to eternal life.
May God bless the family Drapper, the people of good will in the UK and the world. Amen.
Matthew is a delightful young man, and certainly set off my gaydar. If I am correct, I pray he will be able to integrate his spirituality and his sexuality. Deborah is thoughtful, but it’s too bad she is so self-hating and obsessed with judgment. That is the spirit of the Pharisees, not the Spirit of Christ, who came not to condemn, but to save the world.
As a bear of very little brain, I find philosophy simultaneously interesting and exasperating. That latter emotion often occurs when I read an argument that strikes me as being intrinsically daft, but don’t have the ready knowledge or the philosophical background to refute the argument quickly. Luckily, there are usually those much better-versed than I on hand to deliver stinging ripostes.
A case in point has been the discussion over at the Talking Philosophy blog about Julian Baggini’s review of the recent book by John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale: Questions of Truth. Apparently, Baggini’s review for the FT had to be re-written, at the FT editors’ request, to be more "even-handed". That sounds, to my ears (and to others), to be a euphemism for “make it a positive review”. Luckily, Baggini posted parts of the original drafts of his review on the Talking Philosophy blog so that we could all read his objections to Polkinghorne’s and Beale’s exercise in apologetics. As a result, Nicholas Beale joined in the discussion on the post, which has led to a merry ding-dong of over 200 posts thus far. I have to say that Beale comes across as a not very pleasant character, but setting that aside, I remain unconvinced by his arguments.
For a condensed rebuttal of the arguments, A. C. Grayling’s review of Questions of Truth does a very good job. Not for nothing is the subtitle of the review: “AC Grayling rips into the latest attempt to bridge the God-science gap”. This is not duelling pistols at dawn, this is a 12 bore shotgun against a toy gun.
原谅我对你们宗教问题的不甚了解你是个无神论者,对吗?或者说没有自己信仰的宗教?i can get the general idea of your essay, but you know im a chinese ,my english is poor 那么我想自己和你在宗教问题上有些一致，我不明白为什么要把虚幻的东西当作个人的精神支撑，何况这些宗教的教义有很多让人不信服的地方当你问有些人为什么信教，他们的回答是不知道，那么我对自己什么也不信的回答是我也不知道可能依靠个人的原则，品味，直觉是更合理的
"It is difficult for us to contemplate, fixedly, the possibility, let alone the certainty, that life is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self-perpetuation, that it unfolds in emptiness, that our planet will one day drift in frozen silence, and that the human species will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us. That is what growing up means. And it is frightening prospect for a race that has for so long relied on its own invented gods for consolation."
宗教的问题是虚无中的虚无，如何能得出确定性
在英文我们有句古话：唯一的事情是一定是死亡和纳税
挺可爱的
Google tells me that "挺可爱的" translates as "very cute". Thanks, 小水 ("Small Water")…
Also of great importance about this film: The reason that you can only see this film on the net this way and can’t buy it on DVD is because of the insane copyright law in the country. The film uses a number of late 1920s jazz recordings by Annette Hanshaw which, although the recordings are in the public domain, the songs she is singing are still in copyright to various holding companies. The composers of these songs are long dead and this music should have been in the public domain years ago, but because of the ridiculous permanent extension of copyright (thanks Disney!) these companies have demanded exorbitant sums (over $50K!) from the broke indie animator Nina Paley to show or distribute the film. The only reason PBS can show it is because it has different rules regarding copyright permissions! Please, if you care about this film and the ability of artists to have their work seen by the public, check out QuestionCopyright and Nina Paley’s blog for more info!
[…] Sings the Blues is wonderful. Roger Ebert thought so […]
I got my fingers caught in between two strong magnets – not as powerful as your friend’s – on a gadget called ‘window wizard’ and it flaming well hurt!!!!! Coincidentally, my son is just recovering from a crushed fingers injury and was very reassured to see the pictures that Dirk has supplied – thanks Dirk xxx
Hi, BM. Crushed fingers can’t be very pleasant, and the photos make me squirm even more. Hope your son recovers quickly…
I know I’ve complained about the dumbing-down of the BBC’s Horizon before, but I keep on trying to watch it in the hope that its decline might be reversed. However, last night’s edition on the body clock seems to have been the nadir of a once great television series that had a mission to “educate, inform and entertain”*. I say “seems to have been”, because I confess I only lasted about five minutes before I turned it off in utter disgust at its crassness (flashy graphics, stupid ideas, loud music and a bad script). Luckily, someone who was paid to watch the whole thing, reports today that I was not wrong to do so. As Lucy Mangan says:
…the time has come for the BBC’s once-flagship science documentary series to be officially demoted, possibly to "weekend sailboat", more probably to "patched and ailing dinghy".
Frankly, I think it would be kinder, and more useful, to take it outside, shoot it, and boil the body down for glue.
* Lord Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, famously summarised the purpose of the BBC in those words: “educate, inform and entertain”. It is perhaps telling that the BBC’s current mission statement reverses the order to be “entertain, inform and educate”. I can’t say I’m totally surprised as a result that Horizon is no longer worth watching.
Hi ! I am deeply saddened by the decline of the BBC documentaries. It used to be my go to source for great documentaries, but the dramatization and general americanization in the writing and directing has left me a bitter taste.
Would you recommend an other documentary serie like horizon ? Nova maybe ? I’m really in search of a new home for documentaries.
The BBC still make good documentaries, but they tend to hide them away on the BBC Four channel, I’m afraid.
Horizon is still just a shadow of its former self. Occasionally there will be a good episode, and that is usually when a single scientist fronts an episode to deal with his or her work and the implications thereof.
Other than Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, I don’t think I’ve seen other Nova documentaries, so I can’t say how they compare.
Sometimes, what you think is obvious does not always turn out to be the case.
So it was when I decided to connect my Tablet PC (an HP Tx2000ed) to my audio amplifier (a Denon AVR-3808). I was driven to this step by the fact that trying to browse through the music libraries stored on my Media Servers while using the interface on the AVR-3808 was an exercise in frustration. The performance is absolutely abysmal.
But then I thought, why don’t I use the GUI of Windows Media Player to browse my music libraries? I can use my Tablet PC running Windows 7 to browse the libraries (the browsing performance is good), and if I play back the tracks on the Tablet PC, and connect via the digital S/PDIF interface to the AVR-3808, then I will send a high-quality digital audio stream direct to the 3808 amplifier, and have the best possible results.
It seemed like a good idea, so I found a cable that had a 3.5mm jack on one end (to plug into the Tablet PC) and a Coax plug on the other (to plug into the 3808) and made the connection. The trouble was, nothing happed – no music emerged from the amplifier. I tried all the settings on the interfaces at both ends – the Tablet PC and the AVR-3808. Result: nada, zilch, nothing – no sound at all.
Luckily, Google is my friend. I entered the search string “HP tx2000ed S/PDIF problem”, and the very first result told me what was wrong. I had assumed that the 3.5 mm jack socket on the front panel of the Tablet PC was for a coaxial connection of the digital signal. After all, the other two 3.5 mm sockets alongside it are also for copper-wired connections. Nope, wrong; it’s actually an optical connection, and doesn’t use copper but fibre-optics. There is, of course, absolutely nothing in the HP documentation to point this fact out. Thank you Google*.
HP – pull your socks up and produce decent documentation.
* Of course, entering the same search string into Microsoft’s Live Search produces no results at all. Sigh. Live Search still sucks.
[…] I blogged back in February about how I was having some problems with the “Play to” feature in the new Windows Media Player that will be part of Windows 7. […]
[…] The issue that I discovered back in February with the “Play to” feature in Window 7’s Media Player is still there, unfortunately. I don’t know whether the blame should be laid at the door of Microsoft or whether it’s a shortcoming in the DLNA specification. Either way, the result is that I can’t use the “Play to” feature to push music from my Windows Media servers to my Denon amplifier. Negotiation of setting up the correct streaming format for the player device (the Denon) isn’t being handled correctly when there are three devices in the playing chain (the server, the player and the controller). I have got a workaround though. I’ve installed the (free) Asset UPnP media server software onto my Windows Home Server. The Asset server can be set to automatically transcode the Windows Media Audio Lossless format (which the Denon can’t handle) into PCM (which the Denon is happy with). Then, when the Asset server is instructed to push an audio stream to the Denon by the “Play to” media controller of Windows 7, it will stream PCM by default. Result: music and bliss. […]
There was an extraordinary documentary on BBC 2 last night: Trouble in Amish Paradise. It followed the story of two Amish brothers, Ephraim and Jesse Stoltzfus, who started questioning the rules of their Amish culture, and as a result ran into problems with their church, and faced total rejection by their friends and family.
It has to be said that many of the rules that are followed by the Amish look bizarre and ridiculous to outsiders – perhaps because many of them are, when you really get down to it. A rule that forbids you to ride a bicycle that has pedals and a chain, for example, does seem to be pushing into la-la land. It’s probably because the countryside where the Amish live looked to be relatively flat to me that this rule still survives, with the Amish scooting about on pedal-less bikes. But the laws of natural selection do seem to have applied to other rules: the widths of hatbands and the manner of wearing suspenders (men’s braces) have evolved into a veritable cornucopia of varieties, each sported by a different Amish sect.
However, Ephraim and Jesse weren’t really bothered about these sorts of rules – indeed, Ephraim, who came across as a most personable man, looked upon them with self-deprecating amusement – no, the one that really bothered them was the fact that the Amish Bible has to be in old German, which hardly anyone understands anymore. The rule is that an English translation is not allowed, so the rank and file of the Amish simply cannot read the Bible for themselves, they have to rely on the church elders. Ah, politics, politics, ‘twas ever thus… As a result of the two brothers’ desire to bring the bible back to everyone, they ran the risk of excommunication from their church, and the shunning of their friends and neighbours. And, make no mistake, “shunning” is no little thing amongst the Amish, it has real consequences both for the shunners and shunnees…
As I say, Ephraim was most personable, as was his wife and their four children. They are very nice people. Yet, to me, their unquestioning belief in God led them into risky situations. For example, they gave all their life savings to a family whom they judged needed the money more in the unshakeable belief that God would provide for them in times of need. So when one of their daughters fell ill with leukaemia, and they were faced with hospital bills of $3,000 a day, that belief was put to the test. In this case, their friends and neighbours did relent their shunning and rally round, but they could have just as easily held true to shunning the Stoltzfus family, and let them go to the wall.
The unquestioning belief was also seen in Amanda Stoltzfus in a scene in the hospital with her daughter. She was totally accepting of the possibility of her daughter’s imminent death, if that was what God willed. Part of me thinks that is admirable (and much better than the “why me?” attitude of some religious believers), but part of me can’t help but find it misguided, in the sense that, by my lights, what she’s doing is crediting her own inner strength to a non-existent outside agency. I also couldn’t help but roll my eyes when the parents said, in the hospital, that their daughter would pull through if God willed it. It seemed as though they gave no credit to advances in medical science or the efforts of the doctors and nurses.
Still, this was a sympathetic portrait of a sympathetic family, and I could not help but feel empathy with them. I would happily have them as neighbours. What I couldn’t do is have that unquestioning, unshakeable, unblinking belief in God. After it was over, I wondered what would have happened if I had, through an accident of birth, come into being in an Amish family. As a gay man, I certainly would not have found it easy. I wonder whether I would have survived, physically or mentally. The outriders of authoritarian societies are usually destroyed or rejected.
[…] of the Frying Pan… Posted on March 17, 2011 by Geoff Coupe A couple of years back, I blogged about a documentary made by Andrew Tait. It was Trouble in Amish Paradise, and followed the lives of two Amish families. Last night, the […]
The ‘God’ part I don’t mind; it’s everything that’s attributed to ‘Him’ where things seem to go off the rails. Thank your lucky stars you were born and raised in the progressive Isle of Man. 😉
Yup – I had it really easy, in comparison with some… 🙂
We so understand with your plight! We also struggle with things with church and family! Could we be in touch with you,
humbly and in Jesus Name,
qt
Er – I don’t have any “plight”. I gave up religion a long, long time ago. It’s pointless, and messes with your mind. Completely unnecessary. I suggest you try and do the same.
Last month, I wrote about some of the ways in which consumer technology doesn’t always work as promised. Today I’ll continue with the saga of the SNAFUs I’m encountering in my quest to have a media network in the house. I should start off by pointing out that today’s episode deals with cutting-edge features of products that are not in their final state, so it’s hardly surprising that not everything works as it should. Still, I post this as a counter-balance to some of the rah-rah blog posts that I’ve seen to illustrate that things aren’t always as wonderful as they seem.
Today’s topic is the “Play to” feature that will be in the upcoming version of Windows Media Player that will ship with Windows 7. That means that when browsing my music library, instead of choosing a track (or an album) and having it play on my computer, I can send it to be played on the Denon AVR-3808 that sits at the heart of our home’s audio-visual system. What I see on the PC is something like this:
Let’s take a closer look at the “Play to” window:
Here you can see that a track from a Kate Bush album is being played through the Denon AVR-3808. At the bottom of the window are the playback controls. The “Play”, “Pause”, “Stop” and “Track skip” buttons work correctly. In theory, I should also be able to set the volume level on the Denon via the volume control here, but this currently has no effect. This is probably because it’s an attribute in the new version 1.5 of the DLNA specification. The Denon is currently only certified to version 1.0, but a future firmware upgrade should be able to take care of this.
Well, this was all very nice, thought I, I’ll be able to assemble Playlists on my Tablet PC and use them on my Denon. But there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip… I found that many tracks simply would not play on the Denon. When I tried, the “Play to” window would report that an error had occurred on the Denon, like this:
As you can see, it’s not a particularly informative error message, and looking through the error logs on the PC using Event Viewer didn’t reveal any more information that I could see.
What was going on? Further experimentation revealed that some tracks worked while other tracks didn’t – and it was consistent. Those that worked, always worked; and those that didn’t, always failed. And just to be clear – all of the tracks worked when I called them up off the Media servers using the Denon directly. But when I sent them to the Denon via the “Play to” feature, some of the tracks would always fail.
Finally, I found the correlation. The tracks that work were encoded using the default Windows Media Audio codec, encoding at a bit rate of 192 kbps. Tracks encoded using the Windows Media Audio Pro codec (also at a bit rate of 192 kbps) and those encoded using the Windows Media Audio Lossless codec (which uses higher bit rates) always fail with the “Play to” feature. This is a bit of a bugger, since these days I always use the WMA Lossless codec to rip my CDs to my Music Library.
So, to summarise:
|
Codec |
Streamed to Denon via “Play to” Feature |
Streamed to Denon Direct from Media Server |
| WMA |
Works |
Works |
| WMA Pro |
Fails |
Works |
| WMA Lossless |
Fails |
Works |
As I said at the beginning, Windows 7 is still in Beta, and the Denon has not yet been certified to the new 1.5 version of the DNLA specification. So the problems could lie in either of them or both. But I do find it interesting that the Denon has no problem with all forms of WMA codecs when the files are streamed directly to it, which leads me to suspect that the issue may well lie with the current Beta of Windows 7. Whatever the cause, I hope that it gets resolved soon.
Important Update, 13 March 2009: I’ve discovered that I am in error in believing that the Denon works directly with WMA Pro and WMA Lossless streams – it doesn’t. The reason why I thought that these were working when streamed directly to the Denon (as shown in the table above) is that the streams were actually being transcoded into PCM format on the fly by the Media Servers I was using. Clearly, the servers were negotiating with the Denon over a supportable format when talking directly with the Denon. When using WMP12’s “Play to” feature, there are three devices in the chain, and a proper negotiation is not taking place. So, the server sends WMA Pro or WMA Lossless to the Denon, which can’t dealt with the formats, and the process fails.
Second Update, 14 May 2009: Using the Windows 7 Release Candidate, I’ve found that there is are scenarios where the format negotiation will fail, and ones where the negotiation will succeed. It’s all down to how you access your music files in Windows Media Player, and what the media server is. I’ll document all this and add it as a fresh entry into my blog… It’s now posted see Fun with Technology – Part IV.
I’m experiencing the same problem with WMA Loseless, except with the Denon 4308 and Window 7 RC. Kinda a bummer to be "so close" a really awesome capability.What Media Server do you think was transcoding to PCM? I was using the Window Home Server to stream to loseless WMA, and it works great. Did you find documentation that said it was transcoding to PCM?John
John, the Windows Media Connect server and the servers in WMP11 and WMP12 will all transcode WMAL to PCM when sending directly to the Denon providing the Denon negotiates directly with them. If you look at the Denon’s display, you’ll see that the WMA icon lights up when streaming plain WMA to it, but if you stream WMAL to the Denon, then the PCM icon lights up instead, showing that the servers are transcoding the stream.I had a message from Gabe Frost in Microsoft claiming that the RC of Windows 7 would fix this negotiation problem, but as you and I have discovered, it’s still there. A workaround is to install the Asset DLNA server on to your Windows Home Server (see http://www.dbpoweramp.com/ ). You can switch the Asset server to always transcode WMAL to PCM, and then it doesn’t matter if you have the three-way negotiation set up using the Play to feature, because the Asset will stream PCM to your Denon.
I’ve actually discovered that the picture is a bit more complex than I thought. Some scenarios will work, others won’t. I’m currently documenting this and will add it in as an update to this post later today.
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