The "432 Hz vs. 440 Hz" conspiracy theory - <AUTHOR> https://jakubmarian.com/the-432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theory <comment><USER3> I have been following this for years, being both a sound engineer and a bit of a hippie who knows a lot of other hippies. The basic issue is that 432 is a numerologically interesting number compared to 440. So if it's more interesting it should be better for artistic purposes, goes the argument. However this falls flat as soon as you consider that the 432 is only interesting relative to the completely arbirtrary duration of a second. There is nothing special about the second from a human psychoacoustic point of view. We could have standardized on a longer or shorter time interval, but since we'd been using the Babylonian-originated divisions for centuries in the west the second is what we ended up with.

But unless the music also contains some 1Hz modulation (or a power-of-two multiple thereof) then the 432 base frequency isn't related to anything fundamental in musical terms. Speaking as a DJ, if you take a track and play it a little bit faster or slower it still sounds great or awful as at the default speed in most cases. 432Hz vs 440Hz is a ~2% difference, while DJ equipment commonly allows for +/-10% pitch variation so you can match the pace of different tracks smoothly while people are dancing. Only the very tiny number of people with perfect pitch find this disorienting to listen to. If there were really something special about the duration of the second and the base pitch relative to that, you'd have expected it to emerge from dancefloors years ago. In reality 432Hz is basically cargo cult numerology, something fun to think about when you are not having any success coming up with a kickass tune. And kickass tunes derive their quality from the _relative_ rations of the note pitches, not from some absolute Magic Frequency.

Trust me on this. I really love numerology, sacred geometry and so on, and I try to integrate this into my artistic work regardless of medium. I would _love_ for there to be some special key that would unlock the gate to cosmic/ biological/ quantum harmony and allow my artistic work to automatically echo the heartbeat of the universe. I'm a mystic by temperament and have been looking for such things my whole life. I would go so far as to say I have some religious faith in the significance of such things. But this ain't it.

<comment><USER4> _" if you take a track and play it a little bit faster or slower it still sounds great or awful as at the default speed in most cases."_

Yup. Another example: in most of the world (where the television system is PAL or SECAM) movies are played on TV or released on DVD at 25 frame per second. But to achieve this frame rate, they take the theatrical film release at 24 fps and speed the video and audio up by 25/24th (4.17%). Of course almost nobody knows this because nobody notices it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/576i#PAL_speed- up](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/576i#PAL_speed-up)

For NTSC, the film release is sped down by a much smaller amount (0.1%) during the 3:2 pulldown to adjust from 30 to the exact 29.97 fps that NTSC needs.

<comment><USER5> Another example is the kind of dastardly television trick of increasing the speed of a television program to shorten it and thus increase the amount of advertising space that can be run alongside the program.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6i1VVikRu0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6i1VVikRu0)

This video claims that TBS is currently increasing the speed of Seinfeld episodes a whopping 9%, reducing a 25 minute episode to some 22.5 minutes.

<comment><USER6> "mpv -speed 1.1 file.webm" ... get 10% of your watching things time back, it does pitch correction, often its unnoticeable.

Technology can work in your favor too!

<comment><USER7> VLC can do this too:

Speed up: ] key Speed down: [ key Normal speed: = key

<comment><USER8> I use that to watch slow lectures at anywhere to 1.8x to 2.3x the speed. Turns a 40 minute lecture into a 20 minute lecture.

<comment><USER9> Some people one youtube speak really slowly, or are unprepared. The 1.25x speed button is great for that.

Also, some youtubers speak way too fast. Slowing them down helps comprehension a lot, I find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Decided to try searching this and found this lovely site:

> A=432 Hz, known as Verdi's 'A' is an alternative tuning that is > mathematically consistent with the universe. Music based on 432Hz transmits > beneficial healing energy, because it is a pure tone of math fundamental to > nature > [https://attunedvibrations.com/432hz/](https://attunedvibrations.com/432hz/)

Oh new age pseudo science. My mom loves this stuff and I never fully understood why. My sister gets angry at me when I point things out or level any criticism because "it makes her happy". This apathy to the issue from people who should know better is likely why nonsense like this keeps spreading in an age of Snopes and Google.

<comment><USER11> Eh-- pick your battles.

If family members get a positive placebo effect from listening to "5 Hours High Quality BEST 432hz Meditation Healing Chakra" on YouTube...Who cares?

<comment><USER12> The one whose inheritance is next squandered on highly priced meditation chakra recordings and excessively expensive hoax high-end audio equipment? (From Youtube to purchasing mail order junk...)

<comment><USER13> Until that person dies or is otherwise ruled incapacitated, it's their money to spend however they like.

<comment><USER14> No it isn't. Spending is very clearly regulated, and you are only allowed to spend it on sufficiently 'normal' things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have no idea why this laughable article/idea persists, but the actual answer about 440 Hz is completely commercial and mundane.

Decisions made by the J.C. Deagan mallet instrument company at 1770 W. Berteau in Chicago are the sole reasons why A=440. I once worked in this building, still called the Deagan building.

The company made chimes and xylophones and instruments. They had customers all over the US. Each symphony in each city used a slightly different reference tuning. Philadelphia used 442, New York 438, etc.

This fact forced Deagan to retool their machinery every time a different order came in. This cut into profits. The owner, J.C. Deagan urged his customers to standardize on one reference tuning. One reference tuning meant one set of machine tools for his machines and no time or money spent retooling.

Deagan got results only when he contacted James Petrillo, the President of the AFM - the national musicians' union. Petrillo made it a work rule that A=440, overriding the conductors local preferences.

This was in 1910. Therefore there are no nazis involved.

[http://richsamuels.com/nbcmm/deagan/index.html](http://richsamuels.com/nbcmm/deagan/index.html)

Hey internet: don't be so goddamn gullible all the time, okay?

<comment><USER16> Where did the article that nazis were involved?

<comment><USER17> Second sentence.

<comment><USER16> The second sentence makes no such claim. If you scroll further down you'll see

> Why do we use A = 440 Hz? (spoiler: no Nazis)

<comment><USER17> Right, the second sentence describes a conspiracy theory, and the end of the article dismisses this theory. The person you were replying to concurs with this dismissal, and presents additional evidence.

<comment><USER16> No I think the person I was replying doesn't know that the article dismisses the conspiracy theory. I might be wrong

> I have no idea why this laughable article/idea persists

<comment><USER15> You are wrong about that. This is the third or fourth time I've seen this dippy nonsense in print, and I wish it did not persist. Its central sin is that it obscures the mundane, industrial-based reasons for the tuning standard's emergence.

<comment><USER16> I'm sorry for being wrong then, but I'm still a bit confused - which part of the article is inaccurate?

> Its central sin is that it obscures the mundane, industrial-based reasons > for the tuning standard's emergence.

The article claims that tuning standards emerged because pitch inflation lead to problems for singers, is that inaccurate?

<comment><USER15> No apology needed!

And yes, the tuning standard emerged from the wishes of the owner of a single mallet instrument factory in Chicago named Deagan.

[http://richsamuels.com/nbcmm/deagan/index.html](http://richsamuels.com/nbcmm/deagan/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > orchestras specializing in older music may sometimes tune in the tuning > close to the one for which the piece was originally written, which may range > from 415 Hz to 470 Hz).

I can say as someone who performs a lot of Baroque music (c. 1600 - 1750) that there is a relatively common standard of A=415 for music of this period. A=415 is often referred to as "Baroque pitch."

This mainly applies to ensembles that specialize in Baroque music, and use historical instruments. If you see your local symphony orchestra play Bach on modern instruments, they will probably play at A=440.

I have never performed at a pitch higher than 440. I'm sure it happens sometimes, but I think it's more of a niche thing.

<comment><USER19> Opera singer here - you must be playing in North America. In Germany tunings range from 436 to 444, depending on what you're playing. Most theaters tune to 442.

One thing that gets opera singers (like me) up in a knot about this, is that the human voice is not a tune-able instrument. There are registration issues in fixed frequency ranges, which we can't change. At A440, a register shift happens a quarter tone lower than where Mozart and Verdi expected it. That creates a sound difference that an audience can hear, and a big difference technically.

<comment><USER20> As a classically trained but relatively amateur singer, and professional audio engineer, this fascinates me because I would've thought such breaks vary enough from person to person that it wouldn't be possible for a composer/conductor to expect it to be somewhere with anything like quarter- tone precision. Cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have met some very competent musicians who have found 432 tuning to be powerfully effective. When I dug into this, I discovered they were tuning the other notes in the scal to frequencies in whole numbered cycles per second, using tables being passed around. So the real change was in the qualities of _intervals_ ; many of these became far more resonant than the compromised resonant qualities we get with equal tempered tuning. This trade-off was once well known in the musical world, but it is now long forgotten. I consider "432" to be a symbol that suggests the restoration of forgotten methods for tuning scales, rather than a literal value to be used to proportionally change the frequency of every note.

<comment><USER22> If you're interested in this sort of thing, look for Wendy Carlos' album _Switched-On Bach 2000._ She revisits the material of her classic electronic music album with modern synthesizer equipment, and uses authentic Bach tunings for the pieces as well. The liner notes for the album explain the tuning systems used, and how they differ from the modern, mathematically-perfect equal temperament. She notes that Bach was himself a first-rate tuner and theorist, and was not above retuning "on the fly" to improve the sound of various compositions. Of course, with synthesizers, a tuning is just a block of data, which can be reloaded as needed.

(As a "bonus track" on the album, she included a realization of "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor." Especially appropriate for the season!)

<comment><USER23> Wendy Carlos is awesome! I didn't know about the 2000 version, I will check that out.

Tuning is just a block of data on a digital synthesizer, but on an analog synthesizer it's not. If you use a keyboard controller, it's generating pitch control voltages with a fixed 2^(1/12) ratio between notes (or logarithm thereof). It would be challenging to convert this into a just intonation.

On the other hand, if the pitch control voltages are generated by potentiometers on an analog sequencer [1] and the musician is setting those potentiometers by ear, the musician will probably end up tuning to a just intonation because it sounds more correct to the ear.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_sequencer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_sequencer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On the subject, here's an interesting song that starts out at A432hz and makes its way up to A440hz by the end.

Hideaway – Jacob Collier [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v3zyPEy- Po](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v3zyPEy-Po)

I did not explicitly notice this the first time hearing it, but I certainly _felt_ it. When I discovered the change it made sense to me. The mood is lifted over the course of the song as the tuning is also lifted.

There are so many elements of music that are routinely varied within a song — dynamics, texture, timbre, rhythm, key, and tempo (though less frequently during this age of the click track). I don't think I'd noticed tuning used prior to this.

<comment><USER25> I sometimes vary the tuning in subtle ways in my piano music (using a software piano).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > the BBC required their orchestras to tune to 440 Hz instead of 439 Hz > because 439 is a prime number, and the corresponding frequency is hard to > generate electronically.

I followed, until this. Earlier he debunks the significance of 432 _per second_ (including that it's a sum of four consecutive primes), because a second is an arbitrary length of time. But now he says that 439 _per second_ is difficult to generate electronically, because it's prime.

I'm not an EE. I'm willing to believe, but could a knowledgeable someone help us out here?

<comment><USER27> 439 being a prime would be an issue if you were up multiplying a lower frequency to generate it, for example using a PLL. However it is such a slow signal that it would be generated by dividing down a higher frequency. For example you can divide it down from an 18 MHz clock.

So, nope his claim doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER28> 439 from 18M requires a divisor of 41, which does sound trivial. Meanwhile 440 from 1M requires only dividing by 5 and 2 when first multiplied by 11, which might have been significantly simpler than dividing by 41.

I wonder if there is some easy way of figuring out the simplest base number- multiplier-divisor chains for getting certain numbers?

<comment><USER29> Dividing a frequency by a large prime, like 41, is somewhat difficult without digital electronics. Smaller factors are easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I spent three months in meditation retreat some years ago. I'd never heard of this phenomenon. At some point, I started hearing various tones that weren't coming from outside. They eventually became quite loud. I noticed three tones in particular, and wrote some code to pin down their frequencies.

I discovered that they were C, E, and G, where the A would have been 432 Hz (or very close to it; certainly much closer than to 440). Some internet searching turned up this phenomenon. Apparently ancient Hindus and Buddhists heard similar tones during meditation, and related them to various points in the body.

Maybe there is something to the notion that it's related to our neurology or physiology in some way.

<comment><USER31> _> I noticed three tones in particular, and wrote some code to pin down their frequencies._

What kind of code does one write to get the exact frequency of a sound in your head?

<comment><USER30> Haha yeah I could have explained better. I wrote code to play a solid tone where I could adjust the frequency via keyboard input. I played around until it matched what I heard internally. I have some musical training and know I can do that pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wasn't the 432 Hz thing started by Lyndon Larouche?

[http://www.schillerinstitute.org/music/revolution.html](http://www.schillerinstitute.org/music/revolution.html)

<comment><USER33> He basically popularized it, and I was surprised someone wrote an entire article on this without mentioning that fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The article mentions _pitch inflation_ and it reminds me of something I learned about symphony orchestras.

I dated an symphony oboe player for a few years. Oboes players play the note used to tune the orchestra before performances because the oboe has a penetrating sound and has very limited tuning capability (due to their construction) so other instruments are tuned to the oboe.

She said that the string players often wanted a higher "brighter" pitch than the true pitch for middle C. She had to carry an electronic tuner (about the size of a smart phone) to verify her pitch and resolve disputes with the some of the string players.

</comment><comment><USER35> Moral of the story is that numbers with dimensions totally arbitrary. In theoretical physics you often want to find a small parameter to do a Taylor expansion and make some mathematical expression simpler. A small parameter is a number much less than one, but if we have a quantity with the units of metres for example, we cannot say "r is much less than 1" because you can't compare a number with dimensions to one. You could always pick your units such that the number is much less than 1. What you instead do is find some _ratio_ of quantities that is much less than one, because then the units cancel and you have a dimensionless quantity that you can then compare to 1.

</comment><comment><USER36> One proposed pitch standard that was never widely used set C at 256 hz just to make the math slightly easier.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_pitch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_pitch)

</comment><comment><USER37> I use all different sizes of strings and tensions and tunings for my basses and guitars. ALL of the Western 12 note musical system is a social construct, not something innate to music, and other than what audiences and musicians are accustomed to, it makes no difference what tuning you use. Just like bands can play songs slightly faster or slower live, they can also transpose the pitch a half step or two, or a semitone in whatever direction, without most people consciously noticing. And it could have a beneficial effect on a song, or not. Exact tuning just doesn't matter to people without perfect pitch - <USER2> pitch matters.

</comment><comment><USER38>
        An equilateral triangle whose area and perimeter are
        equal has the area of exactly the square root of 432.

Let's say we have an equilateral triangle with a perimeter of 3x units. Then each side is x units, and the area is sqrt(3) * x^2 / 4 square units. So we set:

                3x = sqrt(3) * x^2 / 4
                 3 = sqrt(3) * x / 4
       3*4/sqrt(3) = x
        12/sqrt(3) = x

Then the area is:

        sqrt(3) * (12/sqrt(3))^2 / 4
        sqrt(3) * 144 / 12
        sqrt(3) * 12
        sqrt(3) * sqrt(144)
        sqrt(432)

Fun!

<comment><USER39> I saw that in the article, too, but it didn't make sense to me. One has units of area and the other has units of length. How can they possibly be equal? That's like saying a 700 foot wall is the same size as a 700 square foot apartment.

<comment><USER38> That's what made it jump out to me too! But the key thing is that one number is in linear units and the other is in square units. So for any linear unit you choose (mm, in, km, furlongs, ...) an equilateral triangle with perimeter sqrt(432) units will have area sqrt(432) square units.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Prince was also big into the 432 Hz thing vs. 440. 432 on guitar feels a little nicer overall but I like to play along to radio / DJ mixes for fun & practice and being at 432 feels off to me, so I stick with 440. 432 is good on acoustic, but then again open tuning sounds good on acoustic no matter if using 432 or 440.

<comment><USER41> I like playing bass tuned slightly flat because I have tiny hands and it's easier to play with less tension.

<comment><USER42> I recently switched to nylon wrapped strings... they also have lower tension. But I mostly did it because I play a lot of americana / folk / rockabilly / blues / jazz and wanted a better slap sound.

Unfortunately they sound terrible arco so now I have to play cello when I play in my wife's orchestra. :(

[edit] it occurs to me that you're talking about electric bass... in which case nylon strings would be a bit strange ;) sorry about that.

<comment><USER41> I was talking about electric. But thanks for reminding me to play my upright now and then! Poor thing needs some TLC... and a much lower bridge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Just wait until the conspiracy nuts learn about the tunings that affect the distance between notes, not just the shift! (I'm surprised my double music major is useful somewhere).

<comment><USER44> Just curious - what exactly is a double music major? (I always have heard of double majors as being separate subjects.)

<comment><USER45> I think they mean that chose to major in <X>, with music as a second (additional) major.

<comment><USER46> Possible also they got to different music degrees, in say, Composition/Theory and Trombone Performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> A guy I met at a party this weekend was explaining this to me (as something he believed) and I was trying to keep the "WTF" off my face. Thanks for posting this.

</comment><comment><USER48> For those wondering, 432 Hz is about 32 cents below 440 Hz, or nearly a quartertone flat.

<comment><USER49> There has been a "hertz" war in the bagpipe world for the past 200 years with the pitch raising steadily higher over the decades. Ancient pipes' "A" were historically tuned at 440hz, but modern pipes are tuned around 476-480hz!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Highland_Bagpipe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Highland_Bagpipe)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> A cool video on "music temperament" as well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRlp- OH0OEA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRlp-OH0OEA)

</comment><comment><USER51> Interestingly, his argument for dismissing the conspiracy theory basically boils down to type theory.

It's not legal to "convert" Hertz to other units willy-nilly, especially because Hertz is tagged with an attribute that says "this relies on arbitrary constants", meaning you would have to multiply 432 by some conversion factor before you can compare it to pure numbers.

Thinking about things in terms of types (in a fuzzy, intuitive way) like this is a very powerful mental shortcut that is useful surprisingly often.

</comment><comment><USER52> I helped do a lot of costumer relations for a music instrument maker who makes fixed-tuning instruments (which cannot be retuned by players, it's a fine art).

By nature of the instrument, we had a lot of relatively mystical-minded customers, and a solid subset inquired about the availability of instruments tuned to a 432 Hz reference.

What was interesting is that there is indeed a difference in 'feel' (character, vibe...) for most acoustic instruments when you tune them down e.g. to an alternative, lower, pitch reference. (Because most aspects of the system are either non-linear e.g. our sensitivity to various pitches, and maybe some sort of psychoacoustic quasi-significance assignment... ... or because simply they are changing one term in a function, e.g. given a fixed thickness of vibrating membrane, tuning it to a different pitch yields a different relationship to the many 'modes' in the system akin to standing waves... etc etc etc)

There's nothing mystical about it all of course... but the vibe changes, and many people prefer a slightly lower pitch, and now it is 'carried' by the instruments.

Then you get fuzzy thinking... I like this better, it feels better, QED an alternative pitch reference is the key to life itself.

What's funny in my experience is that our specific instrument did not have a fixed equal tempered tuning anyway, for technical reasons... so even with a 432 Hz A reference, the pitch values for say C# or F# were not === what they 'should' be according to 432 Hz adherents.

But try explaining that gently to an adherent... especially in the context of kindly debunking their mysticism around this topic... <wince>

</comment><comment><USER53> _However, in the 19th century, obtaining thicker strings was not that easy. Manufacturing of strings was a complicated procedure, so rather than changing the manufacturing process, it was much easier to tune the same strings to a higher pitch to increase tension and thus improve the sound._

Worth noting that today's strings are made from steel and nylon, as opposed to gut.

</comment><comment><USER54> [Posted on my blog]([http://www.krisconstable.com/432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy- the...](http://www.krisconstable.com/432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theory/))

While I appreciate Jakub's breakdown for the reader to get to explaining why the 432 number itself is effectively fabricated for convenience, he eventually states: "_The 432 Hz tuning, the divine tuning of nature itself, is ultimately defined as one vibration per 21279240.2083 periods of radiation of an uncommon chemical element_" however he's missing the critical argument.

What is missing from the argument is the irrelevance of the number. For example, if 432 Hz resonates with I don't know, the neocortex, there is no relevance what the number is or that we've associated with what we humans currently call a time second — that's just a standard way of identifying the number.

What needs to be done is validation or invalidation of this frequency in terms of "healing and soothing properties." It's also important to not do so defensively, otherwise you're arguing against organized religion or Santa Claus or Unicorns — it's a useless effort to argue against something that has no scientific evidence. If someone is making a claim without evidence in the first place, you're arguing irrationally already and you've already lost. Reason requires logic.

"Here is my repeatable scientific evidence why I feel the world is flat" is different than "I have a feeling the reason the sky is blue is from unicorn tears — prove to me it's not".

It is my suggestion that if someone feels that 432 Hz has healing and soothing properties, they take this hypothesis and run it through the scientific method. It will be these published results that can be responded to, directly. A quick search on plosone doesn't show that there's any documented research in this area currently, a new opportunity for those interested.

<comment><USER55> This can be difficult because everybody has been overexposed to 440, which is nearly impossible to control for. Even if you log an effect it can be argued that the effect is not of 432 but of a certain deviation from a norm.

<comment><USER56> Eh, try it across a range of different tunings and see if there's a peak in the effect around 432. If there were, it would be easier for me to believe it's the 432 that's significant rather than "normal - 8Hz"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> When I first heard of this I was really messing around with different tunings and such for writing music on guitar/bass. I didn't buy the whole new science schtick, but I did give it a try and I believe recorded and "produced" (as a hobbyist) an entire song in 432 hz to see if it'd be more interesting to work it. The only real noticeable thing to me was my strings were a bit more floppy than usual (due to it being in between E and Eflat tuning). It was an interesting experiment, but I've stuck to 440hz ever since, except for one time when I tried to do a rock cover/adaptation of a song from the 1920s that was in some crazy mystery temperament that I could never properly match (probably because every instrument section was different, horns were like 435+, double bass was 432, some strings were flat at like 430 or 431.. it was a difficult thing I never accomplished)

</comment><comment><USER58> Fascinating stuff. I have never pondered the arbitrariness of musical tunings (probably because I am not a musician).

However, if these tunings and notes vary so much, what does it mean when one claims that they have 'perfect pitch'? Is it an ability that uses the relative distance between notes? That is, given an A they can identify the C?

<comment><USER59> > given an A they can identify the C

this is relative pitch

> what does it mean when one claims that they have 'perfect pitch'

someone starting before 6 years old (better chance of things sticking) and being sung "bah-bah-black sheep" with a piano at the correct pitch. So they manage to remember the starting pitch as well as the relative up/down of the melody.

Interestingly, more common in "tonal" language speakers, e.g. Mandarin, where the pitch can make a difference in the meaning of the same word. Apparently "ma" can mean mom, horse, lazy... depending on the pitch and its direction.

Perfect pitch is mostly a curse than a blessing as many notes in the world are off, e.g. a school bell, and hurt the person with the perfect pitch. I hear :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> An amusing aside: As I understand it, a lot of rock bands use "drop" tuning, in which the guitars and electric bass are tuned down by a semitone or more. Explanations on web forums vary, but tend to revolve around the range of the typical male singer, as well as a preference for a more "heavy" sound.

<comment><USER60> This is true, but in drop tunings (and most alternate guitar tunings) the instrument is still usually tuned to 440 Hz - each string is just tuned to a different note in a 440 Hz scale.

<comment><USER61> It's a somewhat interesting question. One of my favorite recent albums [1] is at A = 366Hz. That's literally the case (the A string on the fiddle is tuned to 366Hz), but of course you could argue the whole thing is transposed down a minor third and then tuned to A = 435 or so.

[1] [https://soundcloud.com/nicolaslbrown/sets/alison-and- nicks-t...](https://soundcloud.com/nicolaslbrown/sets/alison-and-nicks-tracks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The article doesn't explain itself very well.

> There are millions of people in the world who believe that Goebbels dictated > the tuning to make people feel more anxious and warlike.

Is that a hyperbole? I doubt there are millions that believe this.

> I cannot say with certainty that there is no difference in the psychological > effects of A = 432 Hz and A = 440 Hz, but I suspect there is no significant > difference

This is the most interesting part, I think - i.e. what psychological difference is there? because that is what most proponents are focused on (e.g. the effects on the heart, chakras, etc.)

> and I think that if 432 Hz were some kind of a sweet spot, someone would > have noticed by now.

This completely misses the point, because proponents of 432Hz are saying this exactly! that 432Hz is a sweet spot!

I'm not sure myself, but I found these to be hole's in the author's claims against it being a special frequency.

</comment><comment><USER63> I think it is totally irrelevant what the exact pitch is. I play guitar for over 40 years and I rarely tune my guitar exactly to 432 or 440, instead, I often tune my guitar about a whole note lower because I like the sound of the strings with less tension.

Whatever the pitch is, I have my moments playing great and playing terrible. If there is one special quality that might be heavenly then it is the artist composing or performing that beautiful piece of music in the moment, and I never experienced that moment being connected with 432hz in any way.

<comment><USER62> Drop tuning is different than the actual frequency to which the instrument is tuned. You could tune up or down as many steps as you want and you might still be at A=440Hz. To try this you need a chromatic tuner which lets you change the frequency of the A note.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> This article is obviously written by a Nazi to cover their tracks :)

</comment><comment><USER65> If you lived in Europe, most of the films you've watched on TV were in the (when insisting on the exactness) "wrong" pitch: recorded with A = 440 Hz, but played at A = 458.3 Hz. Have you ever noticed?

[http://www.michaeldvd.com/Articles/PALSpeedUp/PALSpeedUp.asp](http://www.michaeldvd.com/Articles/PALSpeedUp/PALSpeedUp.asp)

And the 432 Hz tone became exactly 450 Hz using the same transfer.

</comment><comment><USER46> There has been considerable pitch inflation over time... Back in the 1700's tunings as low as A400 weren't unusual, and even lower wasn't unheard of.

</comment><comment><USER66> For any Pantera fans here, Dimebag is said to have tuned somewhere between 425-435 Hz for all of their albums after Cowboys From Hell.

</comment><comment><USER67> There's also the argument that 432 Hz is more in tune with our planet, see "Cosmic Octave" by Hans Cousto.

<comment><USER33> You shouldn't have been modded down since the origins of this idea come directly from Kepler's Harmony of the Spheres.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Orchestras in Europe mostly use 442 pitch. This was really started because the recording industry liked a more "brilliant" sound. It also lead to some disastrous destruction of old string instruments which couldn't withstand the high pressure of steel strings being tuned to 442 to and broke.

</comment><comment><USER69> I always liked the idea of standardizing on notes with the formula Cx = 2^(x+4)Hz. In reality it's fairly arbitrary, but in this method the frequency would follow numbers familiar to programmers, e.g.

C5 = 512Hz C6 = 1024Hz C7 = 2048Hz

In such a method, 'A' would be closer to 431Hz, so slightly flatter than the 440 we use now.

</comment><comment><USER70> A second is also pretty close to the time between adult heartbeats at rest. There is some evidence that the human heart rate can quicken or slow in accordance with rhythm in music. Wonder if that changes anyone's argument in here.

<comment><USER71> A 1% error in approximating a second by a heartbeat will cause an approx 4hz error in the frequency.

Here's a chart of the distribution of heartrates found in random middle-aged people measured over 24hours: [https://d1ieb9vw5zjdt6.cloudfront.net/content/europace/7/2/1...](https://d1ieb9vw5zjdt6.cloudfront.net/content/europace/7/2/104/F1.large.jpg)

Source: [http://europace.oxfordjournals.org/content/7/2/104](http://europace.oxfordjournals.org/content/7/2/104)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Another source of information about this subject (PDF): [http://www.wam.hr/sadrzaj/us/Cavanagh_440Hz.pdf](http://www.wam.hr/sadrzaj/us/Cavanagh_440Hz.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER73> When I was a teenager I had the idea that 60 cycle hum has a similar, unsettling characteristic. The key of C is probably the most popular, and 60hz is a B note which causes a dissonant tension when played together.

</comment><comment><USER6> People love to waste their time talking about high sampling rate audio whos effects can't be demonstrated in blind listening tests.

At least people can actually hear the difference between a=432Hz and a=440Hz. :)

</comment><comment><USER74> " _There are millions of people in the world who believe that Goebbels dictated the tuning to make people feel more anxious and warlike._ "

Well, tens. Possibly ones.

</comment><comment><USER75> 440 Hz is also the standard telephone dial tone in the US.

<comment><USER76> Dial tones are a chord of 440 and 350 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precise_Tone_Plan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precise_Tone_Plan) This follows on from DTMF's use of pairs of tones for signalling. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi- frequency_sign...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi- frequency_signaling)

<comment><USER77> I love the scene in Adaptation where a tripping Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper harmonize the dial tone chord while talking on the phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Given the number of aging Rockers tuning down to Eb, I thought the article was going to make a _physical stamina_ argument :-)

</comment><comment><USER79> Here's the rant I posted to Facebook when someone posted about this a couple of years ago. The site that was on Facebook 404s, including the Wayback Machine, so I can't share all the craziness:

The simplest argument against this is the casual way your typical garage bands tune. Not everyone is busting out the tuners and dialing up 440 Hz, when the guitar player figures out they're out of tune with the bass they just tune up to wherever they're at. With strings stretçhing, drop D tuning, and tuning down a half step, most bands would have hit the 'magic' 432 Hz every other practice and would have stayed there if it had any special properties. And this isn't just me and my buddies in the garage but musicians of nearly every style, genre, and background around the world. We'd revolt if we found our magic 432 Hz and then some clown brought a keyboard in that was at 440 Hz. This simply doesn't happen.

The 'cymatics' demonstrations are great, even the professors I work for get excited about how these demonstrate standing waves in materials. Unfortunately for the 432 Hz people the wave patterns depend on the vibrating materials. I make music out of vibrating strings, resonating wood and digital beeps and boops instead of square plates of metal (nothing against square plates of metal, I'd use those too). So maybe they should start by making pretty pictures of sand on top of a guitar to have a point with the cymatics. Also, the tuner they keep showing for the notes in their video shows their frequencies sharp or flat. They should at least get their notes right. They're also using a modulated tone with harmonics which introduces all kinds of questions about whether they're trying to prove a point or just make cool patterns with the sand. But really, who cares if it sounds good, right? Seriously, if you like your music 'detuned' to 432, go for it.

I've got a theory that altering familiar music is a great way to get us in different moods. We like remixes, right? So a 432 Hz retune might be just the thing to mellow out to. Likewise, a 448 Hz retune might be just the kick in the ass I need in the morning to get going. So retune all you like.

I do have a technical quibble with the suggested method in Audacity, the resample will do bad things to the high end of the music, all those harmonics and partials and stuff (of course, some feel all that is lost in digital music anyway so YMMV). The Audacity wiki talks about better ways to do frequency shifts. I definitely wouldn't do this to anything that has been digitally compressed at any point, your mp3 folders and itunes collection will lose even more when you start pitch shifting them. Rip the original CDs and mess with the .wav files or get the FLAC files if you're serious about retuning your music collection.

The real way to test their idea would be to blind test a bunch of music you've never heard before, some that has been pitch shifted to a variety of frequencies including 432 Hz and some that is unaltered. Score the music and your emotions after each song and see if there is a pattern to the pitch shifting. Now do this to a bunch of people and see if there are patterns in cultures, age groups, musical preferences, etc.

<comment><USER80> > The simplest argument against this is the casual way your typical garage > bands tune. Not everyone is busting out the tuners and dialing up 440 Hz, > when the guitar player figures out they're out of tune with the bass they > just tune up to wherever they're at. With strings stretçhing, drop D tuning, > and tuning down a half step, most bands would have hit the 'magic' 432 Hz > every other practice and would have stayed there if it had any special > properties. And this isn't just me and my buddies in the garage but > musicians of nearly every style, genre, and background around the world. > We'd revolt if we found our magic 432 Hz and then some clown brought a > keyboard in that was at 440 Hz. This simply doesn't happen.

I don't really understand what you're saying here. If you tune casually by ear, then of course when a digital keyboard comes in at 440 you will be off. Maybe higher, maybe lower. But you will be off. Unless you're saying 440 has some "special properties"...

<comment><USER81> They're saying that _if_ 432 Hz had special properties, then they'd randomly hit upon it because of the random drift of tuning, and notice that it was better than other tunings; if the keyboardist then came along and insisted on 440 Hz, they'd revolt because it was worse.

But they DON'T revolt, because 432 Hz is no better or worse than 440, 450, 429, 490, or anything else in that range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> True Qwghlmanian tuning is far superior.

<comment><USER83> True, but banging a silver spoon on an aged stoat is problematic.

I can never find the right spoon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> As a Frenchman, I chuckled at "In Britain, however, the French standard was interpreted in an erroneous way, due to which British orchestras commonly tuned to A = 439 Hz."

NOTE: I hope the word chuckle isn't interpreted as condescending, I only meant that this story is almost a perfect parable for our relationship with Great Britain throughout history, one of mutual defiance and refusal to acknowledge the other party as an equal even though I've always felt that there is some hidden love and respect going on at a deeper level on both sides.

<comment><USER85> As a Brit, my reaction to a Frenchman is one of disgust as I reach for my insults. Yet there are few countries I would turn to so quickly in the search for a sane and good friend.

Perhaps it is easiest to say:

Where the USA has Russia, we have France. Where the USA has Canada, we have France.

<comment><USER86> Does it work the other way? I'm Canadian and a huge part of our culture is defined by the ways we are unlike Americans.

Can't imagine Anglo-French culture works quite like that.

<comment><USER87> And as an American, I don't know anyone who doesn't like Canada or Canadians, while simultaneously not understanding what makes it different other than basically superficial stuff (i.e. french language, metric, being polite, etc.)

So I don't think we have that England/France relationship at all either. It seems pretty special on the world stage.

From anyone familiar with it, is New Zealand and Australia's relationship at all similar to either Canada and USA or England and France?

<comment><USER85> NZ/Aus is pretty special. Most analogous to USA/Canada

The original point was that Britain/France have the superficial differences that let us be friends (USA/Canada) yet we have some deeper differences and historical differences that let us be enemies (USA/Russia).

The nice part of it is that we can carrot and stick ourselves with one neighbour, instead of making our enemy the devil incarnate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Funny conspiracy theory but I have to say that following Occam's razor I would have reach the conclusion that it was indeed Goebbels who was behind it all as the presumably correct historical explanation is quite convoluted.

On the other hand for the Goebbels theory to be plausible I only need to evaluate: Did Goebbels have the power to influence this all across Europe? Yes he definitely had the power to do so.

Actually it wouldn't even be that crazy to believe this as the Nazis believed in all kinds of crazy mystical druid magic nonsense. (That Hitler could have sent people to search for the Ark of the Covenant as depicted in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" isn't that far fetched)

<comment><USER89> Hitler himself was very intolerant of any of this mysticism business. All these activities and societies were banned in Germany once they came to power. There was a number of people, in SS mainly, who were deeply into mysticism, and that was tolerated because of their status. So Hitler wouldn't have sent people to search for the Arc, but Himmler & co. might. Just another illustration of a common misconception about nazi-fascist regimes: they are regarded as highly organized, "precise", bureaucracies, when in fact they were run mostly arbitrary and ad hoc, a consequence of the Fuhrer Principle.

<comment><USER88> Well, I have no reason to doubt you regarding Hitler's personal beliefs, but I wouldn't call it a total misconception.

I live in a German speaking country and the people here who still follow this ideology are frequently into the same insane mysticism. Of that I'm 100% sure because I've seen it quite often.

<comment><USER89> Oh, there's definitely a phenomenon of widespread taste for the occult in Nazi movements. I was just trying to point out that the bulk efforts of Nazi German state and agenda weren't influenced by that in an "official" way. But people like Himmler were obsessed, and they could get away with it with Hitler because they were otherwise useful to him. Of course, it's hard to say what's official and what's not when it comes to such regimes because of the ad hoc system of rule I mentioned: every figurehead had their own fiefdom so to say, governed mostly arbitrarily by their will, as long as it didn't conflict with Hitler's overall agenda, itself arbitrary and dependent upon whatever he came up with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> So. Much. Bullshit.

<comment><USER91> This isn't a very helpful comment, what do you mean?

</comment></comment><comment> d--b I've heard that in some caribbean islands, they tune at 420.

</comment><comment><USER92> Well all that is is a myth about a certain frequency of A4, not really a conspiracy theory.

</comment><comment> loop-programmer The King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza is tuned to 440 Hz, so I'm going to go ahead and say 440 Hz is correct.

</comment><comment><USER93> Mathematician Here: Pitagora, who discovered music, studied that the lower sound we can Here clear is 27hz, and 432 is a multiple of 27. 27hz is A, and so it is 432hz.

432hz makes a lot of sense, other than that it is up to the director if the orchestra tune on 432 or 440, but since the vibration is so powerful, especially the resonance, it makes sense to use 432 to keep harmony, in my opinion.

<comment><USER94> Hmm, it's not as if Pythagoras could measure exactly 27 Hz, or that we all hear down to exactly 27.00, or that it's easy to generate a pure tone that low without clearly audible harmonics. So I guess I'm not convinced.</comment></comment>


Comcast + Time Warner Cable: Together Is Better - <AUTHOR> http://corporate.comcast.com/twctransaction <comment><USER2> There is so much regulatory capture here. These companies might as well be government bureaus. And we know they are in bed with the NSA (not their fault, they are forced to be).

If somebody is screwing somebody with regulation, it might as well be that the public screws the shareholders, not the shareholders screwing the public (as it currently is).

edit: After further consideration, maybe I should just buy stock in these companies. If somebody's screwing someone, I guess it's preferable to be on top.

Though in the long run I think I lose either way because political influence- peddling is so destructive to the market and society we all live in.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Together, Comcast and Time Warner Cable will make life online better for > more people by bringing faster Internet speeds, a more reliable and more > secure network, net neutrality protection, low-cost Internet access, and > programming diversity to millions of new customers across the country.

Surely this is satire. Net Neutrality? Community Investment? Product innovation? All of these items are on the opposite end of the spectrum as Comcast + TWC.

<comment><USER4> When they say "net neutrality protection", they mean "protection, from it, for us".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone who believes this to be true needs to see a doctor immediately. Seriously, only someone with some severe cranial injury could believe that.</comment>


European Parliament votes to end visa-free travel for Americans - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/europe-visa-free-travel-americans-european-parliament-vote-a7609406.html <comment><USER3> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13786339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13786339)

Apparently, this happens everyfew years, but the commission never acts on it.

</comment><comment><USER4> No, the EP didn't vote to end visa free travel by Americans. They are asking the Commission to follow the existing law in case of non-reciprocity - <USER2> may result in Americans no longer travelling visa free to the EU. If the Commission decides to finally follow the law and introduce this 'delegated act', the member states could still strike it down by simple majority.</comment>


Updated Chapter 4 of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming (Jan 18, 2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/fasc5a.ps.gz <comment><USER2> Would be helpful if the title indicated this is a download of compressed PostScript.

<comment><AUTHOR> My apologies, I will indicate that next time. There a preferred way of indicating this?

<comment><USER3> A "(ps.gz)" suffix in the title?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the diff and why?</comment>


Tor security advisory: someone deanonymized hidden services (early 2014) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory-relay-early-traffic-confirmation-attack? <comment><USER2> Sounds like Tor needs more donations:

[https://www.torproject.org/donate/donate](https://www.torproject.org/donate/donate)

I think they already said a while ago that "hidden services" are not a well researched feature of the Tor network, and the Tor Project is generally strapped for cash as it is.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Someone" is now arresting dozens of dark web black market operators too.

<comment><USER4> You mean Europol?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Conversation from 3 months ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107193)

</comment><comment><USER6> I am doing about 2 terabytes of relay traffic monthly on some cheap 15€/month server that serves my various other projects. It's fun and feels good. Takes minutes to set up. Join us! :)

<comment><USER7> Same here & have done this for years. I never come anywhere close to using the resources, myself, that even these cheap accounts provide. It feels good to donate the remainder to a noble cause. The Tor folks once sent me a lovely T-shirt for my contributions. Or Somebody did, maybe it was the No Such Agency's way of tagging me.</comment></comment>


Improving on Tor .onion Address Usability - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/cooking-onions-names-your-onions <comment><USER2> The way DNS works in I2P[0] is pretty neat[1]. Nothing in this post sounds quite like it. It provides a great "default" user experience while allowing for finer-grained control and tighter security if a user chooses. To summarize:

\- Users have a local "Address Book" which maps friendly names (e.g. forum.i2p) to I2P destination keys.

\- There are well-known I2P hidden services providing address book subscriptions. The default install includes a subscription that is maintained (and signed!) by the project maintainers.

\- The address book makes it clear where names are coming from. So if you decide to un-trust one of your existing subscriptions, you can still keep addresses you added yourself, etc.

\- New sites submit their name & key to popular address book services, but there is an additional trick you can use. Pass people a link like [http://mysite.i2p/?i2paddresshelper=<key>](http://mysite.i2p/?i2paddresshelper=<key>). This is known as a "jump" link. Your local HTTP proxy will take you to a page asking if you would like to add the name to your address book, or if you'd simply like to keep the name for this session but not save it.

The whole system is easy to use while staying flexible, secure, and in the user's control. I'm curious if the Tor team has tried out I2P or considered a system like this.

If it's not making sense to you from my summary, I highly encourage you to get I2P and try it out!

[0] [https://geti2p.net/en/](https://geti2p.net/en/) [1] [https://geti2p.net/en/docs/naming](https://geti2p.net/en/docs/naming)

<comment><USER3> It's similar to what ideas 2.1 and 2.2 are in the blog post - a local directory that is maintained and authenticated centrally and then distributed to browsers that perform a central lookup.

The downsides are that it is too centralized - it isn't difficult to imagine that a government agency would want to sinkhole silkroad.tor from the default registry.

With an alternate registry, you have the balance between knowing enough about the directory provider so that you can trust them, but not enough known about then where they are open to legal recourse.

ie. i'd trust a registry from riseup or duckduckgo, but that same registry is likely going to be the target of legal and hacking attempts. Likewise any provider who is sufficiently protected from those threats likely isn't well- known enough to be trustworthy.

One of the benefits of the existing names is that they also authenticate the site (assuming you check it correctly, usually out of band from a trusted source like a directory or search engine) - this part can be replaced with certificates and an issuance model that can be identical to what LetsEncrypt does

In terms of hosting the directory - that almost has to be decentralized using a p2p network. Similar to namecoin. Namecoin also solves the issue of distributing names and typosquatting - and it could be adapted to auction names.

<comment><USER2> > It's similar to what ideas 2.1 and 2.2 are in the blog post - a local > directory that is maintained and authenticated centrally and then > distributed to browsers that perform a central lookup. The downsides are > that it is too centralized...

It is only centralized for users with the default install, who never go into their address book.

I think the real achievement of I2P's name system is that _they have made it easy for users to understand_, and the tight integration in the UX is the main differentiator I see between I2P's approach and any of the approaches in this blog post.

While I think Namecoin sounds cool and all, I really hope Tor considers a simpler approach. I think it's a mistake for us to make this into a technical problem, when it's a UX problem. We're never going to get 100% secure names in a trustless environment, so why not focus on making the default pretty secure, and making the system understandable and useable?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great step forward, however the nature of all "domains" is centralised. DNS is a great idea, that decouples the centralisation to many parties, but it is central at many points; registrars, ICANN, DNS servers (though can be local). Tor's unique .onion address are the perfect way to fix the centralisation and the security, but comes at the cost of human readability.

<comment><USER5> I really liked the idea that created peercoin. I.e. a currency that also enabled distributed the registrar's (at least I believe so).

<comment><USER6> You mean namecoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's best to piggyback on DNS rather than inventing on new scheme (address books, namecoin,..) since this would surely result in a petty holy war and would confuse users. But it would be a nice way to destroy ICAAN monopoly over the domains.

The .onion protocol should behave exactly as https for http, it's just a protocol upgrade. Instead of a green lock, you would get a purple lock indicating privacy.

To do the protocol upgrade, the SSL field annotation seems like the most robust way but I would go with `Alt-Svc` in the mean time since it's easier to implement (server and client side). To mitigate the privacy issue, tor could download a list of popular 'domain->.onion domain' (exactly like DNS caching)

</comment><comment><USER8> Why they don't explore such an obvious approach to improving usability as various graphical representations of onion addresses? It works for security verification codes in WhatsApp, Telegram etc., it should also work for onion addresses.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why not use Namecoin? Seems like a good fit.

<comment><USER10> Larry from Blockstack.

We used use Namecoin and migrated to Bitcoin when we discovered that one miner controls more than 51% of mining power which is a security problem in a proof of work blockchain.

If you're interested in learning more, there's a peer-reviewed paper on it here: [https://blockstack.org/blockstack.pdf](https://blockstack.org/blockstack.pdf)

Section 3: "Lessons from Namecoin Deployment" may be of interest to you.

There's also an (old) thread discussing the problems encountered with Namecoin here: [https://forum.blockstack.org/t/why-is-namecoin-being- ignored...](https://forum.blockstack.org/t/why-is-namecoin-being-ignored-in- favor-of-bitcoin-based-key-value-stores/51?u=larry)

<comment><USER11> Bitcoin mining is also controlled by a small number of people. Over 50% of the blocks hashed over the last 4 days are from the same 5 pools. [1]

The difficulty mechanism has been an abject failure and utterly destroyed bitcoin's promise of decentralization. Under that mechanism, commodity mining hardware automatically defeats itself.

We now have a small number of big players who've built custom, super-secret hardware that can't be distributed or discussed or their investment will be immediately destroyed, and normal people are unable to contribute in any meaningful way (not even with GPUs anymore).

[1] [https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=4days](https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=4days)

<comment><USER12> 50% of hashrate coming from 5 pools doesn't sound like centralization to me. Afaik many pools don't even have miners themselves.

<comment><USER13> I don't want to be pedantic, and I do agree that the scenario isn't centralization in a sense that it strongly threatens the network, but I thing there's a point here worth clarifying. Pools don't need their own physical miners to have power over the block generation process. AFAIK, the connected miners are "dumb clients", delegating their block generation capability to the pool in order to share rewards and therefore reduce income variability.

In short: the pool still defines the blocks that the connected miners will mine. They centralize all the collective power of all connected miners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> ew. gross.

CAs : Web of Trust :: domains : what Tor should do

<comment><USER15> They're not using a ca-like central authority model. They're using Namecoin (or something like it), which is decentralized authority, verifiable via crypto.

<comment><USER14> never said they should. saying the kind of complexity presented by a blockchain is an insane way to work in low-trust environments with competent adversaries.

they should be working on reducing the complexity in the trust model. I trust the person who told me about a service. why can't I just get the keys from them, and verify that all of my other friends agree?

<comment><USER15> > why can't I just get the keys from them, and verify that all of my other > friends agree?

You can, that's what a .onion address is. This isn't too great for regular users; .tor addresses make it easier to work with. There's an observation here that people are already trusting google and onion directories to non maliciously give them the right onion address, this is trying to spread out that trust to a blockchain.

The nice thing about a blockchain based model is that while you need to trust the network to be sane, in case someone tries to use lots of computational power to break past this, targeted attacks are still not possible, the attack (redirecting a name) will be visible to the entire network.

<comment><USER14> Not with a programatic standard I can't. I'm saying they should make the equivalent of key server for GPG -- something simple.

Problems with relying on a blockchain to validate domains against sophisticated adversaries range from obvious to unknown. Not good.

<comment><USER16> The problems related to blockchains are very well known. Blockchains have been used extensively at this point, for highly critical applications. They're the most censorship resistant platforms known to exist.

<comment><USER14> Care to name a point where a blockchain stood between MSS and Chinese dissidents? NSA and islamic radicalizers? SVR and someone Putin wants dead?

I'm stoked about blockchains as much as anyone else (heck, I quit a job at Google and spent a year playing with them when Bitcoin first came on the scene). But to say that they are a good thing to build on top of when facing adversaries that have 7 figure USD budgets and capabilities to perform active attacks on non-trivial chunks of the internet strikes me as just a bit naive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> By placing pretty wallpaper over strong-encryption, we are making it more susceptible to damp.

</comment><comment><USER18> I realize the task of recording your favorite .onion names is a small expense of keeping your traffic private, but why is "taking notes in a text file" considered ad-hoc now? That wasn't the case in 1990, where most computer users had a library of floppy drives with their personal documents, notes, and records. Has the world truly forgotten that you can store data in textual form to your computer's filesystem? With how iOS is designed to hide the filesystem, it seems so. I hear so many app ideas now that could be solved with just a single text file and editor.

<comment><USER19> Good point about the filesystem, but this sounds like a really annoying and slow task to have to manage manually. If someone wants to write an app that spares me the drudgery of copying and pasting out of a text file every time I want to go on a website, I will use that app. Not to mention the reduced cognitive load from having fewer open windows to manage, and one less thing to have to know where I put it.

<comment><USER20> Am I missing something obvious, or isn't this something browser bookmarks/favorites would handle? I.e. storing a more human friendly title/description/tags for complicated URL's & paths.

This doesn't help with the potential complexity of sharing or remembering (on a new device) the sites of course.</comment></comment></comment>


What We Got Wrong About Self-Management: Embracing Natural Hierarchy - <AUTHOR> https://open.bufferapp.com/self-management-hierarchy/ <comment><USER2> >Stopped all 1:1's and mentorship sessions to avoid top down interactions

What? Whaaat? I am glad this is the first thing they immediately brought back, and while I am glad someone is doing some experimenting, this seems a bit obviously wrong headed.

Mentorship is the main way I see experience and knowledge are communicated (in terms of learning, besides making a LOT of hard mistakes yourself) unless you have the most amazing ways of teaching people already 100% completed and available for them to pick up.

To eschew mentorship almost seems to eschew the basics of how humans work!

<comment><USER3> Great points here, I agree on all fronts.

A few things that I realize now, we should have put into the post for full context:

> We replaced 1:1's with managers with peer 1:1's between people in equal > positions. So it was true peer to peer mentoring on the same hierarchical > level. This however didn't fulfill the need that people really want to hear > from someone who might have more experience than them, or who can guide them > onto the next step.

This is what we learnt and what we brought back.

<comment><USER2> That makes a LOT more sense! Enjoyed the article, thanks, and totally understand you not putting each and every detail in the original piece, its not an exhaustive study.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As much as I hate the status-quo, I've been burnt enough times participating in new ways of working together that I'd now explicitly look for prior art before innovating on them. There is a historical, evolutionary reason for things to be the way they are. The status-quo however is path dependent, and great innovation happens when we figure out the implied assumptions that were path dependent, but are no longer true.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness has been brought up here multiple times, but it is still a good reminder for the brave ones pushing boundaries:

"For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be open and available to everyone, and this can happen only if they are formalized. This is not to say that formalization of a structure of a group will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn't. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and make available some means of attacking it if the people involved are not at least responsible to the needs of the group at large. "Structurelessness" is organizationally impossible. We cannot decide whether to have a structured or structureless group, only whether or not to have a formally structured one. Therefore the word will not be used any longer except to refer to the idea it represents. Unstructured will refer to those groups which have not been deliberately structured in a particular manner. Structured will refer to those which have. A Structured group always has formal structure, and may also have an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in Unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites." \- [http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

</comment><comment><USER5> > Removed all managers that would help decide what someone would work on > > Stopped all 1:1's and mentorship sessions to avoid top down interactions

Why? Why remove such great areas of peer support and guidance? A flat structure does not mean all manager related things should be tossed out the window, but rather that decisions are made by your peers, who you'll listen to due to their skills and experience, not due to their title. It doesn't scale well at large companoes but the casual nature of it can be attractive if you have a small team.

</comment><comment><USER6> They could have just read Bakunin[0].

"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person."

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin#Authority_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin#Authority_and_freethought)

</comment><comment><USER7> The difficulty of conceptualizing an entire programming system gave rise to a paradigm of small pieces fit together through composition. Each piece should operate at its own level of abstraction. So too with management. Without it, everyone needs to simultaneously operate at all levels of abstraction just to be able to decide what's most important to work on.

Well done trying an experiment and well done acknowledging when it didn't work out and fixing it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Agree with the conclusions.

My conclusion: To treat people fairly, recognize not to treat them in identical ways.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think history taught us well enough that communism or similar egalitarian approaches (or maybe this is more like anarchy? idk), while a worthwhile ideal, do not work in reality. I know I vastly prefer management telling me what to do and where the company should go than doing it myself.

<comment><USER10> What model do you think drives Open Source?

<comment><USER11> Benevolent dictatorship.

<comment><USER12> Hell, Git was literally designed to support this model... Linux is developed with subsystem maintainers and Linus as gatekeeper. It's the very definition of a hierarchy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Holographic Discs to Store 20 Times More Than Blu-Ray - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/holographic-disks-store-20-times-more-blu-ray <comment><USER2> This kind of news has come out every month for my entire life.

Where is my solid state hard drive?</comment>


Add keyboard shortcuts to Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/31805

<comment><USER2> "I hate my laptop mouse. "

Clitmouse FTW!

(Not a big fan of Web site ad-hoc shortcuts, as they often interfere with the default browser shortcuts. Much prefer the "use Greasemonkey of you want site shortcuts" approach.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Heh, I wrote my own, too, at first. Here are others:

[http://www.acunote.com/open-source/javascript-keyboard- short...](http://www.acunote.com/open-source/javascript-keyboard-shortcuts) (scroll down for news.yc/reddit/digg shortcuts)

<http://livepipe.net/extra/hotkey> (general)

<http://code.google.com/p/js-hotkeys/> (general)

<comment><AUTHOR> I liked the idea of the acunote script, and tried it out. But I like my script better :) It allows you to open items in new tabs and use keyboard navigation in the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Or just use Vimperator (firefox addon), and get keyboard shortcuts for the whole web.

</comment><comment><USER5> Firefox's Ctrl+F and ' _almost_ allow you to browse with no mouse interaction at all.</comment>


Avoiding the Adjective Fallacy - <AUTHOR> http://betterexplained.com/static/articles/adjective-fallacy/ <comment><USER2> There was a fairly decent discussion about this last time around:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10296505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10296505)

</comment><comment><USER3> Brilliant! I had a lot of trouble with math, until the second year of an engineering degree, when it all clicked. If only I'd understood what was happening with math was so much more than a series of abstract rules applied to a problem I did understand.

When we had to model a DC motor mathematically it all started to click, the math was simply a tool for greater understanding and prediction.

But sadly at the high school level it was just learn this and repeat it first in the homework then in the exam....

</comment><comment><USER4> > But guess what students learning English are taught?

Well... kind of. The teacher did show a similar chart, then we did a few exercises based on it, but it was more about "see how it sounds better now? you'll apply it automatically after a while". It was definitely not something we spent a long time analysing / practicing.

It's good to know why some things sound wrong.

</comment><comment><USER5> One of my physics professors said that a key skill of good physicist is to be able to characterize a system quickly, prior to bringing in numbers or perhaps even equations. I've applied that to a lot of things.

It's a proxy for developing good intuitions, but also for realizing that formalities often _follow from_ intuitions, and not the reverse.

Language (OP) is organic, and formalities follow.

<comment><USER6> Just out of high school I was visiting some folks in the Amazon basin who did oilfield support work. (Long story.) They were talking about some building modest but non-trivial piece of engineering, like a big tank. One of them, a grizzled old guy who looked more like a motorcycle gang leader than an engineer, talked through the problem in just the way you describe, doing estimates of dimensions, weight, support structure, materials needed, and the like. No calculator, no paper, nothing but what he had in his head from years of experience.

I had assumed that kind of work was done very formally, with equations and blueprints and the like. It blew me away to see somebody do something so familiarly, and I'm sure he was spot on. It definitely inspired me when I went to college.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a difference between acquiring language and learning one as an adult. Children don't need to apply rules to learn a language- they acquire it unconsciously. Adults actually DO need to learn the rules. At least, that's what I remember from Linguistics 101.

Here's my preferred way to chop a circle up to determine the area: [http://www.drcruzan.com/Images/Mathematics/Circles/AreaByRea...](http://www.drcruzan.com/Images/Mathematics/Circles/AreaByRearrangementFigure.png)

<comment><USER8> Not true. Adults are ABLE to learn rules, but they don't NEED to learn them (there's plenty of evidence of adult language immersion).

Also, doubt exists whether knowing some rules explicitly is of any help when trying to use language in a realtime timeframe. And there's also continuous debate whether it's even possible to "transfer" rules from explicit knowledge into an "automatized" linguistic skill.

Some researchers note that "rules" as presented on language classes have nothing to do with the inner representation of language, and are thus of no help. (Except when explicitly "thinking" about language.)

<comment><USER9> I agree. This has always been my feeling about learning a second language as an adult. English is my first (only) language. I've been making a half-hearted effort to learn Spanish the past few months. Recently someone was trying to teach me a handful of rules and I kept trying to tell them 'I don't care, it doesn't matter if, at this stage, I use the wrong verb ending, or even if I say araña (spider) instead of naranja (orange), it won't matter so long as you know I'm trying to ask for an orange to eat or tell you there's a spider outside by the door, understanding has been achieved - that's what's important. We are all just trying to understand each other.

Maybe children have an advantage because they _aren 't able_ to talk properly when they are young due to physical growth limits, so we make a lot of effort to teach them.

It takes children 5 _year_ to reach 95% - 100% language fluency, and will go on to learn many new words over the next 15 years, and some will go on to study their mother tongue, read, and learn more about their and, other languages, all their lives.

 _By 5 years of age, anyone (including unfamiliar listeners) should be able to understand the child's speech in conversation 95-100% of the time._ [1]

I'm willing to bet $100 dollars _anyone_ in full language immersion will reach at least that stage of fluency in 5 years. And remember, children can be very talkative, so they're always making mistakes and learning.

I guess adult language learning is how it is because adults are generally too busy to make that sort of commitment. It then follows as self evident that children and adults learn languages differently. Adults solution space is constrained. We have to try to learn a language around busy adult lives.

Children's brains are also still developing, so there's going to be some physical differences also, it's not clear whether that should be an advantage or disadvantage. Maybe being able to map a second language to what you already know is an advantage, we already have a framework.

1\. [http://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/library/2013Facts...](http://www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/library/2013Factsheets/Factsheet_Sound_of_Speech_PreschoolSchool- aged_children.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I believe this article misses its own point. I'll keep it short.

"I" is a lie. There is no "I".

The brain has two halves, right and left. The right side is spacial. The left side is lingual. Generally.

Both halves of the brain receive stimuli from our senses and build models of the environment that are optimized for their respective roles.

This gives each of us two models which we use to navigate our environment: a spacial model and a lingual model. These models each run in their own hemisphere and are very different from each other in both function and form.

The spatial model is innate. We are born with it. The lingual model, we acquire. (We must learn language before we hit puberty or we lose the capacity to do so. Search for "linguistics Genie" or "linguistics wolf boy" for details.)

Rather, this article is a commentary on the fact that practically all schools fail us.

In school, we sit in class, exposed primarily to lingual input. We consequently build an effective lingual model of explicit rules of our world. But but we are left to our own devices to build our spatial model, which we do from our own activities while following the "explicit rules" we know.

Every once in a while, we stumble upon some visual/real world representation that allows our spatial side to realize a concept that is well known to the lingual side.</comment>


Notes from an Emergency [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSrLjb3k1II <comment><USER2> > Regulate ads to target content, not users.

This. 1000x.

At it's core this is essentially like sponsorship. Anecdote : I've always found sponsored content more useful than the ads that ad networks show me and they are also not creepy like traditional ads. Eg- I search for strawberries on google, click through a few links. Separately I visit a tech blog to learn about how to monitor a VPS, guess what shows up on a site about servers and software? Strawberries! Creepy as f*uck and completely out of place.

Do you think an ad network that focuses on targeting content rather than users will work? Are there any such networks already? If not, it's time to build one.

<comment><USER3> What's your selling point to advertisers though? That you're a worse-targeted version of the big guys? You could say you're more user-friendly, but I don't think that's a premium most advertisers are willing to subsidize.

If this were a good opportunity for an ad network, then we wouldn't need any regulation to force it.

<comment><USER4> This is why it's a regulatory argument, not a business argument. Without a regulatory floor, it's a race to the bottom.

People will always respond better to novel forms of advertising, and it takes bad actors some time to figure out how to game new kinds of online advertising. The result is ever more invasive surveillance and tracking techniques, in a Red Queen's race.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Typical 'idlewords :). Lots of good points intermingled with unwarranted jabs at Elon Musk, X-risk and anti-aging efforts. I suppose the latter are just signalling, but they do detract from the point he's making.

The points about tech running amok with the surveillance capitalism are spot on. I do have some doubts about other parts though; here are they in somewhat random order:

\-- Problem solving.

I'm not buying this villifying of tech world for trying to avoid the "dirty political work". In fact, I believe it's a good approach. Turning a problem into a political issue pretty much guarantees that it won't be solved as people take sides and then invent arguments to rationalize their positions. Just look at the climate change - since it became politicized, it's close to impossible to do anything in the area (Trump's election in the US is not helping either). The only way to address it now is by ignoring the democratic process altogether - by doing research, developing new technologies, and hoping for the market forces to sort things out.

Moreover, why does the tech industry is always blamed for trying to avoid political work? Like, are there no human beings who don't work in tech industry that could try a different approach? Why is tech industry expected to do everything, and then at the same time gets called out for hubris?

Related, on tech and life extension efforts. I call the Comet King principle - "somebody has to and no one else will". Why is nobody else besides tech billionaires interested in putting serious resources into solving that problem?

\-- Poland.

Is it an evil surveillance state now? I live there and I haven't noticed it.

\-- Trump.

I'm starting to get a feeling that some people on anti-Trump side are just sore losers, and can't accept that he won democratic elections; no, it must be some conspiracy. I'm not endorsing what Trump is doing, but the facts on the ground are that many people did vote for him, and denying them agency makes it more difficult to notice the problems those people face in their lives.

<comment><USER6> You completely lost me by calling a sizable majority of voters anti-democratic sore losers.

<comment><USER5> I didn't call them that - you did, by asserting that the sore losers I identified actually form the majority of the voting population.

EDIT:

Also, "you lost me" kool kid dismissal is supposed to be used with things mentioned early in the piece of writing, not with literally the last two sentences of the post. You admitted that you read everything, so no points for style :P.

<comment><USER6> You very much did. Go reread your comment.

You lost me is me telling you that I was entertaining your argument up to the point where you called the majority who voted for someone else sore losers.

The 'kool kid' slur seems pretty unnecessary. What value does that add to your argument?

<comment><USER5> Let me quote directly from my comment:

"I'm starting to get a feeling that _some_ people on anti-Trump side are just sore losers, and can't accept that he won democratic elections; no, it must be some conspiracy."

Note the key word "some" here. I didn't call the majority of voters (or even of those not voting for Trump) "sore losers". Most people who didn't want Trump to win are sad about the outcome - that's normal. But there's a huge difference between being sad your side lost, and going around talking all the time about how the other side _could not possibly have won_ (and it must be some kind of evil conspiracy).

The "wrong" side won, but the real question isn't how, it's _why_. As for answering it, 'idlewords says it's a "bug in the operating system of our democracy, one of the many ways that slavery still casts its shadow over American politics". Personally, I disagree. I think this is democracy working as designed, and the whole situation should be a sad lesson about a) what you get when lots of people feel they are treated unfairly, and b) that general population is kind of dumb in aggregate, and nationalism is unfortunately the default state (in-group/out-group).

That, and c) what you get when you let media spin the "Muslim == terrorism" narrative ad nauseam for close to two decades now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This paper, Natural Monopoly and Its Regulation Richard A. Posner (1968) gives a really good overview of how (and why) this might play out. [http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...](http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2861&context=journal_articles)

</comment><comment><USER4> Text version here: [http://idlewords.com/talks/notes_from_an_emergency.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/notes_from_an_emergency.htm)

</comment><comment><USER8> Ceglowski wants internet companies to be brought under stronger regulatory authority of local European governments, to protect societies and elections from pernicious forces in those companies and on the internet generally. He hopes there's a spillover benefit to people in other countries.

"Regulate, regulate, regulate!", Maciej urges.

Erdogan of Turkey says, "OK, Maciej!" – blocking Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, & Wikipedia in the name of social order.

Putin of Russia says, "OK, Maciej!" – running the Zuckerberg-of-Russia (Durov) out of the country, blocking protest websites, and moving Russia towards a Chinese model of internet content control.

Newly-elected Macron of France says, "OK, Maciej!" – following previous French initiatives to fine Google for failing to delete truthful news worldwide under EU 'Right to be Forgotten' rules, and to ban 'terrorist' websites by administrative decree, Macron pledges further regulations to "stop fake news".

Theresa May of the UK says, "OK, Maciej!" – unveiling a manifesto to make Britain "the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet", penalizing internet companies that "direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm".

<comment><USER4> Obviously there is good and bad regulation. I go into specifics about what I want in the text version of this talk, and here:

[http://idlewords.com/six_fixes.htm](http://idlewords.com/six_fixes.htm)

<comment><USER8> But how often are snarky but otherwise mild-mannered technocrats like yourself able to set the agenda for internet regulation, as opposed to actual demagogues like (in varying degrees) Macron, May, Erdogan, and Putin?

Your "regulate, regulate, regulate" chant about the evil influences of the American internet will in practice drive more censorship then privacy protection – even when, as with the Tories' new internet-regulation manifesto, the censorship is itself dressed up in "data protection" guise.

<comment><USER9> Despots gonna despot regardless of what idlewords (or anyone else) does

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Celgowski got one of the most original and accurate view of the world. He see the big picture.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think that the phenomenon of rich people investing in life extension technology is inescapable - it's the one thing that having a billion dollars still can't fix right now, rich people die just the same as everyone else... But I agree with the sentiment that the world doesn't really need an immortal Larry Ellisson ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> "Now some dopey kids in Palo Alto get to decide the political future of the European Union based on some coding bootcamp that they went to. This doesn't seem right."

</comment><comment><USER13> Summary?

<comment><USER14> Here's a transcript of the talk: [http://idlewords.com/talks/notes_from_an_emergency.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/notes_from_an_emergency.htm)

<comment><USER13> _" The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda. ..._

 _There are five Internet companies — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. Together they have a market capitalization just under 3 trillion dollars._

 _And please regulate, regulate, regulate this industry, while you can. "_

The trouble for calling for regulation is that what you get is Theresa May's version.[1] Or the Great Firewall of China.

[1] [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/new...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/news/theresa-may-internet-conservatives-government-a7744176.html)

<comment><USER15> A simple workaround is to regulate the collection, storage and use of personally identifiable information.

There's nothing especially horrifying about Facebook not being allowed to use demographic profile information to target advertising.

<comment><USER16> How do we regulate in a way that limits the power of the big five without also hurting small businesses? Otherwise, the end result will almost certainly be to bolster Google and Facebook.

<comment><USER17> By creating strong regulations to curb the worst practices of ad company tracking, then dismantling these monopolies the same way we did with Microsoft in the 90s.

<comment><USER18> The regulation of Microsoft is what got us where we are today in terms of loss of privacy.

The Microsoft model was:

1) Money from selling useful software that people buy

2) The web as an information source. Apps are actually software that is (paid for and) installed

3) The PC as hub for the user's digital Life

Instead, with help from the DOJ, Microsoft lost, and now we have the Google model

1) Software and services given away as enticement for user data which is then sold to advertisers.

2) Primacy of the web app over installed apps.

3) A central service as the hub of a user's digital life.

These together have eroded privacy and user's control over their data.

<comment><USER17> That's an interesting point. How do you think we should go after Google and company then?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Saving the 'god of ugly things': NZ battles to restore its rodent-sized insects - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/saving-god-ugly-things-new-zealand-battles-bring-back-its-rodent-sized-insects <comment><USER2> The other morning I felt a scratching on the underside of my foot, while I had my coffee. One of these things had crept into the lounge overnight - it was its long antennae that were tickling my toes.

I am homeless now, but still worried the fire wasnt enough to kill it.

<comment><USER3> True story. Years ago, I was driving with my wife, and I was wearing an oilskin rain hat. I felt a tickle, took the hat off and looked. Dropped the hat on the floor. My wife asked what startled me. I said "let me stop first". Parked the car. She was very worried by now. Said "weta in the hat". She ejected out of her car door like 2001: Space Odyssey airlock scene. Good times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Young children start off fascinated by those insects, Watts says, "but when > they get around 13 years old, something happens and they think [weta] are > just horrible."

I admire the battle to save these creatures...it's hard enough to get people on board that cute animals need to be saved. This has to be a real uphill battle.

<comment><USER5> > _" but when they get around 13 years old, something happens and they think > [weta] are just horrible."_

Yes, that's when puberty hits and they really start caring more about what they think _society_ tells them to consider good or bad, rather than about what their own intuition tells them. It's tied to the development of theory of mind.

Some people grow out of it later, and some are stuck with thinking the social norms they know are the same as absolute truths. They are just interpretive frames, of course.

<comment><USER6> Do you have studies or some data you can link ? I'm interested to read more.

<comment><USER5> I base this on Michael J. Parsons five-stage model for _aesthetic_ development from childhood to adulthood (and professional interpretation)[0]. But I think that it applies here, since deciding whether insects are cute or gross is _very_ much an aesthetic judgment.

Here[1] is for example a paper linking the work to theatre:

> _In the specific domain of visual art, Michael Parsons has proposed a > developmental framework of aesthetic epistemology that describes how we move > through stages or "sets of ideas" when discussing artworks' subject matter, > artists' expressions, the forms and styles of visual media, and our > judgments about each of these concepts. Like epistemologists, he marks the > boundary of each stage by cognitive shifts in: 1) our primary mode of > inquiry (i.e., perception, interpretation, and evaluation), 2) our > expectations about the purposes of art, 3) our primary sources of artistic > knowledge, and, 4) our primary criteria for making evaluative claims. > Numerous studies in the visual arts have supported his framework with > various populations, yet to date no one has offered an analogous > epistemological framework for the domain of theatre._

One criticism of Parsons' model is that it's hierarchical in a way that implicitly suggests that later stages are "better" than earlier stages (in typical Western fashion). Then again, it is tied to cognitive development and growing more mature so how could you _not_ end up with a staged one-follows- the-development-of-the-other ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯. For a more recent, more elaborate model that is inspired by Parsons' model, see[2].

[0] Michael J. Parsons, _How We Understand Art: A Cognitive Developmental Account of Aesthetic Experience_ (New York: Cambridge U P, 1987).

[1] Jeanne Klein, _Mapping aesthetic development and epistemological understanding_ , [https://journals.ku.edu/jdtc/article/download/4376/4104](https://journals.ku.edu/jdtc/article/download/4376/4104)

[2] [http://ppcms.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/usermounts/lederh7/1993-...](http://ppcms.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/usermounts/lederh7/1993-2004/LederBelkOebAugBJP2004.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a bit crazy in NZ due to the mamamal invasion, we have ~4000 endangered species and we are only trying to do something about 300-400.

NZ was a weird place where there was virtually no mamamals just mostly birds that didn't have many predators ( other than some giant eagles, where the best response was to stay as still as possible). As a result much of our wildlife have strong scents they use to find each other. Then the rodent mamamals came along and the stinky native species are easy to find, and thir defence is to stay as still as possible. So Carnage ensued.

One of our defences is a poison called 1080, which is a synthentic version of a nartually occuring poison ( Sodium fluoroacetate ). It has a unique property of being very toxic to mamamals and not very toxic to most NZ birds and insects, so ideal for NZs situation. The poison itself is pretty brutal on mamamals. But it has proven very effective. However, there is a kind of "antivax" backlash to the poison and a lot of misinformation which has slowed down the use of 1080. So we are living in a weird state of trying to protect what we can while a vast amount of native species are getting annhilated.

<comment><USER8> This article about New Zealand's Predator-Free 2050 program was very interesting. Such a large scale project, in terms of time and area.

"The nation wants to eradicate all invasive mammal predators by 2050. Gene- editing technology could help — or it could trigger an ecological disaster of global proportions."

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/new- zeal...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/new-zealand- predator-free-2050-rats-gene-drive-ruh-roh/546011/?single_page=true)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Such a brilliantly weird looking insect. When we were kids we used to love reaching into the wood pile to pull out a weta. Not so keen on the idea anymore!

<comment><USER10> Kids are weird. I used to look for a horned lizard, give it a tour of my house, and release it if it looked stressed. If it didn't, I'd take it to school in my shirt pocket. A big one in particular seemed happy as a pet and lived permanently in our backyard.

I still find them pretty cool, but I don't think I'd chase another ever. Specially now that I know they shoot blood when scared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Back in 1999, I was standing outside gazing at the stars, when I heard this "tick tick tick" sound behind me. Turned around to find this tiny little weta, maybe three centimeters long, jumping around while appearing to look at me.

My father's cats used to capture them by the dozens and bring them inside, usually they'd kill them, but if I could tra pthe weta I'd take it outside and put it near some bushes, so it could get away.

Fascinating little things.

</comment><comment><USER12> New Zealand has the coolest animals. The first time I saw a huge-ass Kakapo (flightless parrot thing) on the southern island it scared the crap out of me. The pigeons that eat partially fermented berries and get drunk are pretty cool, and the Tui birds with two voice boxes are crazy to hear in the wild! Also, Morepork, just because it is an awesome name for a creature.

<comment><USER13> Douglas Adams on the Kakapo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCsHuoVABgI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCsHuoVABgI)

<comment><USER14> You can read more in Douglas Adams' and Mark Carwardine's _Last Chance to See_. Great book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It took me a few years to accept that the Giant Isopod is a real animal. Let's see with this one.</comment>


Is 2020 Over? - <AUTHOR> https://is2020over.com <comment><USER2> This site would be nice if it wasn't so biased.</comment>