always found the claim that scratching a diamond across a grooved piece of vinyl sounds better than decoding a pcm bitstream to be a tad dubious. major reason is a transfer function called the riaa curve. this compensates for the fact that you can't cut those grooves wide enough to record the lower frequencies as they were actually played. thus an important aspect of any analogue amplifier is the accuracy of its riaa filter. so how's that different than any of the digital filters required to make 16bit pcm data listenable? it's still a transfer function. it's still possible to error when you build it. or when the components drift from age ....

your article and the new yorker piece both suggest i should look into what my health plan offers in the way of sleep therapy cuz i sleep poorly and function badly in a rather demanding tetchy job .... doesn't help that our idiot government has inflicted jetlag on us all this weekend. i loath dst - what a stupid concept!

yup, that maser is a handsome car. but many of its stable mates are not, especially the sedans. to my eye, they look like chrysler products with a lovely exhaust burble (something only the italians seem to do well). have to agree with your take on the new stingray. it has potential as a good-looking car from certain views but overall isn't. it's a beast, too, which could be a good thing except too many boyracers will end up pranging the thing.

i like prof krugman too much to impose such a repulsive job on him.

bartlett repeats one of the great anti-canadian healthcare tales: "And although American conservatives are fond of pointing to cases where Canadians come to the United States for treatment, ..." thing is, in most cases where canadians ventured south for heathcare, the canadian medicare system still paid for that treatment. this is what american conservatives ignore. also, there are centres of excellence in canada where american patients venture north to get better care than is available in the united states. there's nothing wrong with specialisation and cross-border medical care.

oh well .... "oh well" was my favourite track from "then play on". so sad to hear it turned into a dirge by a zed-zed ....

why? it was yet another of his leveraged buyouts (per taibbi http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829). willard contributed a paltry sum of his own then piled debt on the repuglicant teatards. too bad they hadn't a reasonable alternative. too bad they're not reasonable ....

curses: i now own a gx1 (once it gets here). hope you get your cut from the clickthru ....

i'm offended! frankly, it matters not how neutral a tone you take on any topic: someone somewhere will be offended. there are plenty of aphorisms about how you can please some of the people some of the time and that's about it. and good luck with it ....

meandering slightly off topic: i rode by a stable this morning. saw a number of young women/girls riding or otherwise mucking about with the large odoriferous mammals. never see any young men/boys. just girls. wondering if my sample set is just too small or is obsessing over horses a girl thing?

wrong coast, mike. california is the place ya oughta be, so load up that truck and move to beverley ....

contacted my local subaru dealer about arranging a test drive of a brz when the car is available. got an obnoxious reply saying test drives were right out - all cars were already allocated to buyers and would i like to get on the wait list. cripes. i won't buy a car under those circumstances, no matter how much the filthy hacks in the motor trade laud the damned thing. i try driving every car i consider buying. no exceptions. thus no brz for me ....

encountered a problem on initial landing at gov.uk: they apparently failed to consider really large viewports. thus the satellite view of portsmouth gets tiled on my scope. alistapart had a great piece about dealing with this very issue.

dunno, from a quick perusal of his blog (assuming newmonetarism.blogspot.com is the right williamson) he appears to have sneer down to a fine art. good luck dealing with him.

although that citroën concept is about as repulsive an eyesore as you say, it's exempt from the ugliest car awards as it's not a production machine. pontiac and their hideous aztec still rule the roost ....

ignoring the trolls, where did krugman address the bit about the evil miracle?

never did understand the art market, even after carefully reading "the painted word" (http://www.amazon.com/Painted-Word-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312427581/). understand it even less now that charlatans like damien hirst waded into that marketplace. i'm hoping it's merely something in the nature of a fool and his money and not some taste malfunction on my part ....

i used to have a collection of about 1,000 vinyl lps, mostly british and japanese imports. after acquiring my first cdplayer (1982 or thereabouts), i started replacing my lps with cds. i've managed to find about 90% of my old collection in digital format. the other 10%? well who cares? the thing i miss the most about those scratchy old vinyl disks is the covers. the rest .... took the lps to bert's on yonge street or the record peddlar on queen or gave them to friends and eventually reduced the collection to zero. mp3/aac didn't really come along until long after my lps were already in someone else's possession. however, i've ripped all my cds to mp3/aac and carry them around in my various ipods. i still have ALL the source cds. wondering why as they take up a fair amount of space. maybe because i still don't really trust the hard drive(s) that hosts my collection. by the way, ip law and the desires of the record companies are only vaguely in sync. there's lots of room for fair use and format shifting whereas the record companies would like you to pay them over and over again for the same old stuff in order to keep them from a well-deserved bankruptcy.

a bit rich of jowly warmongering elitist friedman lecturing anyone on morality. like politicians, the filthy hacks who pollute our discourse need to have patches indicating who bought and paid for them. the hacks are just as corrupt as our politicians, especially the grey lady's frontline hacks, friedman, dowd, collins, &c.

i used to really like reading dawkins until he went careening off the rails with his "god delusion" and its dogmatic insistence that all that's ugly in our world is the fault of the religious when it's glaringly apparent that the problem is with homo sapiens and our evolutionary heritage. which makes dawkins adamant insistence all the more difficult to accept. after all, isn't he an evolutionary scientist?

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bob reich is a really nice man with his heart in the right place but he still seems to be labouring (no pun intended) under the misapprehension that obama is some sort of progressive ....

when will people stop flying united? i took a redeye with a stopover in chicago. it was only supposed to be an hour but they cancelled the outbound flight. so i got to spend a day at o'hara. any compensation? you have to be kidding. united is a bust airline and it really needs to be totally abandoned by its horribly abused "customers" .... i know i've flown united for the very last time.

> What a clown. a clown who's probably going to be the repuglicant candidate for prez. cripes! and by the way, it's treasonous because if the economy isn't totally in the dumper in nov2012, the good guv won't get elected prez, eh?

can you say "single term president"? and a more deserved fate i cannot conceive. obama is a disaster. totally incapable of dealing with the repuglicant obstruction. unfortunately that probably means a further lurch into the religious apocalypse of another bible-thumping texan president .... can't the dems do a primary challenge against the incompetent obama and get someone in there with half-a-clue?