Looking for Skeptics

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bluesjnr said:
Flaccon, it is becoming clearer and clearer that you have no interest in furthering the salvation of mankind with your repeated refusal to read and digest what is being written here. You have had a wealth of advice and instruction (often repeated) and not one scintilla of this this seems to have sunk in. You MUST rule out pareidolia by testing and NOT by assertion. What you witnessed is anecdote and it's been explained to you previously why that won't fly.
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To be fair, flaccon did respond to my questions. Her response annotated with my comments can be found in the pdf here: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=9347991&postcount=3385
 
marplots said:
Why is the letter important? What does it have to do with her claims?
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One of her claims is that the GP believes and supports her other claims. It has been speculated that the unredacted version may give an entirely different slant to what the GP intended. And yes, I was one of those who so speculated.
 
flaccon said:
The first 6 years were the years that I witnessed what the spirit was doing to other members of my family. I witnessed it and reported it to the local Bishop, and they dealt with it.
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What did you witness? What made you believe that spirits were the most likely explanation of what you witnessed? How did you rule out all other explanations? How did your local bishop "deal with it"?
 
Flaccon's recordings uploaded by Alderbank here:
https://www.box.com/alderbank
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Sorry if I'm very late to the party, I'm curious.

I've listened to flaccon_2.wma and flaccon_1.wma

In f_2, one would need to bring the last part down, bring up the first part.
(I did this, for my own amusement.)
When you do this to the first part, you have to get rid of bass that will ruin your speakers. Nothing but garbage there.




In f_1, there's plenty of audio -- a man and woman's voice, more loud crashing.

My question: How were those recorded? Are they purported to be the originals? What kind of processing is doing the noise-reduction? (which is causing the active filtering, the "squelching" effect.)
eta: If that other one says Wimbleton or anything else intelligible, I'll eat my foot.

The Robert one sounds like a little static -- indeed, it could be someone messing with a cable.
 
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Daylightstar said:
Answered here

Also, although possibly confrontational for flaccon, it would be better for her to get such a thing out.
Only one way to find out.
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There have been many claims during this 3,500 post journey. It is reasonable, indeed expected, that many of these will have been abandoned or changed as the argument developed. I think we should work with tuxcat who is trying to establish what the current claims are and move forward from there. Historical claims are really, well just historical.

I don’t agree that a confrontation in this forum would be better for anybody. I reckon you move forward quicker when you all push in the same direction.

Just sayin'
 
flaccon said:
If their words are not enough, and their ability to transfer themselves, and the ability to alter files is not enough, simply because they don't play earth games (their words not mine) then yes I agree, lets move on to other threads.
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1. "If their words are not enough" -- but nobody here is hearing any words.
2. "their ability to transfer themselves" -- meaning what? Do you mean transfer through the wires or "special fingers" or something? But since no one is hearing any words, there's no reason to think that any spirits are transferring themselves.
3. "the ability to alter files" -- what? Do you mean, how you hear something one time and then something else later? One of the very last explanations any neutral outside person would have for that, is that there are spirits altering files. Or do you mean that by speaking to you through the files, they are altering them? Again, nobody here has heard any voices.
4. "they don't play earth games" -- then what a bunch of useless, silly, vain spirits they are. They don't deserve to have their message heard if they won't bother to cooperate with the people who are trying to help them get it out.

Do you see how none of what you said here amounts to anything? If you want to be taken seriously, you have to understand that repeating bad arguments isn't getting you anywhere.

As for your "documenting" all of this. You're using that word like it means something more official than "writing". But all you really mean is that you keep writing down your perception of what you think is happening. That isn't evidence to anyone, though.

Put it this way: millions of kids write to Santa every year. (And sometimes, they think they've heard sleigh bells, or caught a glimpse of him leaving presents, or think they can tell when he's watching them.) But that isn't documentation that Santa is real. Just that a lot of kids believe he is, and that their perceptions & memories confirm their beliefs, and sometimes they write things on paper based on those beliefs.
 
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VolumeUpInt.wav -- in Alderbank Box.

20 seconds or so of weird crappy white-ish noise, with strange little gaps or drop-outs.

(what's causing those little drop-outs?)

Then a very distant two-part thump.

Then more crappy white-ish noise.

Nothing there.
 
calebprime said:
Sorry if I'm very late to the party, I'm curious.

I've listened to flaccon_2.wma and flaccon_1.wma

In f_2, one would need to bring the last part down, bring up the first part.
(I did this, for my own amusement.)
When you do this to the first part, you have to get rid of bass that will ruin your speakers. Nothing but garbage there.




In f_1, there's plenty of audio -- a man and woman's voice, more loud crashing.

My question: How were those recorded? Are they purported to be the originals? What kind of processing is doing the noise-reduction? (which is causing the active filtering, the "squelching" effect.)
eta: If that other one says Wimbleton or anything else intelligible, I'll eat my foot.

The Robert one sounds like a little static -- indeed, it could be someone messing with a cable.
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You might be able to help me here. F1 is a type of distortion I recognise, but I just can't recall where or what was the cause. Any ideas?
 
Alderbank said:
I think we should work with tuxcat who is trying to establish what the current claims are and move forward from there.
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I don't see how that will help too much, because those will just get sidestepped, abandoned, or misunderstood by her, the same way discussion of all her previous claims has. I don't think there's really any progress to be made here, at least not until she can get a grasp on what our perspective is. (And, her use of language seems to be so fuzzy, it's hard to get a clear concept through, either to her or from her.)

She seems like a nice enough person, but 3000+ posts on this thread, and she still seems to expect people should be impressed by her "documentation" of what she's "witnessed", and how she's "tested" all her claims to rule out all other possibilities.
 
flaccon said:
I can rule out hallucinations by doing this: .. by searching out the witnesses in the Police dept, who heard a man chant at the top of his voice for 72 hours before breaking free of his cell.
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Does that make sense to anyone? Troll alert?

I know it's not paredolia, nor am I deluded, by anything.
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It does not please me to tell you, flaccon, that denying it is pareidolia is a delusion.
 
abaddon said:
You might be able to help me here. F1 is a type of distortion I recognise, but I just can't recall where or what was the cause. Any ideas?
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It sounds like very aggressive noise-reduction with active gating of the frequencies, and limited band-width. A little like a cell-phone, or a noise-reduction algorithm with the processing turned up to 11, so to speak.

The algorithm eliminates any frequencies that don't exceed some amplitude -- so it gets rid of hiss -- but it also gets rid of lots of subtle stuff that makes things more intelligible.

I used to get this effect when I tried to clean up noisy field recordings made with a parabolic mic at a great distance.

The voices sound like they're not speaking in English. German, maybe?

I opened it with Twisted Wave, an audio editing program.

You can see that the first word is chopped off, when the recording started.

The cadence of the conversation is that the woman says something, the man responds, and the woman repeats it two more times, with rising inflection, as if she's slightly irritated or insistent. "I'll see arugula spalling!" ;)

Maybe there's a second man's voice, maybe not.

If those are spirits, they live in little boxy rooms like we do, and have arguments about who is getting the groceries and who is doing the dishes.
 
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calebprime said:
It sounds like very aggressive noise-reduction with active gating of the frequencies, and limited band-width. A little like a cell-phone, or a noise-reduction algorithm with the processing turned up to 11, so to speak.

The algorithm eliminates any frequencies that don't exceed some amplitude -- so it gets rid of hiss -- but it also gets rid of lots of subtle stuff that makes things more intelligible.

I used to get this effect when I tried to clean up noisy field recordings made with a parabolic mic at a great distance.

The voices sound like they're not speaking in English. German, maybe?

I opened it with Twisted Wave, an audio editing program.

You can see that the first word is chopped off, when the recording started.

The cadence of the conversation is that the woman says something, the man responds, and the woman repeats it two more times, with rising inflection, as if she's slightly irritated or insistent. "I'll see arugula spalling!" ;)

Maybe there's a second man's voice, maybe not.

If those are spirits, they live in little boxy rooms like we do, and have arguments about who is getting the groceries and who is doing the dishes.
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Thank you. I am wondering if it similar to when someone accidentally pocket dials you and you end up listening to whatever is in their environment? I don't have a sample to compare.
 
flaccon said:
The first 6 years were the years that I witnessed what the spirit was doing to other members of my family. I witnessed it and reported it to the local Bishop, and they dealt with it.
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This reply has absolutely nothing to do with what the good doctor wrote.
 
abaddon said:
Thank you. I am wondering if it similar to when someone accidentally pocket dials you and you end up listening to whatever is in their environment? I don't have a sample to compare.
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Yes, exactly. Happens with my son -- I hear some babble with him and his cronies.
 
calebprime said:
I've listened to flaccon_2.wma and flaccon_1.wma

In f_2, one would need to bring the last part down, bring up the first part.
(I did this, for my own amusement.)
When you do this to the first part, you have to get rid of bass that will ruin your speakers. Nothing but garbage there.




In f_1, there's plenty of audio -- a man and woman's voice, more loud crashing...
Click to expand...

I'm glad that the first time I listened to the flaccon_1 file it was through the crappy, tinny little speaker on my laptop. By removing any vestige of bass it can clearly be heard that the enormous 'explosions' are just the chirping of a budgerigar which is overloading the mic amp. The female voice appears to be saying something like "Alfie's getting on fine, don't worry". She repeats this good news about Alfie(?) 3 times, increasingly insistently, while the male voice seems to be involved in another conversation entirely. Maybe he's on the phone to someone whom she thinks will want to know how Alfie's faring. :)

It's very odd.
 
abaddon said:
You might be able to help me here. F1 is a type of distortion I recognise, but I just can't recall where or what was the cause. Any ideas?
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Someone tell me I'm off track and I'll stop with this.

The distortions in Flaccon1 seem to me to be related to this:


From wiki:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Glitch_video.ogg



From wiki:

Audio

Lossy audio compression typically works with a psychoacoustic model—a model of human hearing perception. Lossy audio formats typically involve the use of a time/frequency domain transform, such as a modified discrete cosine transform. With the psychoacoustic model, masking effects such as frequency masking and temporal masking are exploited, so that sounds that should be imperceptible are not recorded. For example, in general, human beings are unable to perceive a quiet tone played simultaneously with a similar but louder tone. A lossy compression technique might identify this quiet tone and attempt to remove it. Also, quantization noise can be "hidden" where they would be masked by more prominent sounds. With low compression, a conservative psy-model is used with small block sizes.

When the psychoacoustic model is inaccurate, when the transform block size is restrained, or when aggressive compression is used, this may result in compression artifacts. Compression artifacts in compressed audio typically show up as ringing, pre-echo, "birdie artifacts", drop-outs, rattling, warbling, metallic ringing, an underwater feeling, hissing, or "graininess".

A good way to observe compression artifacts in audio is to listen to the applause in a relatively highly compressed audio file (e.g. 96 kbit/sec MP3). In general, musical tones have repeating waveforms and more predictable variations in volume, whereas applause is essentially random, therefore hard to compress. A highly compressed track of applause will illustrate the "metallic ringing" and other compression artifacts very well.
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If someone is playing with the wires (with or without special fingers), or perhaps if there is a fan on, or anything that continuously throws a consistent noise, could this not play the role of the applause in the above explanation?

Of course this would only confirm pareidolia. I'm trying to help the folks familiar with digital sound get to the bottom of the origin of the distortion.
 
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Jack by the hedge said:
I'm glad that the first time I listened to the flaccon_1 file it was through the crappy, tinny little speaker on my laptop. By removing any vestige of bass it can clearly be heard that the enormous 'explosions' are just the chirping of a budgerigar which is overloading the mic amp. The female voice appears to be saying something like "Alfie's getting on fine, don't worry". She repeats this good news about Alfie(?) 3 times, increasingly insistently, while the male voice seems to be involved in another conversation entirely. Maybe he's on the phone to someone whom she thinks will want to know how Alfie's faring. :)

It's very odd.
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If we are to determine whether or not it's a spirit speaking and not a more earthly voice, what can we do to work that question out?
 
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