Anthony_UK wrote:Consider it from another perspective, due to the sheer size of the universe then it is inevitable that life would exist eventually. Okay, so why there are the building blocks of life in the universe anyway is another question but since there is then over the time frame it's inevitable it would happen somewhere. As for you existing, well, being humbled by the enormity is a good thing .gif) |
Obvious Things You Can't Get Your Head Around • Page 6
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L0cky 2,080 posts
Seen 17 hours ago
Registered 18 years agoAnother way to look at it:
If you play the lottery and win, you will feel extremely lucky. The odds of that happening are 14 million to 1.
If you don't play the lottery, and you see that somebody won it, it's both unremarkable and inevitable. -
RedSparrows wrote:
An easier way to think about it might be to consider what a speaker does: play some music loud and you can see a speaker move in time with what you're listening to. The speaker causes particles in the air to vibrate and ping off one another that movement goes to your ear and due to the way our hearing works it is then interpreted by the brain.
quadfather wrote:
Yeah, that makes more sense to a total non-scientist like me. I can understand that it's just energy being transformed into different forms. I'll just leave it at that - if I think about the specifics of acoustic energy being turned electrical and retaining the actual information we recognise as music or sound my brain melts.
Going a bit further into how the actual vinyl process works -
Yeah it’s seems like voodoo but think about what sound actually is – vibration.
Look up how a transducer works – converts one form of energy into another. So a microphone in a studio converts acoustic energy to electrical, that used to hit a tape recorder which converts it to magnetic then that’s played to a cutter which vibrates and etches a copy of how it’s vibrating onto a lacquer which produces an lp. When you play it the stylus vibrates and the whole process is reversed and, miraculously, it kind of sounds like what they recorded in the first place.gif)
A fun fact about music is that the energy created by a loudspeaker has to go somewhere, so the excited particles get absorbed into walls and can be reflected back out as heat. So in the winter play your music louder.gif)
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quadfather 39,071 posts
Seen 17 hours ago
Registered 11 years agoRedSparrows wrote:
Agreed. Same here. I'm going to tell him to be quiet about it now I have my answer
quadfather wrote:
Yeah, that makes more sense to a total non-scientist like me. I can understand that it's just energy being transformed into different forms. I'll just leave it at that - if I think about the specifics of acoustic energy being turned electrical and retaining the actual information we recognise as music or sound my brain melts.
Going a bit further into how the actual vinyl process works -
Yeah it’s seems like voodoo but think about what sound actually is – vibration.
Look up how a transducer works – converts one form of energy into another. So a microphone in a studio converts acoustic energy to electrical, that used to hit a tape recorder which converts it to magnetic then that’s played to a cutter which vibrates and etches a copy of how it’s vibrating onto a lacquer which produces an lp. When you play it the stylus vibrates and the whole process is reversed and, miraculously, it kind of sounds like what they recorded in the first place -
L0cky wrote:
I like that.
Another way to look at it:
If you play the lottery and win, you will feel extremely lucky. The odds of that happening are 14 million to 1.
If you don't play the lottery, and you see that somebody won it, it's both unremarkable and inevitable. -
A fun fact about vinyl is that certain pressings of reggae records have had sub bass so strong that it caused the needle to ping out of the groove -
quadfather 39,071 posts
Seen 17 hours ago
Registered 11 years agoArmoured_Bear wrote:
Yeah, he's gone on a mad one recently with tapes, checking out the quality differences after listening to tapes LP's.
quadfather wrote:
I totally agree with your mate, I have a preference for vinyl for pretty much the same reasons. except the cassette part, can't stand cassettes
@Armoured_Bear - Reply for you -
Yeah,I was talking about the frequency response of a typical moving magnet cartridge rather than the medium, this tends to be 20hz – 22khz. You can get moving coils that go higher and some quadraphonic records did, indeed, have information above 30khz. Bass is definitely deeper on cd, no argument there. Too low on vinyl and the cartridge will simply jump out the grooves, you used to be able to tell how good a cartridge’s tracking ability was simply by playing Telarc’s pressing of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Loads of them couldn’t get past the cannons and skipped like crazy
I don’t think centred bass is really that much of a problem and it’s not something that’s ever caused me an issue when listening but it is definitely a limitation of vinyl. Both formats have their own limitations, for me, I can live with those of vinyl a lot more easily than cd. But, the main problem with cd is that far too few of them have been mastered with any care. I also find jewel cases and the booklets deeply unsatisfying.
Bear in mind that I’m talking about cd rather than digital as a whole. I have 2 Pink Floyd lps and one Beatles one which are mastered from hi rez (24/96) transfers of the original master tapes and they are very “analogue” sounding. I don’t have any issues with this approach.
I’m more interested in how cassettes work at the moment and what they do to the sound of the stuff I’m recording, this is really weird
And yes, he's already told me that he needs to get out more, but it's just his thing -
boo wrote:
I was watching that Horizon about hacking from the other night and the term super-position is used rather a lot, now I understand that in a relative sense and I understand how looking at something then affects it but while I understand it on some level I really don't get it. It's weird, it's like part of me understands the principle but cannot apply it at all to the universe I know.
Quantum physics generally, but I don't think that's unreasonable.
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minky-kong 14,787 posts
Seen 8 hours ago
Registered 13 years agobdaggers wrote:
I always do this. I always seem to write display as "dispaly" as well, but at least spell check picks that up before I send emails.
Why do I always type 'form' when using a keyboard, although I've told my fingers to type 'from' ? -
@kinky_mong
As iam sure you are aware both hands are not equal, so when typing with two hands there are speed variations which a computer gets confused by. So it is not uncommon for letters to arrange differently such as r going down after the o notice different sides of qwerty. Especially as when we read we tend to miss out the middle bits.
Edited by Sharzam at 11:48:36 21-08-2013 -
quadfather 39,071 posts
Seen 17 hours ago
Registered 11 years agoMr_Sleep wrote:
It's all bonkers
RedSparrows wrote:
An easier way to think about it might be to consider what a speaker does: play some music loud and you can see a speaker move in time with what you're listening to. The speaker causes particles in the air to vibrate and ping off one another that movement goes to your ear and due to the way our hearing works it is then interpreted by the brain.
quadfather wrote:
Yeah, that makes more sense to a total non-scientist like me. I can understand that it's just energy being transformed into different forms. I'll just leave it at that - if I think about the specifics of acoustic energy being turned electrical and retaining the actual information we recognise as music or sound my brain melts.
Going a bit further into how the actual vinyl process works -
Yeah it’s seems like voodoo but think about what sound actually is – vibration.
Look up how a transducer works – converts one form of energy into another. So a microphone in a studio converts acoustic energy to electrical, that used to hit a tape recorder which converts it to magnetic then that’s played to a cutter which vibrates and etches a copy of how it’s vibrating onto a lacquer which produces an lp. When you play it the stylus vibrates and the whole process is reversed and, miraculously, it kind of sounds like what they recorded in the first place
A fun fact about music is that the energy created by a loudspeaker has to go somewhere, so the excited particles get absorbed into walls and can be reflected back out as heat. So in the winter play your music louder -
minky-kong 14,787 posts
Seen 8 hours ago
Registered 13 years agoSharzam wrote:
That makes perfect sense. Cheers
@kinky_mong
As iam sure you are aware both hands are not equal, so when typing with two hands there are speed variations which a computer gets confused by. So it is not uncommon for letters to arrange differently such as r going down after the o notice different sides of qwerty. Especially as when we read we tend to miss out the middle bits. -
PazJohnMitch 17,276 posts
Seen 18 hours ago
Registered 14 years agosajasanman wrote:
It is mathematically inevitable life would have happened somewhere.
Mr_Sleep wrote:
It's both mathematically inevitable and ridiculously improbable.
Okay, so why there are the building blocks of life in the universe anyway is another question but since there is then over the time frame it's inevitable it would happen somewhere. As for you existing, well, being humbled by the enormity is a good thing
It is mathematically neglible it would have happened here. -
Mr_Sleep wrote:
Pretty standard feeling, I think. That's the difference between the layman and the expert, in any field.
It's weird, it's like part of me understands the principle but cannot apply it at all to the universe I know. -
PazJohnMitch wrote:
And yet (and you can see why the religious are religious about this - even if science was not the basis for this) it did happen, and so could not have happened any other way, here. It's at once absurd, near-impossible... and yet in happening, it's unimaginable that it couldn't happen. Which in turn is troublesome.
sajasanman wrote:
It is mathematically inevitable life would have happened somewhere.
Mr_Sleep wrote:
It's both mathematically inevitable and ridiculously improbable.
Okay, so why there are the building blocks of life in the universe anyway is another question but since there is then over the time frame it's inevitable it would happen somewhere. As for you existing, well, being humbled by the enormity is a good thing
It is mathematically neglible it would have happened here. -
I wouldn't tend to file the creation of the Universe under "obvious things". -
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neilka 24,025 posts
Seen 35 minutes ago
Registered 16 years ago
"Six by nine. Forty two."
"That's it. That's all there is."
"I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe" -
DFawkes 32,791 posts
Seen 15 hours ago
Registered 16 years ago7 * 8. I've got lazy over the years so always quickly do Number I want to Multiply * 5 or 10, then add or subtract extra to get the answer. Writing it just now it seems like the reverse of lazy, but it means I only even use 5 or 10 times tables. So I don't think 7 * 7 is 49 in one step, it's (7 * 5) + 14.
But for some reason 7 * 8 just stalls my brain, which can't decide whether to do (7 * 5) + 21 or (7 * 10) - 14 and turns me into a gibbering simpleton temporarily. Sure, I should just add 7 * 8 = 56 to my brain, but next time 7 * 8 comes up it'll be the same as it always has been and my brain will just go "ABORT! ABORT! FORGET BASIC NUMERACY SKILLS!". -
quadfather 39,071 posts
Seen 17 hours ago
Registered 11 years agowe're all massive freaks -
CosmicFuzz 32,632 posts
Seen 7 hours ago
Registered 15 years agoHaha, true. -
LockeTribal 4,740 posts
Seen 10 hours ago
Registered 14 years agoWere you not all made to recite your times tables back in primary school? I generally only have trouble with anything over 12 as that's where we stopped having to do them. So I've no trouble with, say 8*12=96, but I have to think about 8*13 or the like. -
PazJohnMitch 17,276 posts
Seen 18 hours ago
Registered 14 years ago@DFawkes that is not bad arithmatic. It is Engineering maths not the pure maths (/ parrot maths) they try and teach in school.
I have always done mental aritmatic based on multiples of 10 and then worked out the difference and I was top in my year at school. Doing 10s (or 100s * 10s) first gives you a decent estimate of what the answer should be.
If the number you calculate when doing it more accurately is a long way off you know you have made a mistake. It is also an easy way of doing a sanity check. -
PazJohnMitch 17,276 posts
Seen 18 hours ago
Registered 14 years agoShikasama wrote:
0.999999999 with an infinite number of 9s and 1 are the same in mathematics as there is no number between them.
I don't get why 1/3 = 0.33, that fundamentally doesn't make sense to me.
A mate tried explaining to me that it's because the .33333333 gets so intimately small mathematicians just round it up a whole 1 when you get to 0.99999999.
Sounds like they are making it up as they go along tbh -
It's more that the 0.33.. is a poor representation of the number as it infers this never ending thing that gets closer to the actual number you mean. 1/3 is a better representation; it's the same number.
It's more of a syntax/grammar/representation problem than a logical one.
.gif)
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