prokopetz:

toastedtoadstool:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

You know that post that’s going around about how sometimes it doesn’t seem like housecats know they’re small?

I strongly suspect that a lot of the weirder impulses people get are at least partly attributable to the fact that the dumb monkey part of our brains doesn’t realise that humans are big.

Impulses of this type include:

• The impulse to enter and explore vents, drains, and other apertures a human clearly cannot fit into
   
  
• The impulse to climb on objects and surfaces that will not support a human’s weight
   
  
• The impulse to leap from high places in a manner that would be perfectly survivable if you were a ten-pound arboreal primate, but as it stands, not so much!
  

What, so the voice telling me to jump off that tall thing if I get too close to the edge isn’t suicidal intrusive thoughts, it’s just monkey mind massively miscalculation our capabilities?

Weirdly, yes. In cognitive science that’s known – somewhat unimaginatively – as the “high place phenomenon”, and though it’s popularly miscategorised as a symptom of intrusive thoughts, some studies estimate that up to 50% of all people experience it, most of whom have no particular tendency toward suicidal ideation, nor toward intrusive thoughts of any other type.

ethnianmandarin:

etirabys:

Today is my first day working from home as a real employed person.

I was in the middle of reading a textbook on Android development when I started absently prodding at the extrapolated-bottom-of-my-teeth with my tongue. If you swipe your tongue down from your lower teeth to your gums, there’s a sudden concavity that you can push your tongue into. At some point my attention transitioned abruptly from the textbook to the physical sensation; I thought, ‘huh, isn’t the lower jaw kind of a C-shape, so there’s no bone between my tongue and the underside of my chin?’

and then, ‘wait, if I stick my index finger into my mouth under my tongue and put my thumb on the underside of my chin, can I just… wiggle? the intermediate flesh?’

For some reason this idea fascinated me – I sprang out of my chair and went to the bathroom, thoroughly washed my hands, and tried it. There’s a lot of meat between your fingers when you do this, but it’s definitely wiggling.

That was a totally novel human experience – I came back to my desk enthralled – and I’ve learned a lesson about the hazardous new universe of distraction that opens up to you when you work from home.

for your next trick, anchor your index and second finger on the bridge of your nose and press your thumb against your hard palate.

if you then gently oscillate you will discover that the whole cartilaginous structure there can gently yield

this has the significant effect of loosening any phlegm that is resting in there, which you will feel flowing down your throat

i-was-today-years-old-when:

i learned that Nintendo pushed usage of the term “game console” so people would stop calling products from other manufacturers “Nintendos”, otherwise they would have risked losing their trademark (x)

tsutsifrutsi:

(Required reading: Siderea on Class)

It’s interesting to think about the (many) ways in which the modern “bay-area rationalist techno-libertarian” culture (i.e. Scott Alexander’s Grey Tribe, and to a lesser extent all of STEM academia) is effectively an outgrowth not of the bourgeoisie “entrepreneurial” class identified with the American upper-middle, but rather of the historical-and-present military officer class. Examples:

• seeing things in terms of game-theory, negotiations, and logistics—in est, in terms of strategy;
• breaking debates down into positive vs. normative subcomponents, and then setting out to solve the positive subcomponent; thus, technocratic politics;
• the default assumption of meritocracy, and the belief (against evidence) that organizations with many members from this class will naturally end up meritocratic;
• thinking in terms of capability rather than intent or policy, e.g. “the only thing stopping the state from seeing your data is encryption”, or “the only thing stopping nuclear war is MAD”;
• the whole notion that while the world is suboptimal on a macro-political level, this is fixable through strength of arms: directly through war, or indirectly through technological innovation. Culture is the thing presumed to be immutable and worked around—an attitude foreign to most every other class, who think of culture as the first and only viable battleground for macro-political change;
• an enjoyment of futurism (i.e. speculative fiction, X-risk debates) but also Futurism (the aesthetic of early speculative fiction, of games like Portal and Bioshock, of clean elegant spaceships and “fixed” transhuman genomes.) This is the only class that sees nothing wrong with the concept of a “supersoldier.” (It assumes the advances will turn the crank of genomics tech, which will result in the positive macro-political shifts mentioned above);
• the ideal of Heinlein’s competent man, completely autonomous, able to restart civilization from its bootstraps—not quite a Nietzschean übermensch, since the philosophy and beliefs of the “competent man” are mostly irrelevant—it is instead the skill-set that matters, and its concentration all in one (or rather, every) individual;
• the drawing of a sharp division between “officer-quality” and “enlisted-quality” people, where the distinction comes down not to acculturation into this officer class, but to potential: raw intelligence and willingness to learn, but not to labor (i.e. the ability to be the “competent man”, and then—having gained the knowledge to do so—the desire and analytical capacity to properly delegate to others who have a comparative advantage in those skills, rather than to do them oneself);
• for the above reason reason, the highest likelihood of any class to hire skilled laborers and tradesmen or pay for services, instead of attempting to do “amateur” work themselves. The numerous profitable startups serving exclusively the “rich SV engineer who wants to automate something” crowd can attest to this. (Though, as above, this class first seeks to understand the work that will be done, such that they can then observe and evaluate the performance of the contractor or service. This leads to many a tradesman being “told how to do their job” by members of this class whenever they do something nonstandard);
• the scouting for un-acculturated members, with an explicit path to acculturate them, vis. officer training schools, or coding bootcamps. This is one of the few classes (the only?) that almost universally encourages, and attempts to facilitate entry into it. This class doesn’t see people in the other classes as doing something inherently “bad” that must be corrected. Instead, it sees most people as being in their “proper” class, the one that fits them—but sees the “officer-quality” people who are in some other class as being in the “wrong” class, and assumes they will feel much better when “rescued” by this class. (Which is at least sometimes true; many who were bullied in a differently-classed public school do feel “rescued” when they enter a STEM program in university.)

Remember, Silicon Valley was a DARPA project center first, and the startups there are the diaspora. SV and Bay-area culture is military-officer culture.

If you identify strongly with characters like Miles Vorkosigan and Ender Wiggin, it might do to ask yourself how much of that is a feeling of identification with a member of a class you didn’t realize you were in.

youmightfindyourself:

Metlac Bridge

awesomage:

Electronic Housefly Trap

femmenietzsche:

kontextmaschine:

WAIT, was Etsy named after “&c”, like “et c.”, abbreviation for et cetera, meaning “miscellaneous” and invoking the flea/craft market aesthetic?

MOTHER FUCKER

Actually:

Kalin said that he named the site Etsy because he “wanted a nonsense word because I wanted to build the brand from scratch. I was watching Fellini’s 8 ½ and writing down what I was hearing. In Italian, you say ‘etsi’ a lot. It means ‘oh, yes’ (actually it’s “eh, si”). And in Latin and French, it means ‘what if.’“

znk:

jaiwithani:

sinesalvatorem:

tropylium:

sinesalvatorem:

reasonableapproximation:

sinesalvatorem:

TIL that it’s possible for earphones to be misconnected such that they’re playing the instrumental to a song without playing the lyrics?

This is super weird, but I assume it has to do with how the audio encoding works. I assume different tracks are layered over each other such that the singing is a different stream of bits from the instrumental? Or something? IDEK.

I learned this because I was listening to Kartel song after Kartel song, becoming more and more distressed by the idea that the worlboss had decided to only upload instrumentals from now on. It’s only on a whim that I thought to pull out my headphone jack.

I believe sometimes tracks are set to have lyrics in one ear and music in the other, so if only one side of the headphones is working you could get that effect.

I’m not confident this is what’s happening, but I have no other immediate guesses.

Nah, both ears were working. Even to the point where instrumental effects that used one ear or the other worked fine. However, even though the lyrics were supposed to play through both ears, I heard none of them.

Analog stereo audio cables have three separate wires: left channel, right channel and null. If any of these breaks entirely, the effects will be obvious (no left channel / no right channel / no sound whatsoever)

On the other hand, in one failure type, which I believe is a short circuit between the right and left channels specifically, what you end up with is hearing the subtraction of the two channels in both ears. Probably phase-inverted with respect to each other, but that’s usually not an audible distinction.

Most music has some degree of stereo mixing, which means that you will not be left musicless. Also, since the voltage remains, volume is not really affected (though I would assume fidelity is).

Vocals, on the other hand, are usually mixed dead center, which means that they will be zapped from the mix entirely.

…The fact that this is a thing that can even happen is so cool and so annoying.

Fun fact: this is a pretty reliable method to remove vocals from a stereo track. Try it in audacity!

@tropylium is right. Connecting the left and right wires¹ yields the difference between the signals.

[Attention conservation note: Press J to skip some hobby audio engineer infodumping applications of linear algebra to stereo audio signals & going off on various tangents. Maybe I should do a separate post on how to use it for fun?]

It‘s called the S (side) channel. Instead of getting stereo by having separate left and right tracks, you can encode the same information in a mid and a side channel:

M = (L+R) / 2
S = (L-R) / 2 ²

In linear algebra terms, it’s a change of basis in 2D vector space, and can be easily reversed to get the original representation back:

L = M+S
R = M-S

L/R is the natural scheme for stereo playback: L goes to the left poweramp + speaker, R to the right. Simple. That is the obvious thing for CDs, cassetes, tape reel … - the playback device doesn’t have to do much.

But M/S encoding comes in very handy for lossy data compression (called Joint Stereo in MP3, OGG etc.):
Good quality M with bad quality S yields overall good quality for the important stuff in the middle (most things get mixed to near the center anyway, and even the rest is all added in there, just quieter³. The main mono tracks for vocals, bass, kick drum and snare are usually dead center.). And then, even the few information you get out of a shitty S channel adds spatial stereo fanciness. Nice.

It also ensures mono compatibility: What was in the middle before compression, stays there.⁴ If you highly compress L and R seperately, all the important center stuff gets spread out over both channels, but might be rounded off a bit differently by the compression, depending on what else is mixed in from each side, which could result in a ~wobbly effect. Not nice.

It’s also how vinyl LPs do stereo. On mono records, the groove zig-zags left & right, making the needle follow the waveform of the one channel signal: Electron microscope video of a phono stylus moving along the grooves on a vinyl record.
You can’t move up & down as much, because then the needle might bounce off the track. That means you can’t encode as much information that way. You wouldn’t want to just use the horizontal movement for one speaker and vertical for R - then the violins might sound crystal clear, but the cellos sound like muffled, noisy garbage. Asymmetry, yuck…
Instead, keep left-right for M, and use up-down for S, the difference between the L and R channels. (Equivalently, you can think of the needle moving diagonally upleft-downright / upright-downleft as the L / R channels. Change of basis!). That also means older phono players will just ignore the up-down motion and just use the left-right signal as usual.⁵

Radio adds the S to the usual mono transmission on a different frequency so receivers can make it stereo optionally. (FM is a bit complicated…)

Finally, there’s a neat analogy to video: When broadcasters introduced color to analog TV, they kept the black&white luminance (brightness) signal where it was, and just added two chrominance channels on another frequency⁶. That way, people could keep using their old monochrome TVs. Yay for smart standards!
And just like with the spatial S audio information, you can also
(a) save bits/bandwith by compressing the hell out of the color information, b/c we are far better at distinguishing shape & brightness than color; and
(b) be sure that if you transmit black&white footage, you get less weirdly fluctuating colorations added in because the brightness isn’t split up over three separate, low quality RGB channels.

---

1. This can happen if you don’t plug in the TRS jack all the way (such that the contacts of the plug touch multiple contacts of the socket. Not sure about the maths, but it might also involve feeding one of the signals into the ground, against which the voltage is measured); or if the isolation surrounding the three wires inside is broken. ↩

2. Halving (= subtracting 6dB) right away ensures that you stay in the original volume range. If you don’t, you might get clipping b/c you go over -0dB (max. Volume allowed by the data encoding / poweramp transistor). Might not be important for S though, since it should be a lot quieter than M anyway. ↩

3. Only components that are completely out-of phase (signal ) will not be present at all in M ↩

4. Sometimes you already want to ensure that during recording, if you mostly care about the center signal, and the stereo-ness should be subtle and natural instead of wide and flashy (e.g. classical symphony?). Using a normal (though probably ridiculously expensive) unidirectional mic, angled up against a weird bidirectional figure-8-characteristic mic, M and S actually correspond to physical microphones, which rules out weird phase issues from the start. ~so pure~ ↩

5. Though apparently old mono styluses are larger and more rigid, so they can “dig” into the groove and destroy the stereo information, making your LPs mono even on stereo players… whoops. ↩

6. Since regular humans have three types of color receptors in their eyes, colorspace has 3 dimensions (which is a pathetically lossy projection down from the ~infinite-dimensional continuous spectrum, even only considering the visible wavelengths). So in addition to the luminance, you need 2 chroma components (e.g. U for blue and V for red, each normalized by subtracting the brightness. Then low U and V but high brightness means green.).
   You can encode these two chroma channels in one frequency carrier, by using both phase and amplitude (which might also have different fidelity, so apparently you do another basis transformation such that the phase means hue and amplitude means saturation, landing you in ~HSV, the neatest, bestest color space… Abstraction! :D) That’s how most of the world (PAL & NTSC) does it. SECAM (Russia, France, …) only uses amplitude and alternates between sending U and V over the same frequency. ↩