nerd_stuff

6 ms·

1.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
What math exactly would you like me to do? 16 bits gives a theoretical maximum range of 96dB while the human ear can hear over 130dB. Good headphones can handle over 100dB signal to noise. Maybe you should save your grandiose lectures for
2.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
24 bits has more information. It's useful for mixing and in cases where things haven't been properly gain-staged, an engineer had an off day, a track hasn't been mastered, etc. Seems pretty basic to me.
3.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
I disagree that these things are, in the real world, "solved problems" and I'd rather have an unmastered raw track at 88/24 than a poorly mastered track at 44/16. I don't disagree that CD quality basically maxe
4.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
As I ceded in another comment, dithering trades harmonic distortion for noise. > In order for it to be even theoretically possible to hear the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit audio, Only for professionally mastered audio which is no
5.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Dithering basically raises the noise-floor by trading harmonic distortions for random noise at the cost of the last bit of information (for the uninitiated dithering means you randomly flip the last bit to create a soft truncation.) It&#x2
6.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
This article is bordering on pseudoscience. When you do experiments you must understand your experimental design enough to understand exactly what you're testing and what conclusions can be drawn from that. If you do A/B testin
7.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Momentum and Special Relativity don't conflict. Momentum is modified with a Lorentz Factor which for a particle with mass runs to infinity as the speed approaches the speed of light. For electromagnetic radiation like light the moment
8.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
You think what's reckless? The guy who wrote the article has a degree in Electrical Engineering and the article's great. EMF is not a force and it's not the only thing the word electricity refers to. I've just checked
9.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
> I wonder what the turning point was when people stopped thinking of electricity as magic and instead thought of it as science Once they could make predictions and those predictions were verified by reality. "When I flip this swi
10.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
To say electricity is roughly the flow of charge looks perfectly fine to me. Opening statement of the wikipedia article on electricity: > Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and flow of electric
11.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Without invoking the maximization of utility we could use game theory and ask if the players were simply minimizing their maximum regret. It was during the qualification rounds, not the finals. It looks like they each preferred taking an
12.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
> This quote speaks volumes about your own perspective. Does it? I was pointing out that today there are motives for publicly supporting women in the sciences that didn't exist in 1966. In that quote Feynman pushed things in a pro
13.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Feynman, 1966 ( http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html ): > I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain
14.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
As the blog comments suggest there's a difference between a good self-study book and a good textbook for a class. The book will be accompanied by (at least) what look to be a good set of course notes. Some googling around suggests his
15.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Out of curiosity, what's the background that lets you be so dismissive of a Fields Medal winner? At this point I see a blog post written by a well respected mathematician whom I feel comfortable trusting and it's being brushed asi
16.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
For anybody who studies science that isn't an uncomfortable question and it's over century old at this point. The last time the field of science had a high level of certainty that it would solve everything ever was probably the l
17.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
It's a good question that I wish I could answer. For me looking into String Theory's status as scientific/not-scientific is a good way to learn that the Popperian view of falsifiable==scientific is a bit too simplistsic and
18.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Right, that's exactly why I chose String Theory as an example.
19.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
It's a good approximation but it misses the mark. String Theory is not verifiable but it's still a scientific theory. Bohmian Mechanics is, some say, by definition not verifiably different from Quantum Mechanics but it's a
20.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Is it harder to understand distribution than memorize FOIL? Probably. It's memorizing a process vs. understanding a concept. FOILing won't help you master algebra but if you're in a science class and your teacher needs to
21.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Then come up with a better mnemonic or trick that captures the essence of the general case. Like Fanana: First times all of them, next times all of them, next times all of them... it's not 100% clear but it took 10 seconds to come up
22.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
For the opposing view see Street Fighting Mathematics which encourages not only using tricks but using them well and often. The problem is if you only learn the trick without the reasoning behind it. The solution isn't to not learn th
23.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
He lived in Arizona which is hot and a school full of space-heaters (humans) will probably run AC more often than heat. What grandparent commenter showed was the school district's numbers are plausible. I doubt the district entered
24.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
I think "Digital Taylorism" is more accurate and informative than calling it "scientific management". The quotes let you know The Economist is intentionally using a famous misnomer but I'm not sure that comes acros
25.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
If it's a calm, rational discussion about evidence then science usually wins. In fact science wins that one so often it isn't very exciting. If it's a heated debate about who can call who which names then everybody loses. W
26.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
> One huge problem with scientism is that it invites, as an almost allergic reaction, the total rejection of science. As we know to our cost, we witness this every day with climate change deniers... Just a few paragraphs later he celebra
27.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
A quick Google search gives these top links for starters: NASA: Climate Change Evidence - http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ind
28.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
My intention isn't to be argumentative but to point out that the field of science described by Kuhn doesn't match the field of science that I've seen in reality. Let me be more specific. > "When we read a science tex
29.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
When was the last time you actually read a science textbook? When you learn a big idea you're usually also taught when it was figured out, who did it and what it replaced. If you think back to chemistry when you were taught about the
30.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Here's the part of the lecture mentioned in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaUlqXRPMmY Feynman was an excellent communicator, it's rare that having an intermediary "explain" what he was say

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