I think lots of people believe "high level science" consists of 3 or 4 ideas:

1. In Schrodinger's thought experiment, a cat in a box could be seen as both alive and dead until an observer collapses the waveform
2. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says you can't know both the exact position and momentum of a particle
3. General relativity states time slows and mass increases for objects at relative high velocity
4. Light's behavior exhibits a wave/particle duality, as demonstrated by interference experiments

Know those 4 things? Have you watched Star Wars once? Good, you're now equipped to understand pretty much all "oh wow that guy's a crazy brainiac nerd" humor. Somehow if you reference things like that, you get a pass to do a comedy routine without any jokes. You're stroking people's ego enough that they don't care you're not funny.

I think people would just get pissed off if he left the "nerd humor" script, though. People don't want to be challenged, or hear pop culture references they don't know. Anyone who's the tiniest, tiniest bit interested in Greek mythology knows Pandora opened a jar, not a box - but nobody wants to hear a joke involving Pandora's jar. They want the same reference that 1000 previous pop cultural references have prepared them for. They want affirmation that they're part of the special club that knows about stuff.

So, to do "nerd" humor the plan is to avoid anything actually nerdy. Stick to the most often recycled bits of pop culture and pop science, mix in some clumsy, senseless double entendres so that people know when to laugh, and you're good to go.

>> ^KnivesOut:

Is this meant to (eventually) be an alternative to synthesizing tones with software?
Also, the nose thingy above the mouth is hilarious. I guess they had to put that up there so it didn't look so much like a talking vag.


Well, that and the fact that when you speak a certain portion of expelled air goes through the septum and adds to the waveform.

And here's Tycho from Penny Arcade's take on it, and it is beautiful:

"It was a lot of fun watching this story mutate as the day progressed, warping in its essential shape, culminating in something like justice. A brigand has tasted his own medicine, and it is bitter.

His Twitter is a hoot - he taunts Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling about the ability to alter game behavior at will, and in the very next message attempts to seek the developer's sympathy. It's like, wow, douche. Is lion taunting statistically correlated with lion attacks? Do some math, motherfucker. He's an utterly unrepentant hacker, yet he wonders what strange force keps gets his boxes banned. It would be like if I'd made a reputation for myself entering local cafes, slipping into the back to shit directly on their hot grills. And then, when I came back the next day, they told me to leave - even if I hadn't managed to shit on anything during that particular visit! Come to terms with the idea that there is a point beyond which you are not worth the price of your subscription.

There are times during the video when "The Pro," a moderator on the service and the supposed villain, sounds like a real bastard - but I've got sufficient life experience to recognize the underlying waveform in his audio stream.

He is using his Dad Voice.

When you and I log into the service of our choice, we can log off at any time. Try to imagine a world where you could not escape these people, where it was your damnation in a literal sense to stew in a crockpot of social disease. Maybe he should be nicer to people who claim to have fucked his grandmother until she was destroyed by the process. That's something he can work on, maybe. I'm sure there's an informative pamplet he can peruse. In the meantime, let's get that statue made."

Douchebag's Twitter: http://twitter.com/iTzLuPo

And he actually told MajorNelson over Twitter that he should expect a "class action suit" for saying his video of The Pro was edited. Wow.

Ya, TOS dead to. Right as I voted for it too, some type of waveform must of collapsed.

Well, it seems that the waveform of the magnetic field alters when it achieves its harmonic...ness. Perhaps it could just turn on and off like every so often and check to see if it gets a harmonic signaling of some sort. Some kind of cycling that happens very very quickly and doesn't use very much power. As it is, electronics that are plugged in do draw small amounts of current even though they aren't actually using any...this could be MORE efficient in that respect. Though the overall effectiveness is what I want to know about.

I came here to mention the double slit experiment... but is that true shole.. even with the measuring device, the photons still show an interference pattern unless a human observes the measurement?

I was under the impression that as soon as you placed the measuring device, the waveform collapsed.

seems to be completely uncoupled from the breath cycle of that bird, and at the end as they move away all the sound changes fluidly but the duck breath stays exact same volume, my guess if you stacked the waveform of the individual duck yawns they would be exactly identical

that's bollocks. file under "awweeeesum!!!!! (for 5 minutes)".

there's only 2 methods that have caught on enough so that you don't have to take the kit to the club with you: CDJs and turntables.

Then there's the final scratch / serrato guys who come along and annoy everybody by plugging in loads of cables to their laptop, which then crashes or runs out of battery (seen that happen to grooverider).

This system in comparison is expensive, heavy, fragile, large, and never gonna catch on. Added to that, a touchscreen is neither tactile enough nor fast enough. Perhaps the guy demonstrating this is just a shit DJ, but I expect he is being restricted by the performance of the system. Already there is a sense of "detachment" when playing CD instead of vinyl, and this system here just takes that detachment to a whole new level. In music, a delay of more than about 5ms can be noticeable and ruin your flow.

There is no benefit for the DJ here, just cool tech. (the large waveform display is not much more useful than the small display on serrato anyway, and anybody serious about scratching the record would use real vinyl or one of those technics CDJs with the real motor in it), and the audience can't even see your "kewl" screens, and they don't give a shit anyway...
most people don't even realise that DJs actually change the speed of records to blend them together. They don't realise, because they never tried to find out, because they don't give a shit.

So this looks to me like one of those "kewl" things that might eventually become the future, but only after several technological limitations are lifted. E.g if i could roll these two screens up and stick them in a small backpack, then we might start talking. but of course, if these things were light, they would move around the table when you touch them. Hmmmm.

But remember... most venues don't have space on their table for this shit, so you end up being restricted by a very basic and primitive limit. If you design your show around this technology you won't be able to play in a large percentage of venues. The main reason CDJs became standard was because they are small, cheap, and CDs are very very very universal. And CDs aren't heavy.

Sell this technosplurge to Bjork or something. Get Microsoft to buy you out because you are "youth" or whatever. Wait 20 years and you won't even need a screen, it will all be about waving your hands in the air or just "thinking" about the mix while wearing a braintooth headset. anyway by then live music will have killed the DJ. mark my words.

But lets face it, the music I just heard in this video was bullshit, not even in rhythm. Sort that out first, yeah? Music > tech.

If the dielectric breakdown voltage of air is 3kV/mm and the spacing between the wires is about 65mm (~2.7in), then the voltage between the wires would have to exceed 200kV before the air would ionize and allow current to flow. This would be possible with a transformer with an extremely high turns ratio at the expense of current driving ability. The oscilloscope seems to show a pulse-width modulated waveform with a low duty cycle.

Nice work with all the breadboarding! I wonder if they ran into problems with the high voltage wires arcing to something unexpected.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
The provocative part of the experiment is asking yourself if vibrations traveling through a medium are sound, or do they only become sound when perceived?

I believe this approach sidesteps the actual intent of the thought experiment. Looking at it in this analytical way implies that you accept the existence of the unobserved, and turns it into a very easily-resolvable question of semantics - that is, do you define "sound" as vibrations or their perception.
Of course, the nature of the question implies that the tree falls even if no one's around, but I believe the purpose is to stimulate a progression of thought back "up the tree," as it were, asking "does something happen if no one knows it?"
Schrödinger's Cat is an excellent example, illustrating the "no" answer (suggesting that an uncollapsed waveform is essentially unrealized), while the vibration\perception position illustrates the "yes" (by accepting the existence of the unobserved).

Tags for this video have been changed from 'music' to 'music, compression, distortion, clipping, volume, waveform' - edited by fissionchips

Meh, I dunno what direction to go - no vote or upvote. It seems like it's just some radio signals (solar flare, dust, light distortion, changing in permeability of the rings)in the high hz spectrum mushed and mangled into the range of the human ear. The same can be done with capturing light signals off a tv or something flickering, taking the various waveforms, compressing them to the ~16-40hz and playing them.

According to the Many Worlds theory- an interpretation of quantum mechanics that is undergoing a kind of renaissance of examination- the quantum level events DO scale to the macro level, we in our universe only perceive one possible quantum outcome but all other possibilities are simultaneously occurring in other parallel universes. Therefore Schrodinger's cat may be dead in our universe, but is wholly alive in another. The waveform function of our Macro universe does not collapse at all- all possibilities exist.

In reply to this comment by Memorare:
maybe siftbot is operating in some parallel universe where time is sped up.

In these physics videos one thing they never offer an explaination for is why the quantum level events don't scale up and occur on our macro level since everything is made up of sub-atomic particles organized as atoms. As with the Schroedinger's Cat paradox it would be kind of disappointing to finally discover a unified theory of everything, only to learn that it really doesn't matter since it doesn't scale up to mundane reality and therefore only "exists" as a theoretical concept. (personally i think the notion that the cat is both dead AND alive simultaneaously and observation determines which, is a lot of mathematical bs, ie it's not Really true except on paper but then i'm not a cosmologist or metaphysicist so what do i know)

Also, a simpler question that has an answer but i just don't know what it is...
with all the anti-matter positrons bombarding the planet via cosmic rays, don't they ever bang into some electrons and create a tiny but big enough to be measured matter/anti-matter explosion? Sure matter is mostly empty (or not so empty apparently) space and possible collisions are few, but cloud chambers indicate tons of these thigns zipping around so Howcome there's not bazillions of these tiny explosions going off all around us constantly?

According to the Many Worlds theory- an interpretation of quantum mechanics that is undergoing a kind of renaissance of examination- the quantum level events DO scale to the macro level, we in our universe only perceive one possible quantum outcome but all other possibilities are simultaneously occurring in other parallel universes. Therefore Schrodinger's cat may be dead in our universe, but is wholly alive in another. The waveform function of our Macro universe does not collapse at all- all possibilities exist.

The most interesting thing is that the banana actually is a demonstration of Schrödinger's quantum superposition problem, we can never know if the banana is either fresh or asploded until we open the door. The banana actually exists simultaneously in both states, and only be the act of observation does the banana assume one state or the other- in essence the quantum waveform function of the banana collapses only by the act of observation.

Proponents of the "Many Worlds" school go further, and hold that the quantum wave function does not in fact collapse and form a single outcome, but rather that every possible outcome does exist in a parallel universe somewhere. So even if you are in our world scraping asploded banana from the inside of your microwave, you can be secure in the knowledge that an alternate version of you in a parallel universe is enjoying a fresh, ripe, un-damaged piece of fruit.

In reply to this comment by plastiquemonkey:
the tough part is catching the residual microwaves. they bounce around inside the microwave oven even when it's not turned on, because the microwave's walls have a special reflective coating.

when you open the microwave door to put your groceries inside, you have to do it quickly, so as not to lose too many of them. if the door's open too long, the microwaves will bounce out the opening, and the benefit to the produce will be lost.

of course, if you do end up losing the residual microwaves, you can restore them by turning on the microwave (with the door closed) for 5 seconds on 'HIGH'.