Viewing profile — nerd_stuff

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 t…

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. See…

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 …

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 …

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 rand…

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 conclusio…

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 ligh…

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 ele…

> 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 predictio…

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 phenome…

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, no…

> 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 …

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 l…

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 …

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 fe…

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'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 falsifiab…

Right, that's exactly why I chose String Theory as an example.

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 d…

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 …

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... …

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 r…

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 …

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…