How to date a recording using background electrical noise • Hacker News Board

Re: How to date a recording using background electrical noise

#31

Post by ProtoAES256 » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 7:31 AM UTC

cynwoody wrote: post #21

Groxx wrote: post #3

A video on the same subject: https://youtu.be/e0elNU0iOMY I really enjoy Tom Scott. Everything he puts out is wonderfully concise.

Yes, Tom Scott is one talented YouTuber. See, for example, his video on microwaving frozen hamsters back to life[0], in which he interviews the 101-year-old J. E. Lovelock, the scientist who did the work back in the fifties. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tdiKTSdE9Y

RIP James E. Lovelock, who passed away at the age of 103 in 26 July 2022.

I can see the passion in his tones in the video.

Re: How to date a recording using background electrical noise

#32

Post by justinclift » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 10:05 AM UTC

spoonjim wrote: post #25

justinclift wrote: post #2

Sounds like anyone wanting to do a "proper" fake job will now need to separate out any existing hum, then add a new continuous "hum track" based upon those publicly available ENV values. Probably wouldn't even be all that hard.

Well subtracting the hum requires knowing the hum at that time, right?

Wouldn't something like Nvidia's noise cancellation tech (as commonly used by podcasters, etc) remove the original hum well enough?

eg ready for new "fake continuos hum" to then be applied

Re: How to date a recording using background electrical noise

#33

Post by archi42 » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 10:43 AM UTC

I'm wondering how difficult it is to clean the signal once the relevant noise portion can be extracted, and then introduce a fake noise to manipulate the date?

I'd wager it's not too difficult to produce something that can fool a layman just using some dating software...

Re: How to date a recording using background electrical noise

#34

Post by ralusek » Sun, Feb 26, 2023, 3:56 PM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #14

tverbeure wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dumbed down version is great to introduce people to the subject Chances are that good written explanations already exist, just a Google search away, for those who want to learn more. Tom’s video and this blog post are perfect combo that complement each other.

Dumbed down without being inaccurate is also often sufficient for anyone with some base knowledge in an area. You can figure a lot out simply by being told the core concept, no need to go into extreme detail. Extreme detail is great for those that want or need it, but it's far from the only reasonable option for learning things. --- Re the general flood of these kinds of videos: oh yeah, I think it's excessive. I sus…

It's actually often impossible to dumb something down without inaccuracies. I'm always drawn to the metaphor of resolution in an image. If I want to simplify an image by reducing its resolution, I'll have 4 pixels at a time that I need to decide how to represent with 1. Whatever solution I do will ultimately result in an image that is technically a less correct version that the original image.

If I start a class by saying "computer code will run line by line on your processor, one instruction set at a time" this might be a useful way to get someone familiar with writing code. If someone raises their hand and says "well don't CPUs perform optimizations to try to do branch predictions other optimizations so that it doesn't execute exactly as written, and isn't some code able to run on GPUs, and can't cosmic rays cause bit flips in memory so that your code doesn't execute exactly as written, and..." Sure, but I'm teaching you a wrong thing because it's functionally right at this resolution.

Re: How to date a recording using background electrical noise

#35

Post by NikkiA » Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 5:40 AM UTC

cynwoody wrote: post #13

Right below the author's comment, "Regardless of a grid’s size, the current flowing through it oscillates in perfect synchrony, at exactly the same frequency, throughout the whole grid," he presents a map of Western Europe's regional groups. I notice that Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland comprise the Nordic Regional Group. Iceland? There is a lot of water between Iceland and the other three nations in its group.…

Norway to Faroe Isles and Faroe to Iceland are about the same distance individually as the electrical links between the UK and Norway and UK and Denmark, so I don't see why not. The north atlantic is a little deeper, but that's probably not much of an increase in distance all considered - a couple of km at each end at most.