For anyone wanting to see a master example of echolocation see this short video: https://youtu.be/TeFRkAYb1uk
Coincidentally, I watched this last week and found it highly informative, entertaining.
Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound
41–50 of 111 posts
Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a motorcycle one is much more connected to the environment and I think that is one reason people like them. Its fun to come down into a hollow and feel the temperature change. Smells are also easily detected. Sound, on the other hand, is mostly the motorcycle noise (which can be fun too). Reading this comment made me think it would be really interesting to try out an electric motorcycle.
Or a bicycle or e-bike. Those are also pretty quiet and fun to ride.
Bicycles and e-bikes are great. Would love to have a high powered e-bikes/very small e-motorcycle that could go on the freeway (ie., be able to cross the bay bridge. Have yet to see such a thing is America.
Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well said. For me the 90s and early 2000s internet was completely magical. My fondest memories of my teens was finally having a computer in my room and the freedom to stay up late and explore the online universe. I met a lot of people and saw the advent of a lot of new things. I wonder if that's going to happen for my kids. Today's internet feels so highly commercialized. All the new exciting discoveries are in the f…
The sad thing for me is that a lot of those strange, eclectic sites are still there, only they became really hard to find. Thanks to Google and other search engines prioritising recency and Brands (with a capital) in all results, the eclectic is penalised to the point of near invisibility. There was never a point to them, but they were hugely interesting. Today there's no point bothering as it would be gone forever a…
I don't know that Google was ever the thing to find them. Various curated lists and word-of-mouth were how they spread. But yeah, the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty terrible now for anything that isn't a ho-hum "conventional" query. On the other hand, the sheer volume of information has to count for something. You can reach a greater breadth and depth for directed learning online than in the 90's where it was mostly undirected novelty.
Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound
#44This article reminds me of how it felt to be on the internet as a child. It seemed like this magical place where around every corner there was hidden an alchemic recipe to achieve something magical, if only you knew how to search in the right places.
This article reminds me of how it felt to be on the internet as a child.
You stick to being a child on the internet.
Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound
#45I’ve been practicing this for years and it’s quite useful. It’s not like seeing of course, but I’m able to get an idea of a room size and material hard/softness. Useful for not walking into walls in the dark or finding something when I don’t want to wake my SO. In general I’ve always been into sound and I think a lot of people have better hearing than they think, but never learned to hear well. I find it odd that we…
Situational awareness goes way down when people walk around with headphones with loud music. I notice it on a lot of people and how they behave in traffic. Just listening to things around you can be quite interesting as you move around. I never wear headphones for this reason. On interesting thing is to open the windows (and sunroof) in an electric car, whilst driving in built up areas < 20 mph/35 km/h, you hear a lo…
I wear headphones when I'm out most of the time, but at least half the time I don't have anything playing (and a third of the time it would be an audio book, not a constant noise like most music). It's still a big difference in how connected I feel to my surroundings. I'm not sure it's related to sound, as my headphones don't dampen much. I think it's just the expectation of people when they see someone with headphones and it allows me not to interact as much.
Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound
#46Do loud noises or loud music interfere with it?
I would imagine it does, but I'm also curious how quiet it had to be for this to work.
Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound
#47There should be an app for this.
Most phones have stereo microphones and they're individually accessible by apps. Combined with the accelerometer for rough position change tracking, it must be possible to build. Would be super cool to see in the dark like that.
Edit: wait, we don't just have two mics in our head, we also have our outer ear that's required for this. I guess the phone would need physical addons for this to work.
Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sad thing for me is that a lot of those strange, eclectic sites are still there, only they became really hard to find. Thanks to Google and other search engines prioritising recency and Brands (with a capital) in all results, the eclectic is penalised to the point of near invisibility. There was never a point to them, but they were hugely interesting. Today there's no point bothering as it would be gone forever a…
Which are your favorites?
It looks like it hasn't been updated in years, but http://www.powerlabs.org/index.html has some cool content
Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well said. For me the 90s and early 2000s internet was completely magical. My fondest memories of my teens was finally having a computer in my room and the freedom to stay up late and explore the online universe. I met a lot of people and saw the advent of a lot of new things. I wonder if that's going to happen for my kids. Today's internet feels so highly commercialized. All the new exciting discoveries are in the f…
The sad thing for me is that a lot of those strange, eclectic sites are still there, only they became really hard to find. Thanks to Google and other search engines prioritising recency and Brands (with a capital) in all results, the eclectic is penalised to the point of near invisibility. There was never a point to them, but they were hugely interesting. Today there's no point bothering as it would be gone forever a…
wiby.me is fun.
Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
So true! This reminded me of the first time I came upon Conway's Doomsday Algorithm for telling what day of the week a certain date is. http://rudy.ca/doomsday.html
The method given on that site for computing the component that comes from the last 2 digits of the year can be made a lot easier for mental calculation. I'll give some known improvements below, and then offer one of my own that is noticeably simpler. In the following, let Y = the last two digits of the year (e.g., 18 for 2018), and let N be the value we are trying to be compute. We only actually need N mod 7, but I'm…
Bonus: here's how to compute the day of the year from month/day. First I'll show how independent of the Doomsday stuff, and then show how you can use the Doomsday month number stuff to reduce memorization for the day of year stuff.
The basic idea is to compute the year day for the "0th" day of the month, then add the day of the month. For example, today, October 13th is the 286th day of the year, because October 0th is the 273rd day of the day, so 13 days past that is the 286th.
The simplest way, short of memorizing the 0th day of each month directly (or the 1st day...if you are going to take this approach might as well do the 1st, not the 0th), is to memorize how far off the actual 0th day is from what the 0th would be if all months were exactly 30 days.
Those differences are, for the 12 months:
0, -1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4
The F table has enough structure that it is not unreasonable to just memorize it.
For m >= 4, F[m] = (6x(m-4))//10. If you round toward -∞ instead of 0 when dividing, that works for m >= 3. It's probably harder to remember this than to just remember the table.
Let M[m] = the month factor from the Doomsday algorithm:
3, 0, 0, 4, 9, 6, 11, 8, 5, 10, 7, 12
BTW, if you find F[] easier to memorize than M[], you reverse the formula given above for computing F from M, to go the other way.
M[m] = -(F[m] + 2 x m + 2) mod 7.
While I'm here, one more Doomsday observation.
If a given year, Y, has year number N, then the next year with the same year number is:
• Y+6 if Y%4 == 0 or 1
• Y+11 if Y%4 == 2
• Y+5 if Y%4 == 3
(but only if that does not cross a century boundary).
The day of weeks within a century go on a 28 year cycle. Within any 28 consecutive years in a century, each of the 7 possible year number values occurs 4 times, once on a year with Y%4 == 0, once on a Y%4 == 1 year, and so on.
If you start with Y%4 == 0 year, the gaps between consecutive years with the same year number are 6, 11, 6, 5, which brings you back to the Y%4 == 0 year for the next 28 year cycle. You visit the years in the order 0, 2, 1, 3 mod 4 stepping this way.
If you memorize this pattern, it is easier to answer questions about when years or dates with specific properties happen. For example, let's say you want to know when there will next be a Friday the 13th in October.
Assuming that there will be another one this century, so using the century factor of 2 (for 20xx), you can work out that in this century Friday October 13 occurs when the year number is 0. Such a year was 2000, and 00 is a Y%4 == 0 year, so Friday October 13th occurs in 2000, 2000+6=2006, 2006+11=2017, 2017+6=2023, and then 2023+5 brings is to the 2028, the next 28 year cycle. So the next Friday October 13 is 2023.
BTW, the first Y in a century with year number N and with Y%4 == 0 is (3xN%7)x4.
If you don't care about starting from a Y%4 == 0 year, then it is easiest probably to just memorize the first year with year number 0, 1, 2, ..., 6 in a century:
0, 1, 2, 3, 9, 4, 5