What's so good about normal anyway?
That is all.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
The Meaning of Strife
Had a good thought last week that I wanted to share: Strife is what you get when you live your life with no concern at all for others. Happiness is what you get when you live your live with no concern for yourself.
Short, but sweet.
Short, but sweet.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Echo Dimensionality
The math behind string theory defines a world with eleven dimension. The dimensions we are familiar with are height, width, depth and time. This theory posits seven additional dimensions and describes the higher dimensions as micro dimensions that are wrapped around the more conventional dimensions. There's more to this than just this of course, but in a pinch this explanation will do.
It is regarding these micro dimensions that I have been thinking, allowing my imagination to run around a bit, and although I don't know all the mathematics behind them, it occurs to me that each of these micro dimensions behave as almost a vibration in each of the more conventional dimensions. An example of what I'm thinking can be represented by dropping a pebble at a 90 degree angle to a pool of water. As the pebble is falling, it is moving in the Y-axis of our old friend, the Cartesian coordinate system. When the pebble impacts the water, rings are produced in the pool, along the Z-axis and X-axis and are a function of movement along the Y-axis. There does not need to be any lateral movement to produce a lateral effect. This is similar to the effect that each dimension has on reality, only there is a implied directionality alluded to.
The extra dimensions aren't so much micro dimensions wrapped around the conventional dimensions smaller than we can ever perceive, instead they are actually a function of the conventional dimensions that effect a wobble in the conventional dimensions that resemble extra dimensions and fit the math, but are actually just functional echoes created by the addition of a time factor. The are a reflection of the conventional dimensions that fit the math, but don't actually exist any more than the Tooth Fairy.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
The Proof
Slurpee = Good?
- Slurpee = Partially Frozen Sugary Beverage
- Partially Frozen Sugary Beverage = Thirst Quenching Enjoyment
- Thirst Quenching Enjoyment = Taste Bud Happiness
- Taste Bud Happiness = Neuron Excitement
- Neuron Excitement = Endorphin Release
- Endorphin Release = Good
Monday, March 29, 2010
It Happened Again!
The last post that I wrote was about calculus. Go figure that the next post that I would write would also be about advanced math, but hey I ran into it again and I was amazed. I guess lightening does strike twice, however this time it wasn't calculus, it was trigonometry.
I was selling a Leslie organ speaker on Craigslist.org and I was talking about the speaker with one of my coworkers that didn't know what is special about them. I was explaining how some of the speakers inside the cabinet were connected to a motor that caused them to rotate and that this produced a simulated vibrato in the higher and lower registers. Of course they didn't know what vibrato was so I started explaining it to them. I guess the most commonly known application of vibrato is the whammy bar (tremolo arm) on an electric guitar, but other instruments have other techniques to create vibrato too. On my euphonium I add a little vibrato to some notes just by shaking the horn a bit. Other instruments can produce vibrato in similar ways, by hand movements or by blocking some of the sound, like the cups you often see at the end of trumpets that look like plungers. Some singers do this too, but totally with their voice. You've heard this before, but you may just not have known what it was that you were hearing.
Vibrato sounds like a wobble in the sound or like the sound is bent just a little bit. It can be pleasing to the ears, but there is hard line mathematics behind what's going on. I promise I won't go into it that much because I just don't know acoustics all that much, but I'll give the basics.
Sound is a wave, we all know that. Vibrato changes that wave in a special application of an operation that is commonly known as the Doppler effect. If you don't know what the Doppler effect is, imagine a train approaching you and how the sound of that train increases in frequency the closer or faster it gets. When it passes you, the frequency of the sound you hear decreases the farther it gets from you. So the sound gets higher and lower (not louder and softer) as it moves. The motion however for the Doppler effect is constant because your only dealing with one vector (oh no, physics!) and vibrato deals with more than one vector.
Whether it's shaking an instrument, stretching strings or a speaker that rotates in a circle, the effect is very similar. The easiest change to work out is shaking, where an instrument goes back and forth a small distance. What's happening here is just like the train coming at you and going away from you, but over and over again. So if you look at it, if it's happening over and over again with regularity, what we are creating is also a waveform. So vibrato is actually one wave multiplied by another wave, hence trigonometry.
I counted and I shake my euphonium about four times a second when I'm producing vibrato on it, so the frequency of the wave I'm multiplying the sound wave by is about 4 hertz. I could get into the circle of fifths and the chromatic scale right here and all the frequency of the notes that I play, but instead I will simply say that if my math is right, my 4 hertz movement can change the frequency of the notes I'm playing up to 4-5%, which is significant. BTW, lower notes change more noticeably than higher notes because they have a lower frequency to start with and 4 hertz is a higher percentage of change than in higher notes. Neat.
Now, think about the Leslie speaker. On the bottom of the cabinet there is a bass speaker that rotates in a circle. The speaker is a cylinder (great, now geometry?) about two feet in diameter and eight inches tall. The speaker only points out one side of the box. Now as this speaker travels around it's axis, it is mimicking the action of the Unit-circle in trigonometry with it's motion. I won't go into it, but you can look it up if you're interested. I don't know what the frequency of the speaker rotation is, but I'm sure it can't be much more that I can do myself on my horn, but the rotation produces the exact same effect, vibrato.
Well, I'm done, but I'm beginning to suspect that higher mathematics might be lurking around everywhere, just waiting for us to grow complacent so it can strike totally unsuspected. Oh well, I'm sure it will happen again, and when it does, I'll probably write about it again.
I was selling a Leslie organ speaker on Craigslist.org and I was talking about the speaker with one of my coworkers that didn't know what is special about them. I was explaining how some of the speakers inside the cabinet were connected to a motor that caused them to rotate and that this produced a simulated vibrato in the higher and lower registers. Of course they didn't know what vibrato was so I started explaining it to them. I guess the most commonly known application of vibrato is the whammy bar (tremolo arm) on an electric guitar, but other instruments have other techniques to create vibrato too. On my euphonium I add a little vibrato to some notes just by shaking the horn a bit. Other instruments can produce vibrato in similar ways, by hand movements or by blocking some of the sound, like the cups you often see at the end of trumpets that look like plungers. Some singers do this too, but totally with their voice. You've heard this before, but you may just not have known what it was that you were hearing.
Vibrato sounds like a wobble in the sound or like the sound is bent just a little bit. It can be pleasing to the ears, but there is hard line mathematics behind what's going on. I promise I won't go into it that much because I just don't know acoustics all that much, but I'll give the basics.
Sound is a wave, we all know that. Vibrato changes that wave in a special application of an operation that is commonly known as the Doppler effect. If you don't know what the Doppler effect is, imagine a train approaching you and how the sound of that train increases in frequency the closer or faster it gets. When it passes you, the frequency of the sound you hear decreases the farther it gets from you. So the sound gets higher and lower (not louder and softer) as it moves. The motion however for the Doppler effect is constant because your only dealing with one vector (oh no, physics!) and vibrato deals with more than one vector.
Whether it's shaking an instrument, stretching strings or a speaker that rotates in a circle, the effect is very similar. The easiest change to work out is shaking, where an instrument goes back and forth a small distance. What's happening here is just like the train coming at you and going away from you, but over and over again. So if you look at it, if it's happening over and over again with regularity, what we are creating is also a waveform. So vibrato is actually one wave multiplied by another wave, hence trigonometry.
I counted and I shake my euphonium about four times a second when I'm producing vibrato on it, so the frequency of the wave I'm multiplying the sound wave by is about 4 hertz. I could get into the circle of fifths and the chromatic scale right here and all the frequency of the notes that I play, but instead I will simply say that if my math is right, my 4 hertz movement can change the frequency of the notes I'm playing up to 4-5%, which is significant. BTW, lower notes change more noticeably than higher notes because they have a lower frequency to start with and 4 hertz is a higher percentage of change than in higher notes. Neat.
Now, think about the Leslie speaker. On the bottom of the cabinet there is a bass speaker that rotates in a circle. The speaker is a cylinder (great, now geometry?) about two feet in diameter and eight inches tall. The speaker only points out one side of the box. Now as this speaker travels around it's axis, it is mimicking the action of the Unit-circle in trigonometry with it's motion. I won't go into it, but you can look it up if you're interested. I don't know what the frequency of the speaker rotation is, but I'm sure it can't be much more that I can do myself on my horn, but the rotation produces the exact same effect, vibrato.
Well, I'm done, but I'm beginning to suspect that higher mathematics might be lurking around everywhere, just waiting for us to grow complacent so it can strike totally unsuspected. Oh well, I'm sure it will happen again, and when it does, I'll probably write about it again.
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