Same as for "hotness" or any other colloquial term for equilibrium latent heat energy, a.k.a "temperature" - Kelvin (Celsius is arbitrary bullshit unsuitable for measuring anything other than temperature deltas, in which case the delta is the same as if measured in K)
Yep. And the coldness of space is something like a couple degrees Kelvin, which measures from absolute zero, the theoretically coldest temperature achievable, at which all heat has been removed from the system. And the only thermal reference point from which you can meaningfully determine thermal ratios, such as needed for thermodynamic efficiency calculations, or saying Thing A is X times hotter or colder than Thing B.
It's literally ambiguous, but consistent in practice.
"10x as high" is completely unambiguous. 10x higher is used to mean the same thing, but *is* technically ambiguous the words literally mean 10x+1 = 11x, but that's almost never how it's used (the exception generally being with percentages for some reason, probably because they're usually used for fractional changes).
"10x lower" is the inverse function. Make something 10xhigher, then 10x lower, and you get back to the original state. intuitively obvious, and common language usage almost always follows intuition rather than reason.
It also helps if you consider such things from an absolute reference point, as negative numbers are nonsensical in everyday usage: I have 6 apples, if you have 2x fewer, how many would you have? You can't have -6 of anything, so clearly you have 3. There is no ambiguity. Similarly lengths absolute, nothing can be less than 0m long, so "5x as short" is unambiguously 1/5th.
It gets a little more complex when dealing with arbitrary reference points, but you're still talking about measures from a particular zero point - the height of the hill is measured from "ground level", and no hill can be less than 0m tall, or it's not a hill.
Temperature is particularly bad because it's not immediately obvious that there's a natural zero point for temperatures, and most people are accustomed to *F or C, which are completely arbitrary junk scales akin to setting the zero point on a ruler 247.3 meters away from the beginning, and declaring anything shorter than that to have a negative length. But that's why we have K and R - absolute scales whose zero point is the well-defined theoretical coldest that anything could possibly be, at which point it would contain zero thermal energy, and thus could not get any colder. But most people aren't used to thinking of temperature as a measure of the absolute amount of one kind of energy in a thing, largely because all the changes we're accustomed to amount to adding or removing a few cups of water from a bathtub that already contains many gallons.
Why not? You have an absolute reference point for length - 0m, against which all scaling takes place so that it makes sense, right?
You also have an absolute reference point for temperature - absolute zero, the temperature at which there is no more thermal energy to remove, even in theory, against which temperature scaling makes just as much sense. It['s only in the completely arbitrary Celsius and Fahrenheit scales that it appears nonsensical - but those don't get used in scientific calculations for exactly that reason (outside of chemistry and thermal flow, which are mostly interested in temperature deltas and critical event temperatures, neither of which care where zero is)
You can't even compute heat-engine efficiency using C or F them without getting completely bogus results, because they're completely bogus scales - as though we arbitrarily said the "zero point" on a ruler was actually 213.7meters from the beginning, so that a sheet of paper was approximately -213.7 meters thick - which would similarly make scaling lengths pretty much nonsensical.
Well, no I suppose that's not *quite* true. "X times smaller" is the inverse of "X times larger", and there is some slight ambiguity there. 3x larger almost always means 3x as large as the reference size, but the words technically indicate 1+3, or 4x larger than it began. That hardly ever comes up though, unless there's a pedant around trying to stir up trouble. And as the scale increases the relative difference diminishes. It doesn't really make much functional difference if 10,000,000,000x colder is interpreted as 1/10,000,000,000th the temperature, or 1/10,000,000,001th - the difference is almost certainly within the margin of error.
Basically, I think whole usage grew out of a common expression such as "3x as much", which is completely unambiguous. It was then generalized to add direction and context, and shortened at the expense of literal accuracy. 3x the length = 3x longer, the opposite of which would be 3x shorter = 1/3 the length, and get you back to the original length.
What are you on about? X times smaller means "divided by X" in pretty much every context I've ever encountered. Is it linguistically logical? No. But very little about language is. Is it unambiguous anyway? Yes.
An interesting idea, except you don't want to maintain a fixed following distance - that's what creates the conditions for pressure waves to exist. You want to dynamically adjust following distance based on how much space you have behind you as well. If there's a bunch of empty space behind you - slow down and spread out - then the person in front of you now has more space behind them, and should do the same thing, etc,etc,etc. Likewise, if there's a bunch of empty space in front of you, and traffic behind, speed up.
Basically you're trying to "buffer" road space so that the dense sections stretch out to fill the empty sections, rather than traffic moving in clumps, as is typically the case.
"Pressure wave" traffic jams I assume? That's a solved problem - all that remains is to convince drivers to implement the solution, one that every colony ant on the planet already uses: every driver must try to always remain roughly equidistant between the cars in front of and behind them, which causes the waveform to dissipate.
Ants don't have traffic jams. Humans on the other hand aren't smart enough to avoid them. Riding that guy's bumper isn't going to save you more than a few seconds, at most, but greatly enhances the chance that everyone will get stuck in a traffic jam.
Reread the thread - this entire thread, right to the topmost reply to he article, is about blood. Even Reanjr's comment, to which AC posted the "when you get convicted" statement, was specifically about needles.
I full agree with you about actual competency tests being far preferable. Unfortunately they'd also be far more expensive - at a minimum you'd need a high quality driving simulator available in-cruiser, or get you back to the station for immediate testing there, before you have a chance to sober up.
And high quality is the watch word - it needs to be a realistic enough scenario so that existing real-life skills translate directly - a screen, or even current VR's peripheral vision blinders, are going to really throw off a lot of people's situational awareness, especially non-gamers.
We could perhaps design a "game" that (supposedly) tests attention, reaction times, etc., but it's extremely unlikely it would be an accurate assessment, and then we'd be punishing perfectly competent drivers for not being good at learning new games. Just a different version of the existing problem.
As it is though you're unlikely to be pulled over in the first place unless you're driving erratically (DWI checkpoints and dark skin notwithstanding). And if you have a high BAC, AND are driving erratically near a police officer, then you were almost certainly guilty of at least not paying enough attention to driving given your level of impairment.
The rich don't risk starvation if a risk fails. In fact they can generally suffer several back-to-back failures and still afford that globe-trotting vacation they had been eyeing.
Risk diversification is risk reduction - and only the rich can afford it.
Have you considered the possibility that the tank was actually leaking slowly, and you were operating in a borderline dangerously low-oxygen environment?
I think the problem now is that most medical supply houses are refusing to sell the drugs normally used for an overdose lethal injection. Something about medical ethics and European companies. So they're looking for an alternative. And hey, if you're going to kill someone oxygen deprivation is about as humane as it gets.
More than... nitrogen? Why? Nitrogen is far cheaper and easier to acquire and contain, and no less effective - it's not the gas that kills you after all, it's the lack of oxygen.
Plus, should you have any last words to impart, nitrogen lets you speak normally.
Um, prior to the ADC there is NO digital signal, the ADC is what converts analog to digital - it's right there in the name.
Now granted, for (good) hardware you'll likely sample at a higher rate/fidelity than your final format (integer multiples to avoid introducing greater digital distortion), but that doesn't change the fact that you've already discarded some information.
As for not being able to hear the difference between harmonics - bull. 16kHz square, triangle, and sine waves all sound definitely different, despite the fact that I can't hear a 32kHz signal (I can hear 24kHz just fine, much to my dismay - you woudn't believe how many concert sound guys don't correct high-frequency feedback).
Also, it's not just simple harmonics - you can use ultrasound interference to generate free-floating "acoustic sound" sources.
Zip is not known as a lossless format, it's known as a lossless compression format. That extra word matters. Lossless compression is very much a thing, and there's many different varieties tuned to exactly what sort of information you're compressing (e.g. FLAC will generally compress audio better than just zipping the original.wav file).
And yes, you're absolutely right about there being no such thing as a lossless format, at least not for originally-analog signals. But analog recordings typically capture far more of the subtleties of the original signal, even if they are inevitably superimposed with analog noise.
Unfortunately, S/N ratio tells only part of the picture. Analog typically records the entire signal, limited only by the frequency response of the microphone, plus random noise. Digital meanwhile discards much of the input signal by introducing quantization noise. The big difference being that quantization discards very definite predictable portions of the signal, and introduces specific kinds of audio artifacts, especially at high frequencies.
There's no such thing as a lossless digital format - quantization noise discards vast reams of data at the moment of digitization. Mostly stuff outside of the "typical" human's hearing range - but there's lots of harmonics that can create perceived sound from imperceptible frequencies (a modern example being the use of interfering ultrasound signals to generate tightly targetted apparent normal sound sources).
You're probably thinking of lossless *compression* such as ALAC, FLAC, etc. Which doesn't discard any of the information in the original recording - but that can't do anything to preserve the information which was never recorded in the first place.
Is there any reason you couldn't capture much of the same effect with an analog pre-filter that demonstrates the same saturation effects - i.e. boost the gain, pass it through your saturation filter, and then digitize the result? Even an all-digital saturation filter should be able to recreate the result, though obviously you'd need to record the sample at a higher bit-depth and range to accurately record the "will be saturated" signal peaks while maintaining the same detail for the "normal" signal.
Transistors are fully analog devices as well - they're used strictly in saturation (pseudo-relay) mode in most modern CPUs, etc, but that doesn't change their fundamental nature. Most modern audio and signal amplifier ICs use them in analog mode to great effect.
As for replay - you'd probably get the best results if the entire production chain was (high quality) analog, but professional digital equipment may very well use radically greater fidelity than any consumer hardware can use - typical consumer hardware is limited to somewhere around 16 bits per sample and 44,000 samples per second - both of which introduce significant quantization noise. Which means that a smooth input sine wave is approximated by a jagged "staircase" waveform, with all fine detail discarded, and then the result is (ideally) smoothed back into a continuous waveform via a high-frequency low-pass filter when used to drive a speaker. Unfortunately, while that quantization will typically capture (most) of the (average) human's hearing range, it completely discards higher-frequency tones whose harmonics may still be audible, as well as destroying many other subtleties of the signal shape which may have an audible effect.
Professional gear, especially if designed for recording raw signals that will undergo extreme editing, can potentially operate with much better fidelity - even going to 24 bit samples instead of 16 will increase the sample fidelity by a factor of 256 over the same range, and increasing the sample rate will better capture the temporal transitions - plenty of digital signal processing hardware is designed to operate in the MHz or even GHz range, and there's no real reason you couldn't use that for audio sampling as well - it's just normally considered gross overkill for the job. If you record that back to analog using similarly capable hardware you can get a recording whose quantization noise is much further outside the (average) human perceptual envelope, so that even many of the harmonics and other subtleties are substantially the same as the original, at least to a limited human ear.
Yeah, I've lost a bunch over the years myself, before I learned the "rules": You need to respect the nature of your media.
A lot of (especially cheaper) CD/DVD-Rs use organic dyes which break down quickly if exposed to UV (sunlight) or heat (and possibly moisture), and more slowly regardless - even the good branded and cased ones back in the early days, unless they were specifically "archival grade" or similar, though I've heard recently they have gotten better. You pretty much had to store them in a cool, dry, dark place for them to last. And even then it was a gamble.
Ironically, re-writable discs tend to be far more reliable for long-term storage, as even the cheap ones use a phase-changing crystal that has to be heated to a few hundred degrees F to change state. Of course the cheap ones may still delaminate and make your data unreadable, but barring that your data should be safe. (And personally, I've never had a disc delaminate)
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Same as for "hotness" or any other colloquial term for equilibrium latent heat energy, a.k.a "temperature" - Kelvin (Celsius is arbitrary bullshit unsuitable for measuring anything other than temperature deltas, in which case the delta is the same as if measured in K)
Yep. And the coldness of space is something like a couple degrees Kelvin, which measures from absolute zero, the theoretically coldest temperature achievable, at which all heat has been removed from the system. And the only thermal reference point from which you can meaningfully determine thermal ratios, such as needed for thermodynamic efficiency calculations, or saying Thing A is X times hotter or colder than Thing B.
It's literally ambiguous, but consistent in practice.
"10x as high" is completely unambiguous. 10x higher is used to mean the same thing, but *is* technically ambiguous the words literally mean 10x+1 = 11x, but that's almost never how it's used (the exception generally being with percentages for some reason, probably because they're usually used for fractional changes).
"10x lower" is the inverse function. Make something 10xhigher, then 10x lower, and you get back to the original state. intuitively obvious, and common language usage almost always follows intuition rather than reason.
It also helps if you consider such things from an absolute reference point, as negative numbers are nonsensical in everyday usage: I have 6 apples, if you have 2x fewer, how many would you have? You can't have -6 of anything, so clearly you have 3. There is no ambiguity. Similarly lengths absolute, nothing can be less than 0m long, so "5x as short" is unambiguously 1/5th.
It gets a little more complex when dealing with arbitrary reference points, but you're still talking about measures from a particular zero point - the height of the hill is measured from "ground level", and no hill can be less than 0m tall, or it's not a hill.
Temperature is particularly bad because it's not immediately obvious that there's a natural zero point for temperatures, and most people are accustomed to *F or C, which are completely arbitrary junk scales akin to setting the zero point on a ruler 247.3 meters away from the beginning, and declaring anything shorter than that to have a negative length. But that's why we have K and R - absolute scales whose zero point is the well-defined theoretical coldest that anything could possibly be, at which point it would contain zero thermal energy, and thus could not get any colder. But most people aren't used to thinking of temperature as a measure of the absolute amount of one kind of energy in a thing, largely because all the changes we're accustomed to amount to adding or removing a few cups of water from a bathtub that already contains many gallons.
Why not? You have an absolute reference point for length - 0m, against which all scaling takes place so that it makes sense, right?
You also have an absolute reference point for temperature - absolute zero, the temperature at which there is no more thermal energy to remove, even in theory, against which temperature scaling makes just as much sense. It['s only in the completely arbitrary Celsius and Fahrenheit scales that it appears nonsensical - but those don't get used in scientific calculations for exactly that reason (outside of chemistry and thermal flow, which are mostly interested in temperature deltas and critical event temperatures, neither of which care where zero is)
You can't even compute heat-engine efficiency using C or F them without getting completely bogus results, because they're completely bogus scales - as though we arbitrarily said the "zero point" on a ruler was actually 213.7meters from the beginning, so that a sheet of paper was approximately -213.7 meters thick - which would similarly make scaling lengths pretty much nonsensical.
Well, no I suppose that's not *quite* true. "X times smaller" is the inverse of "X times larger", and there is some slight ambiguity there. 3x larger almost always means 3x as large as the reference size, but the words technically indicate 1+3, or 4x larger than it began. That hardly ever comes up though, unless there's a pedant around trying to stir up trouble. And as the scale increases the relative difference diminishes. It doesn't really make much functional difference if 10,000,000,000x colder is interpreted as 1/10,000,000,000th the temperature, or 1/10,000,000,001th - the difference is almost certainly within the margin of error.
Basically, I think whole usage grew out of a common expression such as "3x as much", which is completely unambiguous. It was then generalized to add direction and context, and shortened at the expense of literal accuracy. 3x the length = 3x longer, the opposite of which would be 3x shorter = 1/3 the length, and get you back to the original length.
What are you on about? X times smaller means "divided by X" in pretty much every context I've ever encountered. Is it linguistically logical? No. But very little about language is. Is it unambiguous anyway? Yes.
Thank you. I figured it was probably something like that, but it's a rather critical detail to have been left out.
An interesting idea, except you don't want to maintain a fixed following distance - that's what creates the conditions for pressure waves to exist. You want to dynamically adjust following distance based on how much space you have behind you as well. If there's a bunch of empty space behind you - slow down and spread out - then the person in front of you now has more space behind them, and should do the same thing, etc,etc,etc. Likewise, if there's a bunch of empty space in front of you, and traffic behind, speed up.
Basically you're trying to "buffer" road space so that the dense sections stretch out to fill the empty sections, rather than traffic moving in clumps, as is typically the case.
"Pressure wave" traffic jams I assume? That's a solved problem - all that remains is to convince drivers to implement the solution, one that every colony ant on the planet already uses: every driver must try to always remain roughly equidistant between the cars in front of and behind them, which causes the waveform to dissipate.
Ants don't have traffic jams. Humans on the other hand aren't smart enough to avoid them. Riding that guy's bumper isn't going to save you more than a few seconds, at most, but greatly enhances the chance that everyone will get stuck in a traffic jam.
Reread the thread - this entire thread, right to the topmost reply to he article, is about blood. Even Reanjr's comment, to which AC posted the "when you get convicted" statement, was specifically about needles.
I full agree with you about actual competency tests being far preferable. Unfortunately they'd also be far more expensive - at a minimum you'd need a high quality driving simulator available in-cruiser, or get you back to the station for immediate testing there, before you have a chance to sober up.
And high quality is the watch word - it needs to be a realistic enough scenario so that existing real-life skills translate directly - a screen, or even current VR's peripheral vision blinders, are going to really throw off a lot of people's situational awareness, especially non-gamers.
We could perhaps design a "game" that (supposedly) tests attention, reaction times, etc., but it's extremely unlikely it would be an accurate assessment, and then we'd be punishing perfectly competent drivers for not being good at learning new games. Just a different version of the existing problem.
As it is though you're unlikely to be pulled over in the first place unless you're driving erratically (DWI checkpoints and dark skin notwithstanding). And if you have a high BAC, AND are driving erratically near a police officer, then you were almost certainly guilty of at least not paying enough attention to driving given your level of impairment.
You should know better than that. Implied sarcasm will ALWAYS be misinterpreted online.
And these days, with wingnuts from all extremes climbing out of the woodwork and expecting to be taken seriously, that's more true than ever.
Oh, it's *always* true. Just because the next generation is a bunch of losers, doesn't mean that your generation was any better...
>He didn't say anything about driving drunk
Sure he did:
> when you submit and get convicted
When. Not If. And if the blood test convicts you, then you were driving drunk.
The rich don't risk starvation if a risk fails. In fact they can generally suffer several back-to-back failures and still afford that globe-trotting vacation they had been eyeing.
Risk diversification is risk reduction - and only the rich can afford it.
Must have been a crappy alarm then - clearly better sensors were available, they had to use them to check.
Have you considered the possibility that the tank was actually leaking slowly, and you were operating in a borderline dangerously low-oxygen environment?
I think the problem now is that most medical supply houses are refusing to sell the drugs normally used for an overdose lethal injection. Something about medical ethics and European companies. So they're looking for an alternative. And hey, if you're going to kill someone oxygen deprivation is about as humane as it gets.
>Death penalty by helium makes more sense.
More than... nitrogen? Why? Nitrogen is far cheaper and easier to acquire and contain, and no less effective - it's not the gas that kills you after all, it's the lack of oxygen.
Plus, should you have any last words to impart, nitrogen lets you speak normally.
Um, prior to the ADC there is NO digital signal, the ADC is what converts analog to digital - it's right there in the name.
Now granted, for (good) hardware you'll likely sample at a higher rate/fidelity than your final format (integer multiples to avoid introducing greater digital distortion), but that doesn't change the fact that you've already discarded some information.
As for not being able to hear the difference between harmonics - bull. 16kHz square, triangle, and sine waves all sound definitely different, despite the fact that I can't hear a 32kHz signal (I can hear 24kHz just fine, much to my dismay - you woudn't believe how many concert sound guys don't correct high-frequency feedback).
Also, it's not just simple harmonics - you can use ultrasound interference to generate free-floating "acoustic sound" sources.
Zip is not known as a lossless format, it's known as a lossless compression format. That extra word matters. Lossless compression is very much a thing, and there's many different varieties tuned to exactly what sort of information you're compressing (e.g. FLAC will generally compress audio better than just zipping the original .wav file).
And yes, you're absolutely right about there being no such thing as a lossless format, at least not for originally-analog signals. But analog recordings typically capture far more of the subtleties of the original signal, even if they are inevitably superimposed with analog noise.
Unfortunately, S/N ratio tells only part of the picture. Analog typically records the entire signal, limited only by the frequency response of the microphone, plus random noise. Digital meanwhile discards much of the input signal by introducing quantization noise. The big difference being that quantization discards very definite predictable portions of the signal, and introduces specific kinds of audio artifacts, especially at high frequencies.
There's no such thing as a lossless digital format - quantization noise discards vast reams of data at the moment of digitization. Mostly stuff outside of the "typical" human's hearing range - but there's lots of harmonics that can create perceived sound from imperceptible frequencies (a modern example being the use of interfering ultrasound signals to generate tightly targetted apparent normal sound sources).
You're probably thinking of lossless *compression* such as ALAC, FLAC, etc. Which doesn't discard any of the information in the original recording - but that can't do anything to preserve the information which was never recorded in the first place.
Is there any reason you couldn't capture much of the same effect with an analog pre-filter that demonstrates the same saturation effects - i.e. boost the gain, pass it through your saturation filter, and then digitize the result? Even an all-digital saturation filter should be able to recreate the result, though obviously you'd need to record the sample at a higher bit-depth and range to accurately record the "will be saturated" signal peaks while maintaining the same detail for the "normal" signal.
Transistors are fully analog devices as well - they're used strictly in saturation (pseudo-relay) mode in most modern CPUs, etc, but that doesn't change their fundamental nature. Most modern audio and signal amplifier ICs use them in analog mode to great effect.
As for replay - you'd probably get the best results if the entire production chain was (high quality) analog, but professional digital equipment may very well use radically greater fidelity than any consumer hardware can use - typical consumer hardware is limited to somewhere around 16 bits per sample and 44,000 samples per second - both of which introduce significant quantization noise. Which means that a smooth input sine wave is approximated by a jagged "staircase" waveform, with all fine detail discarded, and then the result is (ideally) smoothed back into a continuous waveform via a high-frequency low-pass filter when used to drive a speaker. Unfortunately, while that quantization will typically capture (most) of the (average) human's hearing range, it completely discards higher-frequency tones whose harmonics may still be audible, as well as destroying many other subtleties of the signal shape which may have an audible effect.
Professional gear, especially if designed for recording raw signals that will undergo extreme editing, can potentially operate with much better fidelity - even going to 24 bit samples instead of 16 will increase the sample fidelity by a factor of 256 over the same range, and increasing the sample rate will better capture the temporal transitions - plenty of digital signal processing hardware is designed to operate in the MHz or even GHz range, and there's no real reason you couldn't use that for audio sampling as well - it's just normally considered gross overkill for the job. If you record that back to analog using similarly capable hardware you can get a recording whose quantization noise is much further outside the (average) human perceptual envelope, so that even many of the harmonics and other subtleties are substantially the same as the original, at least to a limited human ear.
Yeah, I've lost a bunch over the years myself, before I learned the "rules": You need to respect the nature of your media.
A lot of (especially cheaper) CD/DVD-Rs use organic dyes which break down quickly if exposed to UV (sunlight) or heat (and possibly moisture), and more slowly regardless - even the good branded and cased ones back in the early days, unless they were specifically "archival grade" or similar, though I've heard recently they have gotten better. You pretty much had to store them in a cool, dry, dark place for them to last. And even then it was a gamble.
Ironically, re-writable discs tend to be far more reliable for long-term storage, as even the cheap ones use a phase-changing crystal that has to be heated to a few hundred degrees F to change state. Of course the cheap ones may still delaminate and make your data unreadable, but barring that your data should be safe. (And personally, I've never had a disc delaminate)