I thought the expected advantage of a hydrogen economy was that the manufacturing (or rather, refining) sources can be distributed instead of centralized? I mean, if the technology can be developed to split hydrogen from methane, seawater, vegetable oil... frankly, whatever is handy... then why bother having massive refineries like we do for oil? Why not just have every residence and business generating enough to meet their own needs, along with hydrogen filling stations on the highways for those on trips too long to carry their entire need in one (tank? can we call it that? even if the eventual technology ends up being a solid storage medium?)
Or maybe I'm reading your post wrong-- if you're saying that our current transportation infrastructure is based on a semi-centralized energy production system, but that we can move to a better system if & when hydrogen becomes practical, then I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Please don't take this as a troll, but I don't see where your point is at odds with mine? I don't disagree with you, a working knowledge of the subject is important for any leadership position. I was just arguing that discounting someone merely because their expertise is in administration is just as bad as promoting someone to management just because they're a good programmer. (Having been once put in a team-leader position, where I most definitely do NOT belong, I can speak to the 2nd half of that syllogism from experience...)
Why not? Plenty of extremely superstitious fundamentalists thought it was all going to end on 12/31/1999, after all. And there are still those who try to adjust that for what the believe was the most likely date for the actual birth of their diety.
Even in the pre-digicam days, your suggestion was valid. My favorite 35mm SLR was the Pentax K1000, and my favorite 2cm DLR was the Mamiya C330. Both were entirely manual, with about the only thing automated being flash synch-- but since I don't use flash anyway, that didn't matter to me.
For the casual user, yes, please, enjoy yourself with simple point&click cameras. Frankly that's what I use these days too, and they're quite enjoyable. For the serious enthusiast or professional: ok, I can understand why sports photographers and fashion photographers would need to have nearly everything automated, since they don't have time between shots to manually verify everything-- but for those of us who prefer natural scenics, nothing beats doing it all by hand. I still have the same Pentax spotmeter that I used with a large-format camera & my C330 fifteen years ago.
Some of my best shots involved using an air-pressure bulb shutter release, a stable tripod, and a good chunk of time in the middle of the night while freezing my keester off. Others, frankly, were happy accidents.
A B&W photo I have of a tree on the National Mall in Washington DC was supposed to have been an examination of the contrast in the bark, but because I used a red filter when I should've used blue, it ended up being a perfect silhouette against a cloudy sky. Every detail in the edge of the tree of perfectly visible, but none whatsoever in the interior of the shape formed by the tree.
It's a fun hobby for me these days, but I have neither the time nor the patience to attack it like I did back then. Visiting the same site many times over the course of a year or two so I can get just the right light-- it takes dedication, and frankly it takes being either independently wealthy, or being a college student entirely dependent on the parents (which I was at the time).
More power to the people who can do it professionally. I still admire the works of photographers such as Robert Glenn Ketchum, and of course the greats like Ansel Adams, but I've come to recognize that it'll only ever be a hobby for me.
Re:Concur with the "no more registration required"
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 1
Wouldn't a good counterattack be to have the computer reproduce random keystroke noises as you're working? (And come to think of it, even when you're not...)
Treat it as a white noise solution, something like broadcasting static at a window to prevent outside mics listening in to the vibrations induced in the glass by a conversation insude.
Public Administration is a science. My father earned his Ph.D. in the field about four years ago. I helped compile a lot of the information used in his thesis, and wrote software to handle a lot of the data analysis used in it. Yes, it's a statistical science like sociology and meteorology, but that doesn't make it any less difficult or demanding a field than electronics engineering or particle physics. For the curious, his thesis was an analysis of the benefits and risks of private vs public depot management for the US DoD. And know, I have no idea what the results were, sorry.
A horizontal merger is one in which both companies compete for the same market. For instance, if MS were to buy out Oracle's database platform and services, that would be a horizontal merger, since MS already has SQL Server.
A vertical merger is one in which, for instance, one company uses a product of the other company in order to build and sell their own product. An example of this would be if a cellular service provider were to buy a cell phone manufacturer. (I don't know of any real-world instances of this; it's only a theoretical example.)
4) Up2date is really slow. I often see modem-like transfer speeds during update (over a T3 connection...). Clearly their servers can't help. I generally see far better speeds for Debian mirrors on my home ADSL link.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know if there's anyone in the community working on making a torrent version of up2date? I have to agree about the capability of RH's servers-- there are times when I've had to keep trying over & over for days because I can't get a response at all. It seems that the easy & best solution is to move away from the current ftp-like standard to something a lot more efficient.
Seriously, though, the first computer I remember working on was a little home-built called the KIM-1 that my dad bought when I was eight. It came with no storage device at all (not even an audio cassette deck, which our later trash-80s had), 256 whopping bytes of memory (expandable to 1k), and a MOS 6502 processor.
I just did a little googling and found some more information about it, by someone else who had (has?) one. I guess the thing did have a port for a tape deck, I just don't remember ours having one.
I used hotmail years ago, and had several addresses (none of which could be easily discovered with a dictionary attack). Every one of them, within days of being created, had received spam. And I mean every one of them, even though I never posted the addresses anywhere. Heck, one of them I created solely as a honeypot, and never even used for anything-- but it still got spammed.
Perhaps MS has improved some things since then, but that experience was enough to sour me on them forever.
But in my twelve years of (non-degreed) experience, what I've come to realize is that those with degrees have broader horizons and potentially a higher income ceiling than I'll see until I can compete with them on a level playing field (by earning a degree myself). For the most part, large organizations' HR departments do take into account whether or not you have a degree; it's part of their peer-comparison salary review, for one. Smaller organizations and head-hunters usually couldn't care less, as long as you can get the work done.
About thirteen years ago, during the recession of Bush the Elder, I worked for a few months in a tech staffing office, sorting the wheat from the chaff in the resumes. At that time, there were a few more prestigious institutions we looked for, such as MIT, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, etc. Surprisingly we also kept an eager eye out for Shenandoah Conservatory of the Arts, Julliard (sp?) and a few other prestigious music schools. I have no idea if that's common across the industry, but our company's president had read that the musical and mathematical minds work in remarkably similar ways, so he decided to follow up on it. I've read the same thing since then, but never had the opportunity to follow up with the musicians we hired to see how they were doing in their programming careers.
So to answer your question: a degree is a great first step to get you through the door, and throughout your career will keep the number of available positions greater for you than for me (unless I eventually do go back & get a degree, too). However, it's the experience you pick up in the working world that will decide how stable your employment is, how much you earn, etc. Frankly my best possible advice is: when you move from one job to the next, always stay on good terms with the people you left behind. They'll make great references later. I have unfortunately lost contact with some of the best references I'll ever have, and it's hurt me over the years more times than I can count.
Best of luck when you graduate, or if you take an internship before then, or whatever path you choose. May CowboyNeal never have to put a boot to your head.
Backing up the one advising you to step down off the high-horse:
According to Dictionary.com's definition of the word, the most dominant spelling since ca. 1995 has been 'email', but 'e-mail', 'Email' and 'E-mail' are acceptable alternatives.
Interestingly, according to the text of the definition, the word 'email' has another definition dating back to the 15th century, 'meaning embossed or [perhaps] arranged in a
net or open work'. It also has a meaning in modern French, 'a hard enamel obtained by heating special
paints in a furnace'. I realize that doesn't add anything to this conversation, but I, for one, found it interesting (and welcome our new French overlords, of course).
For the occasional man who can perform this act of creation alone and without financial support, that's great! But if outside funding is needed, then for basic research it should come from a public source, not a private with-strings-attached source.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I love hearing about government-industry technology transfer programs because of this, as long as the patents on inventions and discoveries paid for with public money are held in the public domain.
You're correct, I was referring to Earth-Moon L2, not Sun-Earth L2. Sorry about the confusion.
I can see why Earth-Sun L2, L4, and L5 would be ideal for comm- at any of them not only is the Earth in more-or-less the same spot, but also half the glove is visible at any given time. Not necessarily the same half, but you get the point...
Government-funded researchers invented the calculus
Um... Isaac Newton invented calculus when he was still a student at Trinity College. The school was on break for two years as a result of disease sweeping the area, and having little else to do, he spent his idle time thinking very productively.
There was no government funding involved in his inventing calculus, sorry. He invented it out of curiosity, not because he was paid to do so.
The Lagrange points and Earth-trailing orbit are both becoming popular for space telescopes because they provide very good observing environments compared to LEO.
L2 is a particularly good location for radio telescopes, as the moon shields anything in that position from radio-wavelength signals from Earth. The downside of course is that to report the data back, a repeater is needed, either in polar lunar orbit (so that it forms a halo around the moon) or in a halo orbit around L2. The telescope itself, as long as it sits in L2, can't see earth-bound transceivers unless it uses a ridiculously low wave-length (waves long enough to go around the moon, essentially)-- and a wavelength that long means incredibly slow transmissions. Not exactly a great solution.
For the most part I agree with you, I haven't seen any convincing arguments for repair over replacement either, except in extreme cases such as the fix to Hubble's mirror problem soon after it was launched. I have one question (because I'm not informed on NASA's accounting, not because I'm trying to raise any hackles or anything): Does NASA account for single-use expenditures in shuttle launches, such as fuel, labor, etc? Or are all shuttle expenses budgeted separate from the missions they undertake?
The problem with putting a telescope (or any other facility, for that matter) at L2, or any of the other Lagrange points, is that their location puts them out of the orbits reachable by the Shuttle for repair purposes. All maintenance would have to be done robotically, and considering the delta-V to return any robotic craft to LEO, it's likely that the service robots would be single-use only.
For those not space-science oriented, the Lagrange points (L1 through L5) are points in space around any two orbiting bodies where their gravity exactly (or nearly so) cancels out; as a result, other objects can be left in stable position at those points. It's even possible to put an object in orbit around a Lagrange point, even though there be no mass there. These are referred to halo orbits. SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory is in such an orbit around L1, the postion directly between the Earth and Moon. More information isavailableonline (the last link is a PDF, sorry).
Wonderful story, and a great way to blow off work for fifteen minutes-- many thanks!
For a non-synaesthete, the author does a wonderful job of presenting the senses. I've read that many synaesthetes have their senses of taste, smell and touch (which is actually several senses-- temperature, pressure, texture, etc), involved. I've always been a little jealous of those people, as the only senses I get crossed regularly are vision and hearing, and even those aren't 100% dependable. The things I see & hear (that others do vice-versa, I guess) are consistent, but not persistent, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
You're absolutely right about calling B# & C the same thing-- I don't know what the heck I was thinking about. This just goes to show how out of practice I am at playing (and reading!) music for my viola.
Anyway, I'm interested in your challenge, but I don't understand what you mean by 'You have to tell me which version each recording represents'. As you pointed out, C and B# are the same thing. As far as finger position, I don't really care if it's fourth-finger in 1st position or 1st finger in 3rd position, it's still the same note with the same color and shape. No, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I don't claim to have perfect pitch-- or anywhere near it, for that matter, which is why I never went beyond high school orchestra.
As much as I love Vivaldi's Four Seasons, particularly the Presto from Summer, I can't really agree that the compositions you mention are visual at all. Beethoven's Egmont Overture has moments where it's extremely visual, but not those two.
Interestingly, one bit of music that always has the same visual dynamics for me isn't classical at all. It's Genesis' The Brazillian (the last track on Invisible Touch). I've tried to paint it and/or draw it a few times, but lack the talent to do so properly; the only description I can give of it is that it has the dynamics of a water show with the speed and versatility of a laser-light show. Listen to it some time when you have a spare three minutes (about all the time it takes to play it). There are certain auditory cues in the track that I actually see-- a synthetic drum playing a sound that I can only describe as looking like Edgerton's frozen milk-drop photograph, for instance (except not frozen in this case, just slow-motioned).
I have no ability to prove you wrong in your challenge that I see sounds. You have no way to prove me wrong when I assert that you see the color blue the same way I see the color red. So, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
I'm a synaesthete myself, which is why I never tried any of the hallucinogenics-- I was always afraid I'd lose that wonderful crossing of the senses that I so enjoy.
I'm fortunate that my case is very mild; if it hadn't been for a number of conversations in early adolescence where I tried to describe something using adjectives that made perfect sense to me but not to others, I would never have known I'm different. In high school orchestra, most of the other kids could understand when I'd describe the sound of a viola as warm, or a piccolo as cold... but they'd have no idea what I meant when I started describing the grain of the viola sound (looks a lot like highly-polished oak under a tungsten lamp), or the brilliant white light of a b# played in second position on a violin's E string.
I read years ago in the Washington Post about a case of a fellow who was much more severely affected than I. Instead of seeing the sounds overlayed on the 'normal' visual field, and being able to easily distinguish what was seen with the eyes vs what was seen through hearing, his senses were so crosswired that this was no longer possible. The anecdote given in the story was that he stopped to buy something from a street vendor (ice cream, I think). But when the vendor spoke, his voice looked to the synaesthete like charcoal bricks falling out of the guy's mouth. The article said he hadn't been able to eat ice cream (or whatever the food was) since then. Like I said, I'm fortunate. My symptoms are thoroughly enjoyable & have never presented problems like that.
Standard flourescents are not pure white. Pure white includes the entire spectra from red through violet. If you break a flourescent down through a spectrograph, you'll see entire missing bands. There are some more expensive flourescents that do give off the entire spectrum. These are usually used in rooms where full-spectrum light is required, such as art museums, or for photographing a room that is normally lit by cheaper flourescents.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the expected advantage of a hydrogen economy was that the manufacturing (or rather, refining) sources can be distributed instead of centralized? I mean, if the technology can be developed to split hydrogen from methane, seawater, vegetable oil... frankly, whatever is handy... then why bother having massive refineries like we do for oil? Why not just have every residence and business generating enough to meet their own needs, along with hydrogen filling stations on the highways for those on trips too long to carry their entire need in one (tank? can we call it that? even if the eventual technology ends up being a solid storage medium?)
Or maybe I'm reading your post wrong-- if you're saying that our current transportation infrastructure is based on a semi-centralized energy production system, but that we can move to a better system if & when hydrogen becomes practical, then I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Please don't take this as a troll, but I don't see where your point is at odds with mine? I don't disagree with you, a working knowledge of the subject is important for any leadership position. I was just arguing that discounting someone merely because their expertise is in administration is just as bad as promoting someone to management just because they're a good programmer. (Having been once put in a team-leader position, where I most definitely do NOT belong, I can speak to the 2nd half of that syllogism from experience...)
Why not? Plenty of extremely superstitious fundamentalists thought it was all going to end on 12/31/1999, after all. And there are still those who try to adjust that for what the believe was the most likely date for the actual birth of their diety.
As am I, but it's more of a bowel movement. The grandparent of this post makes me feel like shit for being a programmer.
Even in the pre-digicam days, your suggestion was valid. My favorite 35mm SLR was the Pentax K1000, and my favorite 2cm DLR was the Mamiya C330. Both were entirely manual, with about the only thing automated being flash synch-- but since I don't use flash anyway, that didn't matter to me.
For the casual user, yes, please, enjoy yourself with simple point&click cameras. Frankly that's what I use these days too, and they're quite enjoyable. For the serious enthusiast or professional: ok, I can understand why sports photographers and fashion photographers would need to have nearly everything automated, since they don't have time between shots to manually verify everything-- but for those of us who prefer natural scenics, nothing beats doing it all by hand. I still have the same Pentax spotmeter that I used with a large-format camera & my C330 fifteen years ago.
Some of my best shots involved using an air-pressure bulb shutter release, a stable tripod, and a good chunk of time in the middle of the night while freezing my keester off. Others, frankly, were happy accidents.
A B&W photo I have of a tree on the National Mall in Washington DC was supposed to have been an examination of the contrast in the bark, but because I used a red filter when I should've used blue, it ended up being a perfect silhouette against a cloudy sky. Every detail in the edge of the tree of perfectly visible, but none whatsoever in the interior of the shape formed by the tree.
It's a fun hobby for me these days, but I have neither the time nor the patience to attack it like I did back then. Visiting the same site many times over the course of a year or two so I can get just the right light-- it takes dedication, and frankly it takes being either independently wealthy, or being a college student entirely dependent on the parents (which I was at the time).
More power to the people who can do it professionally. I still admire the works of photographers such as Robert Glenn Ketchum, and of course the greats like Ansel Adams, but I've come to recognize that it'll only ever be a hobby for me.
Wouldn't a good counterattack be to have the computer reproduce random keystroke noises as you're working? (And come to think of it, even when you're not...)
Treat it as a white noise solution, something like broadcasting static at a window to prevent outside mics listening in to the vibrations induced in the glass by a conversation insude.
Public Administration is a science. My father earned his Ph.D. in the field about four years ago. I helped compile a lot of the information used in his thesis, and wrote software to handle a lot of the data analysis used in it. Yes, it's a statistical science like sociology and meteorology, but that doesn't make it any less difficult or demanding a field than electronics engineering or particle physics. For the curious, his thesis was an analysis of the benefits and risks of private vs public depot management for the US DoD. And know, I have no idea what the results were, sorry.
A horizontal merger is one in which both companies compete for the same market. For instance, if MS were to buy out Oracle's database platform and services, that would be a horizontal merger, since MS already has SQL Server.
:)
A vertical merger is one in which, for instance, one company uses a product of the other company in order to build and sell their own product. An example of this would be if a cellular service provider were to buy a cell phone manufacturer. (I don't know of any real-world instances of this; it's only a theoretical example.)
Hope that helps
I thought /. was the anti-Windows lobby!
Oh, wait, nvm...
What's really amazing is that of the 324 registered voters, GWB won the votes of all two hundred thousand!
4) Up2date is really slow. I often see modem-like transfer speeds during update (over a T3 connection...). Clearly their servers can't help. I generally see far better speeds for Debian mirrors on my home ADSL link.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know if there's anyone in the community working on making a torrent version of up2date? I have to agree about the capability of RH's servers-- there are times when I've had to keep trying over & over for days because I can't get a response at all. It seems that the easy & best solution is to move away from the current ftp-like standard to something a lot more efficient.
You had 4K RAM?
Why, in my day....
Seriously, though, the first computer I remember working on was a little home-built called the KIM-1 that my dad bought when I was eight. It came with no storage device at all (not even an audio cassette deck, which our later trash-80s had), 256 whopping bytes of memory (expandable to 1k), and a MOS 6502 processor.
I just did a little googling and found some more information about it, by someone else who had (has?) one. I guess the thing did have a port for a tape deck, I just don't remember ours having one.
Yes, the Deux ex Machine of which Crichton is so fond... what a disappointing ending for what was otherwise a fine book.
I used hotmail years ago, and had several addresses (none of which could be easily discovered with a dictionary attack). Every one of them, within days of being created, had received spam. And I mean every one of them, even though I never posted the addresses anywhere. Heck, one of them I created solely as a honeypot, and never even used for anything-- but it still got spammed.
Perhaps MS has improved some things since then, but that experience was enough to sour me on them forever.
But in my twelve years of (non-degreed) experience, what I've come to realize is that those with degrees have broader horizons and potentially a higher income ceiling than I'll see until I can compete with them on a level playing field (by earning a degree myself). For the most part, large organizations' HR departments do take into account whether or not you have a degree; it's part of their peer-comparison salary review, for one. Smaller organizations and head-hunters usually couldn't care less, as long as you can get the work done.
About thirteen years ago, during the recession of Bush the Elder, I worked for a few months in a tech staffing office, sorting the wheat from the chaff in the resumes. At that time, there were a few more prestigious institutions we looked for, such as MIT, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, etc. Surprisingly we also kept an eager eye out for Shenandoah Conservatory of the Arts, Julliard (sp?) and a few other prestigious music schools. I have no idea if that's common across the industry, but our company's president had read that the musical and mathematical minds work in remarkably similar ways, so he decided to follow up on it. I've read the same thing since then, but never had the opportunity to follow up with the musicians we hired to see how they were doing in their programming careers.
So to answer your question: a degree is a great first step to get you through the door, and throughout your career will keep the number of available positions greater for you than for me (unless I eventually do go back & get a degree, too). However, it's the experience you pick up in the working world that will decide how stable your employment is, how much you earn, etc. Frankly my best possible advice is: when you move from one job to the next, always stay on good terms with the people you left behind. They'll make great references later. I have unfortunately lost contact with some of the best references I'll ever have, and it's hurt me over the years more times than I can count.
Best of luck when you graduate, or if you take an internship before then, or whatever path you choose. May CowboyNeal never have to put a boot to your head.
Backing up the one advising you to step down off the high-horse:
According to Dictionary.com's definition of the word, the most dominant spelling since ca. 1995 has been 'email', but 'e-mail', 'Email' and 'E-mail' are acceptable alternatives.
Interestingly, according to the text of the definition, the word 'email' has another definition dating back to the 15th century, 'meaning embossed or [perhaps] arranged in a net or open work'. It also has a meaning in modern French, 'a hard enamel obtained by heating special paints in a furnace'. I realize that doesn't add anything to this conversation, but I, for one, found it interesting (and welcome our new French overlords, of course).
For the occasional man who can perform this act of creation alone and without financial support, that's great! But if outside funding is needed, then for basic research it should come from a public source, not a private with-strings-attached source.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I love hearing about government-industry technology transfer programs because of this, as long as the patents on inventions and discoveries paid for with public money are held in the public domain.
You're correct, I was referring to Earth-Moon L2, not Sun-Earth L2. Sorry about the confusion.
I can see why Earth-Sun L2, L4, and L5 would be ideal for comm- at any of them not only is the Earth in more-or-less the same spot, but also half the glove is visible at any given time. Not necessarily the same half, but you get the point...
Government-funded researchers invented the calculus
Um... Isaac Newton invented calculus when he was still a student at Trinity College. The school was on break for two years as a result of disease sweeping the area, and having little else to do, he spent his idle time thinking very productively.
There was no government funding involved in his inventing calculus, sorry. He invented it out of curiosity, not because he was paid to do so.
The Lagrange points and Earth-trailing orbit are both becoming popular for space telescopes because they provide very good observing environments compared to LEO.
L2 is a particularly good location for radio telescopes, as the moon shields anything in that position from radio-wavelength signals from Earth. The downside of course is that to report the data back, a repeater is needed, either in polar lunar orbit (so that it forms a halo around the moon) or in a halo orbit around L2. The telescope itself, as long as it sits in L2, can't see earth-bound transceivers unless it uses a ridiculously low wave-length (waves long enough to go around the moon, essentially)-- and a wavelength that long means incredibly slow transmissions. Not exactly a great solution.
For the most part I agree with you, I haven't seen any convincing arguments for repair over replacement either, except in extreme cases such as the fix to Hubble's mirror problem soon after it was launched. I have one question (because I'm not informed on NASA's accounting, not because I'm trying to raise any hackles or anything): Does NASA account for single-use expenditures in shuttle launches, such as fuel, labor, etc? Or are all shuttle expenses budgeted separate from the missions they undertake?
The problem with putting a telescope (or any other facility, for that matter) at L2, or any of the other Lagrange points, is that their location puts them out of the orbits reachable by the Shuttle for repair purposes. All maintenance would have to be done robotically, and considering the delta-V to return any robotic craft to LEO, it's likely that the service robots would be single-use only.
For those not space-science oriented, the Lagrange points (L1 through L5) are points in space around any two orbiting bodies where their gravity exactly (or nearly so) cancels out; as a result, other objects can be left in stable position at those points. It's even possible to put an object in orbit around a Lagrange point, even though there be no mass there. These are referred to halo orbits. SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory is in such an orbit around L1, the postion directly between the Earth and Moon. More information is available online (the last link is a PDF, sorry).
Wonderful story, and a great way to blow off work for fifteen minutes-- many thanks!
For a non-synaesthete, the author does a wonderful job of presenting the senses. I've read that many synaesthetes have their senses of taste, smell and touch (which is actually several senses-- temperature, pressure, texture, etc), involved. I've always been a little jealous of those people, as the only senses I get crossed regularly are vision and hearing, and even those aren't 100% dependable. The things I see & hear (that others do vice-versa, I guess) are consistent, but not persistent, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
You're absolutely right about calling B# & C the same thing-- I don't know what the heck I was thinking about. This just goes to show how out of practice I am at playing (and reading!) music for my viola.
Anyway, I'm interested in your challenge, but I don't understand what you mean by 'You have to tell me which version each recording represents'. As you pointed out, C and B# are the same thing. As far as finger position, I don't really care if it's fourth-finger in 1st position or 1st finger in 3rd position, it's still the same note with the same color and shape. No, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I don't claim to have perfect pitch-- or anywhere near it, for that matter, which is why I never went beyond high school orchestra.
As much as I love Vivaldi's Four Seasons, particularly the Presto from Summer, I can't really agree that the compositions you mention are visual at all. Beethoven's Egmont Overture has moments where it's extremely visual, but not those two.
Interestingly, one bit of music that always has the same visual dynamics for me isn't classical at all. It's Genesis' The Brazillian (the last track on Invisible Touch). I've tried to paint it and/or draw it a few times, but lack the talent to do so properly; the only description I can give of it is that it has the dynamics of a water show with the speed and versatility of a laser-light show. Listen to it some time when you have a spare three minutes (about all the time it takes to play it). There are certain auditory cues in the track that I actually see-- a synthetic drum playing a sound that I can only describe as looking like Edgerton's frozen milk-drop photograph, for instance (except not frozen in this case, just slow-motioned).
I have no ability to prove you wrong in your challenge that I see sounds. You have no way to prove me wrong when I assert that you see the color blue the same way I see the color red. So, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
I'm a synaesthete myself, which is why I never tried any of the hallucinogenics-- I was always afraid I'd lose that wonderful crossing of the senses that I so enjoy.
I'm fortunate that my case is very mild; if it hadn't been for a number of conversations in early adolescence where I tried to describe something using adjectives that made perfect sense to me but not to others, I would never have known I'm different. In high school orchestra, most of the other kids could understand when I'd describe the sound of a viola as warm, or a piccolo as cold... but they'd have no idea what I meant when I started describing the grain of the viola sound (looks a lot like highly-polished oak under a tungsten lamp), or the brilliant white light of a b# played in second position on a violin's E string.
I read years ago in the Washington Post about a case of a fellow who was much more severely affected than I. Instead of seeing the sounds overlayed on the 'normal' visual field, and being able to easily distinguish what was seen with the eyes vs what was seen through hearing, his senses were so crosswired that this was no longer possible. The anecdote given in the story was that he stopped to buy something from a street vendor (ice cream, I think). But when the vendor spoke, his voice looked to the synaesthete like charcoal bricks falling out of the guy's mouth. The article said he hadn't been able to eat ice cream (or whatever the food was) since then. Like I said, I'm fortunate. My symptoms are thoroughly enjoyable & have never presented problems like that.
Standard flourescents are not pure white. Pure white includes the entire spectra from red through violet. If you break a flourescent down through a spectrograph, you'll see entire missing bands. There are some more expensive flourescents that do give off the entire spectrum. These are usually used in rooms where full-spectrum light is required, such as art museums, or for photographing a room that is normally lit by cheaper flourescents.