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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • That’s one of the fundamental disagreements between Catholics and Protestants.

    A Catholic would argue that veneration of saints isn’t worship, it’s showing respect for someone who exemplified Christian ideals, or died as a martyr. Canonization is basically the religious version of the Medal of Honor.

    A Protestant would argue that the distinction between veneration and worship is arbitrary, and veneration of a saint essentially amounts to idolatry anyway.


  • Its not that they don’t have pitch, per se, it’s that the nature of the sound they produce makes the concept of “pitch” kind of meaningless.

    Except for a pure sine wave, every tone is going to have multiple harmonics over the fundamental which is what actually gives an instrument, even the human voice, its timbre.

    Percussion instruments like cymbals and the snare drum create broad-spectrum noise. There’s essentially so many frequencies that it’s difficult for our brains to nail it down the fundamental pitch. It’s also what helps us hear them over the rest of the ensemble.

    Drums in general produce very short pulses of sound, which also makes it harder for the brain to tell what pitch it is. In harmonic analysis, any very short sound is actually broad-spectrum because it takes a ton of harmonics to produce a single sharp spike with rapid decay.

    I highly recommend downloading a spectrum analyzer app on your phone to get an intuition for this. If you’re on Android, I recommend Spectroid.

    Just run it and watch the screen while you make different sounds, approach various sound sources, play music, or just talk or sing. If you can whistle, that also produces an interesting result. You can actually see the frequency of the power grid in the harmonics produced by electric motors and transformer coils which is personally really fucking cool.












  • It is being used to develop a quantum compass – an instrument that will exploit the behaviour of subatomic matter in order to develop devices that can accurately pinpoint their locations no matter where they are placed,

    […]

    The aim of the Imperial College project […] is to create a device that is not only accurate in fixing its position, but also does not rely on receiving external signals.

    These statements imply the device can know exactly where it is in space just by measuring some purely internal quantum effect, which conflicts with the principles of Lorentz invariance and relativity.

    Both are constructed around the same idea that there’s nothing special in the laws of physics that changes with where you are or how fast you’re going. That observation is what led the conclusion that the speed of light is the same in every reference frame, and to Einstein developing the theory of relativity.

    In reality, the device needs an external signal to learn its initial position. And it’s unlikely to be perfectly accurate so it may still need periodic updates, just hopefully a lot less frequently.

    The London Underground is actually kind of a dumb use-case because it’s fixed infrastructure. You can just have something like RFID tags around the track that the train reads as it goes by. And there’s going to be sensors in the track that report trains’ presence to a central control room. It’s just a good setting to test the device.

    What it’s really potentially quite useful for is nuclear submarines since they can stay underwater pretty much as long as their food supplies last, and knowing their position without using sonar or being able to receive GPS signals is quite important for navigation and obstacle avoidance. But the author was probably told to downplay potential military applications.


  • It’s a troll toll. It’ll get you a software engineering job with a roman numeral in the title at a company you’ve actually heard of. But if you’re almost done then there’s no reason not to stick with it.

    The early years of my career were quite a slog, having taught myself to program. I started out on freelancing websites, competing with devs from the third world who worked for pennies a day. I lucked into my first salaried job, got hired through my cousin.

    I will say, having some theory knowledge does come in handy occasionally. You might never have to write your own hashtable, but being able to understand the implementation of the structures you’re using helps a lot to make informed decisions about how you organize and access data, especially when you’re trying to optimize for performance or memory usage.

    One piece of unsolicited advice you might have heard before is to not discount the power of networking. The best written cover letter in the world can’t hold a candle to knowing someone who can put in a good word. Make friends with your professors and classmates, you never know who might think to look you up one day when their company is hiring. My old boss still offers me a job occasionally, more than five years later.