It just came over the news that the cops are having trouble getting cars to move out of their way because of their loud boom-boom-boom sound systems obscuring the siren.
Solution: Powerful Sub-Woofer mounted on cop-car... shakes the car in front of them ;-)
...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
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| 1962 | Leftist weenie bed wetter Democrats are the scourge of the earth
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My first valve amp was connected to a 15 inch loudspeaker. Probably just a couple of 6V6s push-pull with a 250-0-250 mains transformer. Got turned down really quickly because it would "disturb the neighbours" enjoying their Saturday afternoon in the garden :-)
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"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
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I've always wanted one of those... send it straight up their exhaust pipe ;-)
We have so many "low riders" going boom-boom-boom around here. I guess I'll now build my own "countermeasure" ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
It\'s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.
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Sorry Jim. I don't think you can patent the High School Diploma.... :(
Just be THANKFUL you're old enough not to have to grow up with this crap. Can you imagine the conversations 20 years from now:?
Oh look honey, they're playing "our song".... [Insert P-diddy, fitty-cent, Jay-Z, or any of several hundred other zero-talent "performers"] It is truly horrifying!!
I'm of the age of Elvis, and I ain't no prude... I still like my rock 'n' roll ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
It\'s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.
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PLEEEEASE don't tell me you're the type that memorizes entire movie dialogs..!! :) But to your point, the difference is "Why Don't We Do It In The Road" is actually a clever and funny comeback.
Unlike any of the following: -
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At least when Jim (and the rest of us over 40) grew up with Rock & Roll, the musicians were still using INSTRUMENTS. Today it's nothing but a drum track as some toothless wonder chompin on a microphone. Toothless no doubt, from all the crystal meth?
But I guess that explains all the bling and "grillz"
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I guess I'm saying, if some low-rider is playing Steely Dan, or CCR, or even Elvis through his two 15" woofers where the backseat once was, I could probably live with that.??
It was shown on the news with some "victims" interviewed, scared them and got their attention pronto. The cops interviewed liked it, and didn't mention any problem with it.
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...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
It\'s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.
Due to excessive spam, gmail, googlegroups, UAR, and AIOE blocked!
That's why I like Sirius radio in the car... a channel each, for '50's, '60's, the "golden age", Elvis, etc.
I'm considering getting a Sirius radio for the house, returning to my youth to design and build my own amplifiers and speaker enclosures ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
It\'s what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.
Due to excessive spam, gmail, googlegroups, UAR, and AIOE blocked!
Had we stayed at the old house I was going to make the basement of the game room into an enclosure ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
Liberalism is a persistent vegetative state
It is hard to make a low frequency very directional. At several KHz, the speaker can be made to direct the sound at the car in question. The hood of a police car is about 6 feet wide so a radiating structure a few wave lengths wide can be made. Using stored compressed air, power levels of several tens of KW should be easy to manage.
Imagine calk on a blackboard are ear splitting levels and you will have a good idea of the sort of sound I am thinking of.
And now - morphing to something truly off-topic, but just as annoying.
=2E..speaking of chalk on a blackboard - here's some more "noise":
I briefly heard a discussion on Public Radio yesterday about how texting on a cell phone has no hope of supplanting proper written language anytime soon. Nevermind that kids these days drop vowels like hot potatoes (note, I spelled "potatoes" correctly, in deference to Dan Quayle - but I digress..)
The absurd justification for this was that a similar advance in technology (namely, the telegraph) did not obliterate writing overnight. Are you kidding me??!! The telegraph?!!
There are of course many parallels to be drawn, and at first glance, might even seem convincing. But the argument completely fails to consider that nearly everyone has a cell phone (and Internet) these days. That was not true for the Telegraph.!!!! It's a MAJOR flaw in the argument.
But that doesn't stop this same argument from being resuccitated when the topic of English as a Second Language (ESL) comes up. With prior mass-invasions (er, I mean "immigrations") -- folks had picked up English within the first generation. (Pretty impressive actually.) But here again, did we have dedicated Spanish television stations back then catering to foreign speakers? (indeed, Spanish TV networks!?) Or a billion signs in the Wal-Marts of the world in Spanish. No. You either learned to speak English or you were at a decided disadvantage.
And don't even get me started about "Para Espanol, marque en el dos". ("Press 2 for Spanish", in case you didn't catch that....)
How can one possibly make the argument that speaking english will be adopted within the first generation today when there is absolutely no reason to even try, and no penalty (and unfortunately in some communities, no benefit) either way. You can function quite nicely in the status quo.
Personally, I feel if you can't bother to learn the language, pay your taxes, and/or elevate yourself off public welfare, then just go home. The cashier at Office Depot today was "offended" that I could not understand her pidgeon engrish. Hey lady. I grew up here. Go sell pens and paper wherever the hell you come from. You should have seen how she counted my change back to me....
Why is everything so screwed up? I'm not even sure you could purposly engineer society to be this screwed up?
A loudspeaker has some rather significant directionality at only 1 wavelength tall and wide.
If it is on or close to a hard floor or hard ground or hard surface, a loudspeaker arrays itself with its reflection and has that directionality at 1 wavelength wide, 1/2 wavelength tall.
Even at 1/2 wavelength wide (and on/near a hard floor being only 1/4 wavelength tall), the directionality is a little significant.
Also consider what frequencies bass really is:
I have quite a bit of experience with sound reinforcement loudspeakers, even designing quite a few and building some of them. When a loudspeaker actually achieves frequency response -3 dB at 50 Hz, the usual impression is "impressively deep bass response".
People like to say that 30 Hz matters because moving the 31.5/32 Hz control on a 1/3 octave equalizer has audible effect. However, the audible effect remains even when a sharp highpass filter around 45 or even
50 Hz is in place.
When I hear bass from neighbors in my apartment building, it is usually concentrated around 75-80 Hz (floor-to-ceiling resonance at 8 feet), or higher in frequency than that.
I have heard fairly good bass sound from loudspeakers putting out little below 100 Hz. I even felt enough drum impacts from loudspeakers that put out little below 100 Hz.
I have put 60 Hz AC from stepdown transformers into enough loudspeakers. I see the waveform on a scope, and hear how it sounds so different from using 60 Hz from a sinewave generator. It sounds to me that much of what is heard when a loudspeaker is connected to a stepdown transformer (fed by a 60 Hz power line) is in harmonics, especially the 3rd (180 Hz).
Wavelength of 180 Hz sound in air is about 2 meters. 180 Hz is almost "lower midrange", but still very good at shaking things and people.
But this bling thing. There might actually be an opportunity here. Maybe someone can engineer a better set of "grillz" - which are these little bar-type jewelery devices you wear on your teeth (I SWEAR I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP!)
Maybe one that can scroll an LED message across it when you smile? It could be programmable (you could even leave out the vowels since kids don't use them anyway). I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with his own listing of potential canned messages.
- Remember: No cheating by researching popular hip-hop/rap song lyrics.
I moved this up from the bottom because I am about to point out how it could be a lot worse if engineered to be bad.
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When the movable type was invented there was a great change in the language. Spellings became much more regular. Hand written documents before that contained many very creative spellings that are now gone.
Texting is doing the same sort of thing to the language. It is not, however destroying the ability to communicate as you seem to think it may be. Various limitations on the actual freedom of speech would do more harm.
To get a feel for what I am thinking of, imagine a country with only one group in control of its entire mass media in all of its forms. Such a place would have a hard time becoming or remaining a democracy. The USSR fell partly because (or at least the timing was set by) the government lost control over some forms of media.
The printing press and the typewriter are a lot more like texting than the telegraph. You can take some comfort in the fact that we did not devolve back to the cave when they showed up. Good handwriting is a lot less important today.
If you really want to imagine things that would mess stuff up consider things that control the content of the message and not the form. I think that the very american tendency to use euphemisms and sometimes dysphemisms to hide the meaning of a phrase from the listener are a greater risk to society than texting. Calling "retarded" children "special" has made it so that we can't call a kid special anymore without implying that you mean retarded.
Nearly everyone has access to a typewriter. It works better for the comparison.
[....] If you really want to engineer a more screwed up situation than we have today it is fairly easy to imagine how:
First you need to work against the idea that we all share common interest in the nation or society. You need to undermine everything that is part of the "commons". Let things like the roads decay and turn them over to private interests who can charge per use. For best results you want the private owners to be very far removed from the situation. Since we can't sell them off to the martians, we would have to pick some folks on the far side of the world who don't share in our culture and certainly not our language.
Those parts of the society that people feel that they can count on when things go bad would be the next place to attack. You want to ensure that people like the Red Cross are seen as massively corrupt and that government agencies like the FBI and FEMA are staffed with the incompetent and the corrupt. In a nation like the US where a major part of the population believes in a religion with leaders that you can access and corrupt, you can also corrupt this leadership. This would also work in the Arab nations but not so well in Europe since they don't seem to believe as strongly.
While you are removing these things that give people security, you can do a couple of things to help set neighbor upon neighbor.
(1) You need to find a part of the population that is about 10% and is spread around enough that they are noticed but not so big that they can defend themselves. This sector has to be made the scapegoat for all that is wrong. Think of the Jews in Germany for an extreme example. You also need to provide the "we" part of the "we vs they" for this to work well. Some good chest thumping jingoism would work for this.
(2) To really lube the skid into chaos, you also want a bunch of armed thugs in opposing groups. Rome did this by turning its armies into mercenary groups of foreign nationals fighting for money not for country. These armies eventually came back "home" and helped to overthrow the country. Creating an armed force that is a standing army with a sense of being "the other" would be a good way towards repeating this. To do this, you need a war someplace for them to fight in, so you can justify the formation of this army but you have to make sure that the enemy isn't real enough to actually kill off your band of fighters. Some little country in Africa could serve as the "enemy".
Societies in democratic countries are hard to mess up so you would also like to remove the democracy from the situation before you make the attack on the society. Democracies are hard to destroy by direct attack but there are ways to weaken and subvert them:
(1) You want to make people lose confidence in the democratic process and make them believe that it is a rigged game. Most democracies depend on a recorded vote and not a public outcry. In those, attacking the voting process and making it appear non-obvious and corrupt would be a good way to undermine the confidence. Getting a pinball game maker to make the voting machines would be one way to do this. Another slightly less effective way would be to select a person or company with a stated bias to make the voting machines. If you could find a biased pinball maker, you'd be in great shape on this.
(2) As much as possible, you want to move the functions and powers of the government out of the hands of the elected and into the hands of people who are not accountable to the voters. You want this group of people who gain this control to be be fairly small. Setting up or selecting corporations for this purpose, as has happened in Russia, is a good way to cripple a democracy. Ideally, the heads of these corporations should be somehow insulated. It is not as effective if it is spread among a large number of people who live in the society because they will tend to act too much like the average voters because they have much in common with them.
(3) What is often referred to as "the middle class" (but isn't under the old definition) are the folks that create and maintain democracies. These are the people who are not the powerful and rich nor the poor. They don't feel like they have been dealt four aces and are thus willing to call a "misdeal" and also have enough time and security to do something about it. The poor are too busy getting enough to eat to engage in politics. To the degree that you have the power to do it, you want to reduce the size of this fraction of society and drive them towards inaction. Pushing them down towards poverty is the best way to reduce their numbers. Inaction can be partly gained by destroying any organizations that they may belong to, that give them some leverage over the rich. The task is the eliminate the jobs that pay well enough to grant the time to engage in politics so that only those with the wealth have this ability.
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