U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden held a #Jan6 “rioter” in #CriminalContempt for his conduct during trial after he criticized the judge & the court system during a Tues #hearing.
McFadden, a Trump appointee who has been critical of the government’s approach in some of the Jan. 6 cases that he’s presided over, sentenced the man to 5 months in prison Tues – before jury deliberations in the trial even began.
An adult who becomes deaf cannot regain their hearing since the inner ear's sensory cells, once damaged, don't regenerate. In recent research, with partial funding from the National Institutes of Health and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS), USC Stem Cell re
Musical tuning systems is the subject where you get mad at irrational numbers. Nothing works perfectly - and it's not your fault: it's math's fault. It's all about pushing around lumps in the carpet.
An 'octave' is the chord where the high note vibrates 2 times as fast as the low note. In a 'perfect fifth' it vibrates 3/2 times as fast. In a 'perfect fourth' it vibrates 4/3 as fast. In a 'major third' it vibrates 5/4 as fast. Our ears love these simple fractions.
But if you go up 4 perfect fifths, it's not quite the same as going up 2 octaves and a major third, since
3/2 × 3/2 × 3/2 × 3/2 = 81/16
is not quite
2 × 2 × 5/4 = 5 = 80/16
AARGH! 😠
The difference between these is called the 'syntonic comma'. Well, actually the ratio
81/80 = 1.0125
is called the syntonic comma. Listen to two notes with this frequency ratio:
You can hear they aren't in tune, and it probably sounds annoying. This is why we can't have nice things.
Another problem is that if you go up 7 octaves it's almost but not quite 12 perfect fifths, since
2⁷ = 128
is not
(3/2)¹² = 129.746337890625
The ratio of these is called the 'Pythagorean comma':
531441/524288 = 1.0136432647705078125
This is why a 12-tone scale with all the notes equally spaced can't have perfect fifths. But for vocal music, the syntonic comma is more urgent problem, since it involves simpler fractions. It shows up in lots of different ways: two people can sing two different parts starting in tune, each singing beautifully, and wind up out of tune.
Most likely the ear likes notes in simple frequency ratios because it interprets them as harmonics of a "dirty" periodic sounds whose fundamental is not heard because it is too low or suppressed. For example, the 4:5 chord is the 4th and 5th harmonics of a much lower note.
Many physical processes generate "dirty" periodic or quasi-periodic sounds, so detecting patterns of harmonics has obvious survival value in interpreting the sound signal that is heard. 🧵> #Hearing#Music
If you haven't read this thread about #trump's first #hearing in the #Jan6 case w/ #Judge#Chutkan today (Friday) — by the always great @GottaLaff — then you're missing out. It may be the best she's ever done. (At least since I've been following her.) Lots of quotes, easy to follow (it's her trademark!) and sourced throughout. Don't miss this!
So, if there are really no good #a11y#accessible options for #HearingAids for #DeafBlind people, none that have fully accessible #apps or #hearing options specific to the community’s unique needs, why doesn’t someone or a group from the community create one? Any #entrepreneurs out there? Folks could probably make a good deal of $$ out of this…
Wireless earbuds, such as AirPods and Galaxy Buds 2, can actually help you hear conversations better with Ambient Sound
Apple’s wireless earbuds are routinely praised for their natural-sounding transparency mode, and for good reason. But did you know you can customise the level of ambient noise that transparency mode lets through? And if that’s not enough, there’s a separate “ ...continues
New paper out: Georgia and Chih-Ting investigated the functional lateralization of auditory cortex. They built a bilateral microscope to simultaneously image both hemispheres in the same mouse. They find that the higher-order A2 shows functional lateralization and that A2 has lower and asymmetric hemispheric functional connections. Moreover, a lack of sound experiences prevents the development of asymmetric functional connectivity.
If your electronic whatever has batteries that leak, please don’t blindly toss into the trash. Remove the batteries, clean the contacts, put new batteries in. Recycle old batteries when possible. Chances are, your device has many more years of life. We donated an expensive kit for the #hearing#impaired for phone, doorbell and other things, which my mom had used. 3 AAA batteries leaked a little and they through it all in the garbage. We retrieved it and will donate elsewhere. #notphp
What's the fascination with noise-cancelling headphones? The last thing I want when wearing #headphones is to completely block out the real world. That sounds really dangerous; how will you hear if someone's breaking into your house or sneaking up behind you to slit your throat?
Maybe it's the symptom of living in #SouthAfrica with its high #crime (and home invasion in particular) rates. Or maybe it's another symptom of my tunnel vision, where I can't see people approaching me from the side anyway, and therefore have to rely on environmental sounds more than the average person. Maybe it's a bit of both, but cancelling out all background noise just feels like a really bad idea to me.
I wear headphones often, but when I do, I make a point of sliding one of them slightly off my ear, specifically so I still CAN hear what's going on around me.
Sorry if you routinely wear noise-cancelling headphones and I've now made you paranoid about someone sneaking up behind you and slitting your throat! XD #SorryNotSorry
1/20 There's something I haven't seen discussed online a lot. But it affects a lot of people, in negative ways that are not immediately obvious to the people around them.
I'm describing this to ask you to think about it a little, and, I hope, perhaps treat the affected with a little more #empathy once you understand.
I have to tell my own story to get into this, but it'll be short.
I did not know this was a thing. Corporations effectively disabling your phone or your washing machine to force you to buy a new one is bad enough. Doing the same with your ears is disgusting. Especially if you didn't advise that this would happen before installation, and marketed it as "forever". Yet another "How do these people sleep at night?" moment.
Decoding Deafness: USC Scientists Tune Into Hearing Regeneration (scitechdaily.com)
An adult who becomes deaf cannot regain their hearing since the inner ear's sensory cells, once damaged, don't regenerate. In recent research, with partial funding from the National Institutes of Health and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS), USC Stem Cell re
Hearing Aids May Lower Risk of Cognitive Decline and Dementia (www.scientificamerican.com)
As few as 15 percent of people who would benefit from hearing aids use them