DrBob

@DrBob@lemmy.ca

Recovering academic now in public safety. You’ll find me kibitzing on brains (my academic expertise) to critical infrastructure and resilience (current worklife). Also hockey, games, music just because.

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DrBob, (edited )

It is not allowed. See Tom Waits vs. Frito Lay. Vocal timbre is considered to part of a celebrities’ “likeness” and reproducing it to imply endorsement will get you landed in court. ScarJo is a huge Tom Waits fan so she knows the story.

DrBob, (edited )

Lol. You should read the reviews of the album. They are decidedly …mixed. Everyone seems to agree that it wasn’t your typical Hollywood vanity project - she took it seriously as an artistic endeavour.

That having been said her singing voice is freakishly low and the mixing is muddy and obscuring. It shows something that can’t be immediately dismissed, but the poor execution doesn’t allow you to grasp exactly what that spark might be.

It’s worth listening to once.

Eta: Town With No Cheer youtube.com/watch?v=qsDaaVIvXig

DrBob,

It seems credible to me. 🤔

DrBob,

Milgram was rock solid. Zimbardo was a hack.

DrBob,

Stanley Milgram. He was also responsible for the “Small World” hypothesis that yielded six degrees of separation.

DrBob,

Laughs in Edmonton.

DrBob,

Laughs in Edmonton.

DrBob,

In The Big Lebowski there’s a scene where the Dude is at Jackie Treehorn’s place and uses an old detective trick. He rubs a pencil on a pad of paper to see what was written on the last sheet. Instead of a name or number he gets a sketch of a naked man with a huge hardon.

DrBob,

Boredom? Mnemonic?

DrBob,

I am a notary public. I had no idea I wielded such power!

It’s just a work thing where there always needs to be one around to notarize documents in an emergency so we have lots of them. I also get to administer oaths when people join the service.

DrBob,

Yeah but I’d have to talk to them. I’m not sure it’s worth the $20 or whatever.

DrBob,

I’ve never charged. Lol. I became a notary because of work and 90% of my stamps are for my employer. I do the odd immigration or mortgage work for my colleagues for free/beers.

DrBob,

No. But it’s getting there. In business continuity we used to be advised to keep a POTS (plain old telephone service) line around because it would the last service to go down and the first one to come up. About a year ago we were advised that we shouldn’t bother. The copper lines convert to VOIP at a switch station.

DrBob,

Strangely they both look better.

DrBob,

Because checkout isn’t until 11. It takes time to prep a room between guests. Depending on occupancy and staffing levels you may be able to get in earlier.

DrBob,

And used ironically for transatlantic travel.

DrBob,

Structural use means load bearing. So no.

DrBob,

Furring strips and drywall don’t count as load bearing. Structural means that it carries the weight of the overlying structure. Basically if the building falls down if that element is missing, it’s structural. So staircases for instance are almost never structural. Many interior walls are not load bearing so they can get knocked down without consequence. You can also split a room by building a wall that won’t be load bearing.

Is a sound level of 105 decibels for a few seconds enough to rupture a person's eardrum?

In 2022, a Texas family filed a lawsuit against Apple for damaging their son’s hearing after an Amber Alert went off while he was wearing Airpods. According to Google, the maximum volume of phone headphones is around 105 decibels. The family are claiming that the son now requires hearing aids after his eardrum ruptured....

DrBob, (edited )

eta: sorry - replied to wrong comment.

Sound pressure falls off as a function of the square of the distance. So if that jackhammer is 3 m away you are only receiving 11% of the sound energy that the operator is.

DrBob,

Sound pressure falls off as a function of the square of the distance. So if that jackhammer is 3 m away you are only receiving 11% of the sound energy that the operator is.

DrBob,

They absolutely do. We had a nesting pair in a neighbors tree a few years ago. The crows terrorized the park. They hunted baby rabbits, preyed on songbird nests, scooped ducklings out of the pond and so on. They would also grab roadkill and eat it on roofs so you’d be sitting on the patio and the occasional rabbit or squirrel part would come raining down. I used to have a live and let live attitude but not that after that summer. I won’t let them nest around us anymore.

DrBob,

Thanks fellow traveller for punching holes in computational stupidity. Everything you said is true but I also want to point out that the brain is an analog system so the information in a neuron is infinite relative to a digital system (cf: digitizing analog recordings). As I tell my students if you are looking for a binary event to start modeling, look to individual ions moving across the membrane.

DrBob,

It’s an analogy. There is actually an academic joke about the point you are making.

A mathematician and an engineer are sitting at a table drinking when a very beautiful woman walks in and sits down at the bar.

The mathematician sighs. “I’d like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. There’ll always be some finite distance between us.”

The engineer gets up and starts walking. “Ah, well, I figure I can get close enough for all practical purposes.”

The point of the analogy is not that one can’t get close enough so that the ear can’t detect a difference, it’s that in theory analog carries infinite information. It’s true that vinyl recordings are not perfect analog systems because of physical limitations in the cutting process. It’s also true for magnetic tape etc. But don’t mistake the metaphor for the idea.

Ionic movement across membranes, especially at the scale we are talking about, and the density of channels in the system is much closer to an ideal system. How much of that fidelity can you lose before it’s not your consciousness?

DrBob,

Measure differences in what? We can’t ask *c. elegans * about it’s state of mind let alone consciousness. There are several issues here; a philosophical issue here about what you are modeling (e.g. mind, consciousness or something else), a biological issue with what physical parameters and states you need to capture to produce that model, and how you would propose to test the fidelity of that model against the original organism. The scope of these issues is well outside a reply chain in Lemmy.

DrBob,

I am GenX so I can speak from my personal experience, which I realize is not universal.

I actually bought “Rappers Delight” on a 45 rpm single the year it was released. But it’s also true that Blondie’s “Rapture” was the first rapping song I heard on the radio. I would have been 13 at the time and rap was far from a mainstream musical style.

Looking back now there certainly were specific individuals of GenX and Jones who had access to rap, but it was certainly not available to me as a suburban kid in Canada. Even that Sugarhill Gang single was hard to find because “rap” as a concept didn’t really exist at that point. I am trying to find a recording of the Extras song “Hip Hop Hip Hip” as an example but it’s so obscure neither YouTube nor my streaming service seem to have it available. It would be unrecognizable to you as hip hop because nobody knew what hip hop was then. People were experimenting broadly and some of those experiments are now considered part of the movement. But we didn’t know that then. Another example that stands out for me was “White Lines” by Grandmaster Flash. It was largely spoken word and I would have identified it as funk then. Now I guess I don’t know.

“Straight Outta Compton” came out when I was in university. I really liked it because of the anger. The raw emotion felt like the best of the punk movement from 15 years before.

So yeah I could have been clearer. The early seeds of what we now consider “rap” were around when I was young. But I would not have called it a popular genre in my circles, or even mainstream. I don’t remember rap shows in the clubs (and I spent a lot of time there in my teens and twenties).

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