Now propagating on a DNS near you
(scratch in progress)
I broke my own “follow 128 people” rule
…
Only a matter of time before I scratch this account
If you’ve been to a crowded airport, sporting event, or even a kid’s birthday party lately, a little peace and quiet might sound like the perfect thing to help you kick back and relax. Just don’t let things get too quiet, or you might drive yourself a wee bit insane: the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota can mute 99.99% of all sound, but visiting the silent oasis isn’t as calming as you might expect.
The room holds the current Guinness World Record as the quietest place on the planet, and companies from all over the world seek out its unique acoustic properties. The walls of the chamber are lined with sound-absorbing baffles that can capture noise and mute it in an instant. This allows companies — both Whirlpool and Harley-Davidson have visited — to test just how noisy their products are without the risk of outside interference.
But while the super-silent oasis is a great testbed for various products, it holds a darker side: silence, it turns out, can put a great strain on the human brain. Researchers at NASA test the room’s unique acoustic capabilities on humans rather than hardware. The noiselessness is used to simulate the silence of space — an environment astronauts would be well served to grow accustomed to.
What they’ve found is that when all outside noise is removed from an enclosure, human hearing will do its best to find something to listen to. In a room where almost 100% of sound is muted, people begin to hear things like their own heartbeat at a greatly amplified volume. As the minutes tick by in absolute quiet, the human mind begins to lose its grip, causing test subjects to hallucinate.
NASA then monitors how the would-be space explorers react, and whether they can get past the very obvious awkwardness of seeing or hearing things that aren’t actually there. According to lab officials, the longest anyone has lasted is 45 minutes before being allowed to hear the sweet sounds of planet Earth once again.
In the end, the chamber has proven a valuable scientific tool, just don’t plan on renting it for some peace and quiet — it may do more harm than good.
(via wigmund)
I finally have a reason to practice with my tablet
Notable things I learned today:
- “hanbok handstand” returns only one result on Google
Notable things I didn’t learn today:
- Bezier curves will scale. Come on, boss, just agree with me and let me code
Wait
April Fools is over
I can post again now
…right?
Three shelves of Bibles. Three shelves of the exact same book with different color packaging.
Two shelves of Science books, and nearly half of them are Complete Idiot’s Guides to whatever science they’re about.
One shelf for all of Astronomy and Physics.
Not quite one shelf of Philosophy.
And what about Darwin’s Origin of Species? Out of stock.
If you don’t understand the problem with this, then you are the problem.
This.
Best way to help change this is to buy more science-oriented literature, that will encourage more publishers to print books in those fields and help prompt bookstores to give them more space on the shelves.
Encourage scientific literacy!
To Whom It May Concern, please file this response under “The Problem Isn’t what you think it is”
First, please reference that all these shelves combined only take up a smaller fraction of the store than the kids section. Not to mention all the “Adult” fictions, or Science Fiction. There are more works fantasizing about having sex with aliens around distant stars than books on those stars.
Second, Origin of Species - out of copyright. Anything you would buy would probably have been originally typeset around… 1915s? Perhaps with a more modern forward. There’s no money in it.
Third, Interestingly, the Bible has exactly the same issue, with one caveat - out of copyright, but also the original wasn’t in English. Even original English translations, Most notably the King James Version authorized 1611, with their “archaic*” language, are out of copyright. Yet people buy Bibles, and Publishers create new translations of the Bible, which they can have a copyright of. Add to that targeted variations - plainly visible in your photo… That’s competition. That’s American publishing competing for American Dollars.
Fourth, it would have been great to see how much shelf space the combination of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism - but those probably aren’t the religions your regular readers are rebelling against, are they?**
(Wig, getting to a specific response)
In my last visit to the local Barnes and Nobel location, which is obviously not the one featured above, there were similar ratios of shelf space to those given. There were also similar counts of unique titles; a much better comparison of what is being published versus what is being bought.
Bookstores are businesses. Publishing is business. I agree, a higher level of Scientific Literacy would be great. However, if it comes to where money should go, I’m not entirely sure upping publisher’s profits would be the best direction to push.
~
* Archaic, yet were one of the stabilizing forces in the English Language for hundreds of years.
** Please note the different definitions of “rebelling” and “reacting”. I hope I have chosen the appropriate word.
(via wigmund)
dad just said “there should be a netflix for books”
five minutes later he shouted “THE LIBRARY”