DSD

On Jan­u­ary 13, 2008, the won­der­ful web­comic xkcd posted this car­toon.

Within hours, the comic ren­dered itself spec­tac­u­larly inac­cu­rate. Rec­og­niz­ing that it’s impor­tant that the pub­lic prop­erly under­stand the dan­gers of this mod­ern world, we pro­vide here some more recent research. Con­tinue reading…

This is the story of how Honda engi­neers screwed up a big expen­sive project with a sim­ple arith­metic mis­take, tried to fudge their result with sound edit­ing soft­ware, and con­grat­u­lated them­selves for being totally awesome.

When I was a kid, my fam­ily used to drive up to The Pin­ery in Ontario, a beau­ti­ful park by Lake Huron. Very scenic. My favorite part, though, was a stretch of road a half-hour out­side of the park. To dis­cour­age reck­less Cana­di­ans from bar­rel­ing past the houses and barns, the local gov­ern­ment carved five sets of grooves in the road before every stop sign. Drive over them, and the car would vibrate: “vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb… vbvb­vbvb.” The faster you drive, the higher the pitch.

My Dad is a musi­col­o­gist, with a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in tun­ing. So there was no way he was going to pass up the chance to exper­i­ment with this instru­ment. Every time we approached some grooves, he’d start fast over the first set, and try to slow down by the last set, to play a descend­ing scale: G-F-E-D-C. If there was no oncom­ing traf­fic after the stop sign, he’d swing over to the other side of the road and play an ascend­ing scale as we sped up. Con­tinue reading…