house centipede!

only once in my life have i come across this crazy critter that looks a little like a mutated centipede. his legs are too long! apparently confusion over this arthropod is common as 'nobody' has seen one before and 'everyone' is perplexed when they encounter one. i came across mine unmoving on the cement wall in the basement of an old church, and i shocked a friend when i knew exactly the critter being described (once again chillin on a wall)

they are harmless to humans (unlike regular centipedes) and hunt spiders and other bugs.

learn more about scutigera coleoptrata

day length as a function of latitude and time of year

how cool would it be to live at one of the poles and have only one sunrise and one sunset each year? (i mean, besides the fact that it would drive you nuts)

[via wikipedia]

vibrato and tremolo

what started off over at linguisteresis as a simple inquiry into the difference in definition vibrato and tremolo ended up a full scale investigation.

vibrato is the fluctuation of frequency while tremolo is the fluctuation of amplitude for audio signals. vibrato seems to be more well known because it is considered a good quality to have while singing, yet tremolo is much easier to implement mathematically to a time-varying signal.

i thought a picture would be great to illustrate this difference but wikipedia surprisingly did not have an example, so i made one (seen above) and added it to the page.

im not sure i can really hear the difference between the two so i dove further in by finding a sample audio clip of a (very soprano) operatic singer and viewed her spectrogram (not innuendo.) to me it really just sounds like the sound is getting louder and softer, but what i see is clearly vibrato:

new blog!

my primary passion is electroacoustics, but i realize i frequently post about language oddities, and this is something i have alot of interest in. to accommodate this i created a new blog dedicate to just my random thoughts and observations about language. hopefully others find it interesting also!

http://linguisteresis.blogspot.com/

microsoft's lorem() function

lorem ipsum, a set of nonsensical latin phrases used as a placeholder for text in a template, continues to show up in random places for me. recently i found out something interesting having to do with microsoft word 2007. there is a function, lorem(a,b), which will produce some lorem text placeholders. parameter 'a' is the number of paragraphs and 'b' is the number of sentences. to get this to work, type

=lorem(1,1)

anywhere in a word document and it automatically turns into this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.

it appears the second parameter defaults to 3 if left blank, but the first parameter cannot be left blank.

RSTLN E not the best letter frequency mnemonic

ok so i know its not a mnemonic device at all, but i have always used RSTLNE as the general guideline for which letters were most common in english, because thats what wheel of fortune suggested. turns out its misleading, and there is a better one.

I happened upon the wikipedia page for the ampersand where i learned that it got its name from the way english schools used to recite the english alphabet, seen below:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ&

the ampersand on the end looks out of place, but its there because they would include that character as a letter. they also used to use the latin phrase 'per se' (meaning 'by itself') in front of the letters that could be words. so they recited the alphabet as "per se 'A'BCDEFGH per se 'I'JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ and per se 'and'" and the last part very easily slurs to 'ampersand'. thats great. interesting story.

but the true purpose of this post is to make people aware of etaoin shrdlu. this ampersand business led me to the page of letter frequency in the english language, and i noticed it spelled an interesting name (ETAOIN) and when i did a search of this combination of letters the page for ETAOIN SHRDLU came up. this is about the order of the most frequent letters in the english language. this is great knowledge to have for word games, and apparently it is used as a character name in many literary works

cutaneous rabbit illusion

IEEE did an article on a new technology from phillips: a jacket with 64 little actuators in it that let you feel a movie or tv show. for instance, in a frightening scene it can make you feel like a shiver is running up your spine. the question came up about how only having 4 actuators for the entire length of your arm is enough, and the article references the 'cutaneous rabbit illusion' as the answer. my interest was piqued so i went to good ole wikipedia. it turns out that if your wrist is tapped several times rapidly and then your inner elbow is tapped several times, your brain tricks you into thinking you are being tapped at every point along your forearm - like a rabbit running up your arm. using this, four actuators can create the illsuion of being touched along the entire arm. neat.