Thursday: "Why am I hungry?"

"Oh, because I haven't eaten dinner yet."  Good job, me.  Good job wasting time on stupid shit.

Stupid shit A.

Julie sent this video to me, and I was confused, because I didn't think it should saturate into noise on the third iteration.  Human voices are in the 1000 Hz range, so if the Carl doubles the frequency, three iterations only gets it to 8000 Hz, which is still well sampled by a 44 kHz sound file (the standard).  So, I did the sane thing when I got home, which is to download the video and do spectral analysis of the audio.

The human (s00), Carl A (s01), and Carl B (s02).

The human speech is mostly that tiny red peak on the left side, at about 1-2 kHz.  It's confused beyond that, but I think that second red peak (2k ish) can be plausibly shifted in the others.

Plotting everything.

The interesting thing in this one is that you can see that there are two patterns.  The dips around 11k and 13k are probably the easiest way to see that.  They're caused by the response function of the devices:

Carl A has the benefit on the first iteration to have the true voice.

Carl B.

 So I don't think it's really related to the speech frequency vs sampling rate.  I think it's just the addition of the noise in the microphone/speaker feedback.


Stupid Shit B.

I read Dumbing of Age, but I don't really pay super close attention to things.  There are 1773 comics as of today, and it's hard to keep track of stories that long over a long period of time.  There are also a lot of characters that I have trouble keeping track of.  "Wait, how do you know how many comics it has?"

Today's story is all "Amber pushes Danny away because she's angry and making bad decisions."  My thought was, "Who else is Amber's friend?  Joyce, right?"

amber danny 91 0.408072 0.325
amazi-girl danny 40 0.3125 0.142857
amber ethan 60 0.269058 0.285714
amber dina 53 0.237668 0.24424
amazi-girl dorothy 24 0.1875 0.0526316
amazi-girl joyce 19 0.148438 0.0255376
amazi-girl walky 18 0.140625 0.0392157
amber joyce 30 0.134529 0.0403226
amazi-girl sal 16 0.125 0.0695652
amazi-girl amber 15 0.117188 0.0672646

Ethan, Dina, and then Dorothy maybe.  Yeah, I was wondering this enough that I wrote a bot to scrape all the comics to pull out the tags that are applied to each comic, since conveniently list all the characters appearing in that comic.  Then, I looked at the pairwise matches in that set and dumped them out in "character A", "character B", "number of appearances together", and number of appearances for each of A and B, converted here into fractions of all appearances that are together.

So that was waste of time.  I also have dates, and you can extract chapters from the urls (which I saved), so more analysis could be done (my thought was to try to do some sort of connection map), but I still haven't eaten dinner.  Also, I discovered that this comic is the only one to have no characters appearing, so had to handle that case (SOLO_APPEAR is in that with SOLO_APPEAR).

Links.

• Here's a more useful use of math, looking at pirated academic articles.  Interesting fact: there's a place to go to pirate academic articles.
• And here's some information from MIT on why Elsevier pretty much deserves to have their articles stolen.
• I know these as "snek" memes.
• And here's some information from the internet on why snek memes are funny, based on linguistic theory.
• Fuck this guy if he is the guy who decided he needed to fight a damn seal.  Jerk.
• Ms. Marvel.
• Dog.