Les Jones

Word of the Day: News Hole

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | No Comments |

Wikipedia:

The news hole is the amount of content a news provider needs to create in every publishing cycle.

For example, a news broadcast on radio or TV has a certain amount of air time it needs to fill. Likewise, a newspaper, magazine, newsletter, or website, has a news hole of a certain number of printed pages, dependent in part on how many advertisements are sold to advertisers.

The next time you give a reporter a story, tell him “Stick this in your news hole.” Heard on the fifth season of “The Wire.”

Previous WOTD - Dolly Zoom

Word of the Day: Dolly Zoom (Cinematography)

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 | A&E, Photos, Word of the Day | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Wikipedia:

The dolly zoom is an unsettling in-camera special effect that appears to undermine normal visual perception in film.

The effect is achieved by using the setting of a zoom lens to adjust the angle of view (often referred to as field of view) while the camera dollies (or moves) towards or away from the subject in such a way as to keep the subject the same size in the frame throughout. In its classic form, the camera is pulled away from a subject whilst the lens zooms in, or vice-versa. Thus, during the zoom, there is a continuous perspective distortion, the most directly noticeable feature being that the background appears to change size relative to the subject.

As the human visual system uses both size and perspective cues to judge the relative sizes of objects, seeing a perspective change without a size change is a highly unsettling effect, and the emotional impact of this effect is greater than the description above can suggest. The visual appearance for the viewer is that either the background suddenly grows in size and detail overwhelming the foreground; or the foreground becomes immense and dominates its previous setting, depending on which way the dolly zoom is executed.

The effect was first developed by Irmin Roberts, a Paramount second-unit cameraman, and was famously used by Alfred Hitchcock in his film Vertigo.

The dolly zoom is commonly used by filmmakers to represent the sensation of vertigo, a “falling away from oneself feeling”, feeling of unreality, or to suggest that a character is undergoing a realization that causes him to reassess everything he had previously believed. After Hitchcock popularized the effect (he used it again for a climactic revelation in Marnie), the technique was used by many other filmmakers, and eventually became regarded as a gimmick or cliché. This was especially true after director Steven Spielberg repopularized the effect in his highly regarded film Jaws, in a memorable shot of a dolly zoom into Police Chief Brody’s (Roy Scheider) stunned reaction at the climax of a shark attack on a beach (after a suspenseful build-up). Spielberg used the technique again in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It was originally used within Battlestar Galactica to depict the feeling experienced by characters when the ship utilises faster-than-light travel. However, the technique was not used again until the fourth season.

The Wikipedia entry on perspective distortion in photography is really interesting, too.

Previous WOTD - Nuke the Fridge

Word of the Day: Nuke the Fridge

Monday, November 24th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 2 Comments |

Urban Dictionary:

Nuke the fridge is a colloquialism used to refer to the moment in a film series that is so incredible that it lessens the excitement of subsequent scenes that rely on more understated action or suspense, and it becomes apparent that a certain installment is not as good as a previous installments, due to ridiculous or low quality storylines, events or characters.

The term comes from the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, in which, near the start of the movie, Harrison Ford’s character survives a nuclear detonation by climbing into a kitchen fridge, which is then blown hundreds of feet through the sky whilst the town disintegrates. He then emerges from the fridge with no apparent injury. Later in the movie, the audience is expected to fear for his safety in a normal fistfight.

Fans of the Indiana Jones series found the absurdity of this event in the film to be the best example of the lower quality of this installment in the series, and thus coined the phrase, “nuke the fridge”.

The phrase is also a reference to the phrase “jump the shark”, which has the same meaning, only applied to a television series instead of a film series.

Previous WOTD - Tranche (Investing)

Word of the Day: Tranche (Investing)

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 | Economics, Word of the Day | Permalink | 1 Comment |

You’ll be hearing the word trance more and more as the mortgage crisis plays out. As mortgages were bundled into securities, the securities were organized into tranches. Prime mortgages were mixed with high risk Alt-A and subprime mortgages to create different tranches or investment grades. From Wikipedia:

In structured finance, a tranche (misspelled as traunch or traunche) is one of a number of related securities offered as part of the same transaction. The word tranche is French for slice, section, series, or portion. In the financial sense of the word, each bond is a different slice of the deal’s risk. Transaction documentation (see indenture) usually defines the tranches as different “classes” of notes, each identified by letter (e.g. the Class A, Class B, Class C securities). The term “tranche” is used in fields of finance other than structured finance (such as in straight lending, where “multi-tranche loans” are commonplace), but the term’s use in structured finance may be singled out as particularly important. Use of “tranche” as a verb is limited almost exclusively to this field.

Tranching poses the following risks:

• Tranching can add complexity to deals. “Beyond the challenges posed by estimation of the asset pool’s loss distribution, tranching requires detailed, deal-specific documentation to ensure that the desired characteristics, such as the seniority ordering the various tranches, will be delivered under all plausible scenarios. In addition, complexity may be further increased by the need to account for the involvement of asset managers and other third parties, whose own incentives to act in the interest of some investor classes at the expense of others may need to be balanced.
• With increased complexity, less sophisticated investors have a harder time understanding them and thus are less able to make informed investment decisions. One must be very careful investing in structured products. As shown above, tranches from the same offering have different risk, reward, and/or maturity characteristics.
• Modeling the performance of tranched transactions based on historical performance may have led to the over-rating (by ratings agencies) and underestimation of risks (by end investors) of asset-backed securities with high-yield debt as their underlying assets. These factors have come to light in the subprime mortgage crisis.

Previous WOTD - Misdemeanant

Word of the Day: Cabotage (Economics)

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 | Economics, Word of the Day | Permalink | 1 Comment |

From Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day:

Coastlines were once so important to the French that they came up with a verb to name the act of sailing along a coast: “caboter.” That verb gave rise to the French noun “cabotage,” which named trade or transport along a coast. In the 16th century, the French legally limited their lucrative coastal trade, declaring that only French ships could trade in French ports. They called the right to conduct such trading “cabotage” too. Other nations soon embraced both the concept of trade restrictions and the French name for trading rights, and expanded the idea to inland trade as well. Later, English speakers also applied “cabotage” to the rights that allowed domestic airlines to travel within national boundaries but that prevented foreign carriers from doing so.

About that last part. I don’t think many people realize that only U.S. airlines can fly routes inside the U.S. Foreign airlines are mostly or entirely restricted to U.S. international airports. Some countries go a step further and have a single national or nationalized airline flying within their country or even restrict what airlines can fly into their country.

Cabotage is pronounced like another French word, sabotage.

Previous WOTD - Stranger Room or Elijah Room

Word of the Day: Stranger Room or Elijah Room

Thursday, November 6th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 2 Comments |

My Cades Cove pictures included the shot above from the Elijah Oliver place. I found several references to the small room on the porch (left side of photo) as a a stranger room.

Cades Cove people were well known for their hospitality and neighborly kindness. Visiting was the order on Saturday and Sunday nights and folks would sit around sharing tall tales, jokes, puzzles, and proverbs.

Cove residents also made room for strangers. They framed in their porches to create little rooms for overnight guests traveling through. Elijah Oliver enclosed his front porch to serve as a “stranger room” or an “Elijah room” (named after the biblical prophet, not Oliver).

Reading the Wikipedia entry for Elijah, I can guess at a couple of reasons for the name. Elijah had to flee his homeland and needed hospitality. There’s also an Elijah chair set out in Jewish ceremonies and Passover to welcome the returning prophet.

Previous WOTD - Intervalometer

Word of the Day: Intervalometer

Monday, November 3rd, 2008 | Photos, Word of the Day | Permalink | 1 Comment |

From Wikipedia:

In photography, intervalometers are used to trigger exposures. This is often done for a time-lapse series. It may also be used to start taking picture(s) after a set delay. For example, in aerial photography, one may want to delay the start until five minutes after take-off, to allow time to reach altitude.

Most cameras have very basic intervalometer functionality, the “self-timer”. A self-timer can be used to delay taking a picture for short time. The delay is commonly used for the photographer to get into the picture. A self-timer is so basic such that most people do not think of it as an intervalometer.

One of the more common types of intervalometers is the timer that is used to turn lights on and off at set times. These are commonly used by people when they go on vacation. There are also a large number of commercial and industrial applications for even such basic intervalometers.

Previous WOTD - The Mendoza Line (baseball)

Words that are funny

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | No Comments |

Milemarker. Milemarker is a word that is funny.

Word of the Day: The Mendoza Line (Baseball)

Monday, September 8th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 2 Comments |

Wikipedia:

The Mendoza Line is an informal term used in baseball for when a position player’s batting average falls below the boundary between extremely poor and merely below-average offensive production, or the offensive threshold below which players’ presence in the Major Leagues cannot be justified despite their defensive abilities. It is often used to characterize a batting average of below .200. Pitchers are not held to the “Mendoza Line” standard, since their specialized work and infrequent batting justifies less competence in hitting.

More theories about the word origin at the link. Hat tip to The Arquette Sisters.

Previous WOTD - Transient Synovitis of the Hip (Medical)

Word of the Day: Transient Synovitis of the Hip (Medical)

Monday, August 25th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 1 Comment |

From Family Doctor:

What is transient synovitis of the hip?
Transient synovitis of the hip is an inflammation and swelling of the tissues around the hip joint. Usually only one hip is affected. This condition is called “transient” because it lasts only a short time. Transient synovitis of the hip is the most common cause of sudden hip pain in children.

Transient synovitis of the hip usually occurs in children between 3 and 10 years old. Sometimes it occurs in children younger than 3. It is more common in boys than in girls.

Our three year old had this last week, and it was no fun. Luckily it passed in a little more than 24 hours.

Previous WOTD - NIMBY and BANANA

Word of the Day: NIMBY and BANANA

Friday, August 15th, 2008 | Political Survival Kit, Word of the Day | Permalink | 1 Comment |

I knew NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard, usually in reference to a garbage dump, power station, etc.). BANANA is a new one on me:

It is no longer not in my backyard. It is BANANA; build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything. It has been that way for a long time. In the long run things are going to start to stop working if we don’t do something. But once the lights start to go off, the environmental movement will be completely discredited. That will be a sad thing. The fanatics are going to destroy their own movement.

Hat tip to a Hit & Run commentor.

Previous WOTD - Brutalism (architecture)

Word of the Day: Brutalism (Architecture)

Thursday, August 14th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Wikipedia:

Brutalism is an architectural style that spawned from the modernist architectural movement and which flourished from the 1950s to the 1970s. The early style was inspired largely by the work of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, and in particular his Unité d’Habitation (1952) and the 1953 Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, India.

The term Brutalist Architecture originates from the French béton brut, or “raw concrete”, a term used by Le Corbusier to describe his choice of material. In 1954, the English architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term, but it gained currency when the British architectural critic Reyner Banham used it in the title of his 1954 book, “New Brutalism”, to identify the emerging style.[1]

[The Brutalism (architectural style) and the New Brutalism (architectural and urban theory) are two different movements. The New Brutalism of the English members of Team 10, Alison and Peter Smithson, is more related to the theoretical reform of the CIAM (in architecture and urbanism) than to "béton brut". Reyner Banham formulated this difference in the title of his book: "The New Brutalism - Ethic or Aesthetic?"]

Brutalist buildings usually are formed with striking repetitive angular geometries, and often revealing the textures of the wooden forms used to shape the material, which is normally rough, unadorned poured concrete. Not all Brutalist buildings are formed from concrete. Instead, a building may achieve its Brutalist quality through a rough, blocky appearance, and the expression of its structural materials, forms, and services on its exterior. Many of Alison and Peter Smithson’s private houses are built from brick. Brutalist building materials may include brick, glass, steel, rough-hewn stone, and gabion (also known as trapion). Conversely, not all buildings exhibiting an exposed concrete exterior can be considered Brutalist, and may belong to one of a range of architectural styles including Constructivism, International Style, Expressionism, Postmodernism, Deconstructivism and Structuralism (architecture).

Brutalism as an architectural style also was associated with a social utopian ideology, which tended to be supported by its designers, especially Alison and Peter Smithson, near the height of the style. The failure of positive communities to form early on in some Brutalist structures, possibly due to the larger processes of urban decay that set in after World War II (especially in the United Kingdom), led to the combined unpopularity of both the ideology and the architectural style.

Critics argue that this abstract nature of Brutalism makes the style unfriendly and uncommunicative, instead of being integrating and protective, as its proponents intended. For example, the location of the entrance of a Brutalist structure is rarely obvious to the visitor.

Brutalism also is criticised as disregarding the social, historic, and architectural environment of its surroundings, making the introduction of such structures in existing developed areas appear starkly out of place and alien

Previous WOTD - rickrolling

Word of the Day: rickrolling

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 3 Comments |

Wikipedia:

Rickrolling is an Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up“. The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a Web link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking (and thus satisfying their curiosity). When a person clicks on the link given and is led to the web page he/she is said to have been “Rickrolled”. By extension, it can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive.^[1]

The practice began as a variant of an earlier prank originating from the imageboard 4chan called duckrolling,^[2] in which a link to somewhere (such as a specific picture or news item) would instead lead to a thread or site containing a photoshopped picture of a duck with wheels. The user at that point, is said to have been “Duckrolled”. The first instance of Rickroll occurred on the site’s video game board, where a link to the Rick Astley video was claimed to be a mirror of the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV (which was unavailable due to heavy traffic).^[3] The joke was confined to 4chan for a very brief period.

Previous WOTD - Sychophant

Word of the Day: Sychophant

Thursday, July 24th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 3 Comments |

Sychophant:

[sik-uh-fuhnt, -fant, sahy-kuh-]
–noun
a self-seeking, servile flatterer; fawning parasite.
[Origin: 1530–40; < L sȳcophanta < Gk sȳkophántés informer, equiv. to sŷko(n) fig + phan- (s. of phaínein to show) + -tés agentive suffix]

I’ve known what the word meant for a long time, but I always assumed the “syco” part was pronounced like the Albert Hitchcock movie and I just found out it’s pronounced like the Michael Moore movie.

Well, OK, it’s sicka-fant and not sicko-fant, but no one has made a movie called Sicka. I blame Hollywood.

Previous WOTD - Hyperfocal Distance (Photography)

Words that make you stupider when you say them

Monday, July 21st, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 1 Comment |

Pleather. As in plastic leather. As in “Comes with FREE genuine pleather carrying case!!!” Or “sexy pleather bustier.”

Word of the Day: Hyperfocal Distance (Photography)

Monday, July 21st, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 2 Comments |

DOFmaster.com:

The concept of hyperfocal distance is easy to understand: focus a lens at the hyperfocal distance and everything in the photograph from some near distance to infinity will be sharp. Landscape photographs are often taken with the lens focused at the hyperfocal distance; near and distant objects are sharp in the photos.

“The hyperfocal distance is the point of focus where everything from half that distance to infinity falls within the depth of field.” - John Shaw

There’s a great tutorial there showing how to calculate a lens’s hyperfocal distance for a given aperture using the markings on the lens. My first reaction is that this is really interesting. Then the fascination was replaced with disgust, which was replaced by gratitude that I live in a time of reliable autofocus lenses so that I don’t have to think about this crap.

The depth of field calculator is also really cool. It’s truly amazing how razor thin the depth of field is on short lenses at near distances. No wonder macro shooters prefer to mount their cameras on a focusing rail.

The DOF calculator also doubles as a hyperfocal distance calculator. For my 50mm/1.8 lens the hyperfocal distance at F11 is 36 feet, so anything at F11 that’s 18 or more feet away would be in focus, which is sorta handy to know. Um, except that I wouldn’t use that lens at F11 when I could use my 18-55mm zoom. The only reason I have the 50mm prime is because it’s an amazingly fast, sharp lens that’s also inexpensive and lightweight. I only use it at large apertures. At F2 the hyperfocal distance is 216 feet, which is pretty much useless to know. Again, I’m so, so happy to live in a time of reliable autofocus cameras.

Previous WOTD - Uncanny Valley (Robotics and Computer Animation)

Word of the Day: Uncanny Valley (Robotics and Computer Animation)

Friday, July 18th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 4 Comments |

Wikipedia:

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness. It was introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and has been linked to Ernst Jentsch’s concept of “the uncanny” identified in a 1906 essay, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Jentsch’s conception is famously elaborated upon by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay, simply entitled “The Uncanny” (”Das Unheimliche”). A similar problem exists in realistic 3D computer animation, such as with the film The Polar Express[1] and Beowulf.

Mori’s hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.[2]

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely-human” and “fully human” entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

Hat tip to Chris Range. See also this Wired article on the artistic challenges of computer animation.

Previous WOTD - Windcatcher (Architecture)

Word of the Day: Windcatcher (Architecture)

Friday, July 11th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | No Comments |

Wikipedia:

A windcatcher (Persian: بادگیر Bâdgir, Arabic: بارجيل Baarjiil) is a traditional Persian architectural device used for many centuries to create natural ventilation in buildings. It is not known who first invented the windcatcher, but it still can be seen in many countries today. Windcatchers come in various designs, such as the uni-directional, bi-directional, and multi-directional.

The windcatcher functions on several principles:

First, a windcatcher is capped and has several directional ports at the top (Traditionally four). By closing all but the one facing away from the incoming wind, air is drawn upwards using the Coanda effect, similar to how opening the one facing the wind would push air down the shaft. This generates significant cooling ventilation within the structure below, but is not enough to bring the temperature below ambient alone - it would simply draw hot air in through any cracks or windows in the structure below.

Therefore, the key to generating frigid temperatures seems to be that there are very few cracks at the base of the thick structure below, but there is a significant air gap above the qanat. A qanat has quite a lot of water inside, because there are frequent well-like reservoirs along its path. Completely shaded from the sun, a qanat also aggregates the cold, sinking air of the night, which is then trapped within, unable to rise up to the less dense surface air. A windcatcher, however, can create a pressure gradient which sucks at least a small amount of air upwards through a house. This cool, dry night air, being pulled over a long passage of water, evaporates some of it and is cooled down further.

Finally, in a windless environment or waterless house, a windcatcher functions as a stack effect aggregator of hot air. It creates a pressure gradient which allows less dense hot air to travel upwards and escape out the top. This is also compounded significantly by the day-night cycle mentioned above, trapping cool air below. The temperature in such an environment can’t drop below the nightly low temperature. These last two functions have gained some ground in Western architecture, and there are several commercial products using the name windcatcher.

Previous WOTD - Userbar

Word of the Day: Userbar

Thursday, July 10th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | No Comments |

From Userbarz.com:

Userbars are small rectangular images that are designed to be put in an Internet forum signature block. Userbars may be animated if the artist wishes. They are often used to show the user’s interests, hobbies, or graphical skills. Userbar standards are often strictly defined and enforced by communities to ensure that they all have a neat appearance when animated or when stacked vertically. Although there is some variation, most are not wider than 350 pixels and not higher than 19 pixels so they can fit in with other userbars.

Previous WOTD - Litotes

Word of the Day: Tessar Lens or Pancake Lens

Sunday, June 29th, 2008 | Photos, Word of the Day | Permalink | No Comments |

From Wikipedia:

The Tessar is a famous photographic lens design conceived by physicist Paul Rudolph in 1902 while he worked at the Zeiss optical company and patented by Zeiss; the lens type is usually known as Zeiss Tessar.

Despite common belief, the Tessar was not developed from the 1893 Cooke triplet design by replacing the rear element with a cemented achromatic doublet. In fact, Paul Rudolph designed the Anastigmat with two cemented doublets in 1890. In 1899, he separated the doublets in the Anastigmat to produce the four-element, four-group Unar lens. In 1902, he realized that reversing the two rear elements of the Unar and returning to a cemented doublet would improve performance; he named the result “Tessar”, from the Greek word τέσσερα (tessera) to indicate a four-element design.

Pancake lenses seem to be limited in focal length and maximum aperture. They also don’t have a reputation as being the very sharpest lenses you can get. Their big advantage is their incredible compactness. Some of them aren’t much thicker than a lens cap. If I ever spot the Nikon version below three hundred bucks I might be tempted. It would be a great companion to the small, lightweight D40 body.

• Pbase collection of photos made with a Nikon 45mm/F2.8

• Nikonlinks review of Nikon 45mm/F2.8
• Ken Rockwell review of Nikon 45mm/F2.8
• Camera Labs review of Olympus Zuiko Digital 25mm/F2.8
• Pentax DA 40mm f/2.8

Word of the Day: Litotes

Friday, June 20th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 1 Comment |

From Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day:

litotes • \LYE-tuh-teez\ • noun

: understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary

Example Sentence:
Jamie blushingly acknowledged her victory by litotes, saying that her scores were “not bad” and that she was “not displeased” with her performance.

Previous WOTD - Dichotomous Key

WOTD: Dichotomous Key

Monday, June 9th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 1 Comment |

From Wikipedia:

In Biology. a single-access key (also called “sequential key”, “analytical key”, or “pathway key”) is an identification key where the sequence and structure of identification steps is fixed by the author of the key. At each point in the key multiple options are offered, each option leading to the next choice. The options are commonly called “leads”, the set of leads at a given point a “couplet”. If the entire key consists of exactly two choices at each branching point, the key is called dichotomous, else polytomous (or in false analogy: “polychotomous”). The majority of single-access keys are dichotomous.

I know all about dichotomous keys from my mis-spent youth getting a biology degree. In field biology dichotomous keys are used to identify the flora and fauna of a given geographic region. As long as you understand the terminology the key will walk you through a step-by-step identification process.

Nowadays you see the same idea used in other applications. For instance (and this is what inspired this post), go here and click the “Begin Here” link. That page is a dichotomous key to identifying Mosin-Nagant rifles. If I ever buy a Mosin I’ll make a beeline for that page. Good stuff.

Previous WOTD - Infrasound

Word of the Day: Infrasound

Friday, May 16th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 4 Comments |

Ganked from Wikipedia, as you can tell from all the footnotes that I’m too lazy to delete. (Sue me. Lost is about to come on.)

Infrasound is sound with a frequency too low to be heard by the human ear. The study of such sound waves is sometimes referred to as infrasonics, covering sounds beneath the lowest limits of human hearing (20 hertz) down to 0.001 hertz. This frequency range is utilized by seismographs for monitoring earthquakes. Infrasound is characterized by an ability to cover long distances and get around obstacles with little dissipation.

[...]

Infrasound has been known to cause feelings of awe or fear in humans.[9] Since it is not consciously perceived, it can make people feel vaguely that supernatural events are taking place. Some film soundtracks make use of infrasound to produce unease or disorientation in the audience. Irréversible is one such movie. In music, Brian “Lustmord” Williams is known to utilize infrasound to create these same feelings.

Infrasonic 17 Hz tone experiment

On May 31, 2003, a team of UK researchers held a mass experiment where they exposed some 700 people to music laced with soft 17 Hz sine waves played at a level described as “near the edge of hearing”, produced by an extra-long stroke sub-woofer mounted two-thirds of the way from the end of a seven-meter-long plastic sewer pipe. The experimental concert (entitled Infrasonic) took place in the Purcell Room over the course of two performances each consisting of four musical pieces. Two of the pieces in each concert had 17 Hz tones played underneath. In the second concert, the pieces that were to carry a 17 Hz undertone were swapped so that test results wouldn’t focus on any specific musical piece. The participants were not told which pieces included the low-level 17 Hz near-infrasonic tone.

The presence of the tone resulted in a significant number (22%) of respondents reporting anxiety, uneasiness, extreme sorrow, nervous feelings of revulsion or fear, chills down the spine and feelings of pressure on the chest.[10][11] In presenting the evidence to the BA, the scientist responsible said “These results suggest that low frequency sound can cause people to have unusual experiences even though they cannot consciously detect infrasound. Some scientists have suggested that this level of sound may be present at some allegedly haunted sites and so cause people to have odd sensations that they attribute to a ghost—our findings support these ideas”.

The Ghost in the Machine

Research by the late Vic Tandy, a lecturer at Coventry University, suggested that the frequency 19 hertz was responsible for many ghost sightings. He was working late one night alone in a supposedly haunted laboratory at Warwick, when he felt very anxious, and could detect a grey blob out of the corner of his eye. When he turned to face it, there was nothing.

The following day, he was working on his fencing foil, with the handle held in a vice. Although there was nothing touching it, it started to vibrate wildly. Further investigation led him to discover that the extraction fan was emitting a frequency of 18.98 Hz, very close to the resonant frequency of the eye (given as 18 Hz in NASA Technical Report 19770013810). This was why he saw a ghostly figure — it was an optical illusion caused by his eyeballs resonating. The room was exactly half a wavelength in length, and the desk was in the centre, thus causing a standing wave which was detected by the foil. [12]

Vic investigated this phenomenon further, and wrote a paper entitled The Ghost in the Machine. He carried out a number of investigations at various sites believed to be haunted, including the basement of the Tourist Information Bureau next to Coventry Cathedral [13] and Edinburgh Castle. [14][15]

Previous WOTD - EBITDA

Word of the Day: EBITDA

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | 3 Comments |

EBITDA - Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization. Pronounced “ee bit dah.” A non-GAAP means of accounting that helps make unprofitable businesses sound profitable, basically. It was popular in the dot-com era. More info at Investopedia.

And that WOTD is prelude to Phil Greenspun’s post on Enron, in which he explains how bogus EBITDA is:

Conspiracy of Fools chronicles one of the discussions about EBITDA among Enron senior managers. One guy pointed out to Rebecca Mark, a Harvard Business School graduate star of the company, that EBITDA was meaningless because one could improve EBITDA simply by borrowing money at 10 percent and investing it in T-Bills at 5 percent and that was essentially what Mark was doing. She was borrowing money at X% to purchase businesses that would return no more than (X-4)% in a best-case scenario. This fattened her paycheck, but led the company towards bankruptcy.

And from a commenter at Phil’s I found Malcom Gladwell’s New Yorker piece, Open Secrets: Enron, intelligence, and the perils of too much information. He makes the case that Enron gave investors all the information they needed to see the problems with the company’s business, information that an investigative reporter sifted through, prompting Enron’s downfall.

I think Gladwell lets Enron off too easily, but it’s probably true that many modern financial transactions are so large and complex that they’re impenetrable. Warren Buffett said as much in a recent Fortune interview:

Your OFHEO example implies you’re not too optimistic about regulation.

Finance has gotten so complex, with so much interdependency. I argued with Alan Greenspan some about this at [Washington Post chairman] Don Graham’s dinner. He would say that you’ve spread risk throughout the world by all these instruments, and now you didn’t have it all concentrated in your banks. But what you’ve done is you’ve interconnected the solvency of institutions to a degree that probably nobody anticipated. And it’s very hard to evaluate. If Bear Stearns had not had a derivatives book, my guess is the Fed wouldn’t have had to do what it did.

Do you find it striking that banks keep looking into their investments and not knowing what they have?

I read a few prospectuses for residential-mortgage-backed securities - mortgages, thousands of mortgages backing them, and then those all tranched into maybe 30 slices. You create a CDO by taking one of the lower tranches of that one and 50 others like it. Now if you’re going to understand that CDO, you’ve got 50-times-300 pages to read, it’s 15,000. If you take one of the lower tranches of the CDO and take 50 of those and create a CDO squared, you’re now up to 750,000 pages to read to understand one security. I mean, it can’t be done. When you start buying tranches of other instruments, nobody knows what the hell they’re doing. It’s ridiculous.

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Word of the Day: WORM

Monday, April 14th, 2008 | Word of the Day | Permalink | No Comments |

WORM: What Obama Really Meant.

Found at a Talkleft discussion of Barack Cougar Mellencamp Obama’s Pennsylvania gaffe.

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