Imagine a high-capacity air filter that is extremely quiet and doesn t get in the way. I think I see how to build one; here s a prototype: By putting a fan on the ceiling you can have very long blades. This is important for keeping noise down: the longer your blades are the more air you move at a given rotational velocity, which is a major determinant of noise. Testing my prototype, it has a
You famously only need four chords to play everything, or maybe it s only three. But how true is this really? I decided to go look and see what was common. I looked at a large number of transcribed songs, writing down which chords were used. This isn t perfect: some chords are more optional than others, but it s about right. I only wrote down the triad: C7 and Cmaj7 are just C. I used three sour
When I bought my mandolin in 2013, I recorded some examples comparing it to my previous one. Now that I have an electric mandolin, I wanted to do something similar. The acoustic mandolin is a Collings MT, and the electric is a Gold Tone GME-4. Here s how they sounded: Chords ( acoustic mp3) ( electric mp3) High riff ( acoustic mp3) ( electric mp3) Low riff ( acoustic mp3)
Several of my friends have been sharing screenshots of this Twitter post: Time for your annual reminder that, according to A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit makes 15 shillings a week. Adjusted for inflation, that s $530.27/wk, $27,574/yr, or $13.50/hr. Most Americans on minimum wage earn less than a Dickensian allegory for destitution.   —Chris Thompson It s wrong, but it
When coding a webpage, sometimes you know something is very likely to be needed, even if it s not needed yet. You can give the browser a hint: <link rel=prefetch href=url> The browser will take a note, and then when it doesn t have anything more important to do it might request url. Later on, if it does turn out to need url, it will already have it. For example, I wrote a slideshow where