Week 3 Alex Therrien - "Microbaroms"

 Microbaroms:

N: The infrasound that the waves on the sea make. Also known as "the voice of the sea".


This was found in Randall Munroe's book How To, in the chapter on building a piano that can play all  frequencies of sound from around 0.1 Hz to the point that air becomes "opaque" to sound because of the frequency and how waves attenuate worse based off of the square of the frequency. Microbaroms are the sound that waves make, not waves crashing, but the actual ripples in the water. At 0.2 Hz, they are impossible to hear, but infrasound detectors (which are basically an array of high sensitivity barometers) can detect them from the other side of the world.

Infrasound is a very interesting thing. Sounds like it are at most 1 Hz, and humans can only hear down to 20 Hz. Sound at this level travels very far, and because of this it was studied mostly in the cold war, because if someone did a nuclear test it would be impossible to hide the infrasound. Now any detector will mostly detect machinery, vehicles, the occasional smaller explosion, and Microbaroms.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 12 - Azkah Anjum “Fetter”

  Fetter (Verb) to restrict or restrain (someone) in an unfair or undesirable fashion “The United States is the world’s best hope, but if you fetter her in the interest through quarrels of the others nations, if you tangle her in the intrigues of Europe, you will destroy her powerful good, and endanger her very existence” (History Primary Source - Henry Lodge’s Stance on League of Nations) When I first read this sentence I did not understand what the speaker meant to convey. I initially thought in this sentence Lodge expressed that the other nations must not exploit the Unites States. After learning the meaning of the word ‘fetter’, I properly understood that Lodge meant to emphasize the harm in restricting the United States rather than accusing the other countries of wrongly take advantage of the United States. 
Read more

Alex Therrien Week 11 - Hyperbolic Space

Image
 This came out a lot later than I wanted. I forgot about this for a bit. Whoops. Anyways I should be able to catch up on everything. N - A type of non euclidean space where every point has a negative curvature (thing pringle/saddle shaped instead of spherical) The straight lines form hyperbolas in this type of space. This wasn't really much of a vocab word to be honest, but more of an interesting topic I learned about and did a bit of research on to learn more about. Anyways, Hyperbolic space is where every direction of travel is in a hyperbola. Due to this, equilateral triangles have angles of less than 60 degrees, and circles are rather strange. In euclidean geometry, a circle’s circumference is C=2pi*r. This is a linear relationship. However, in hyperbolic space this relationship is hyperbolic (C = 2πsinh(r)). This means that a 2D circle in hyperbolic space would have to be displayed in 3D euclidean space as wrinkled in order to actually fit the extra circumference. This is what...
Read more

Emma LaFond Week 9 - Somnambulatory

 Somnambulatory - adj - (figurative) going through the motions "... whereupon Mr. Wolfsheim swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction" (The Great Gatsby pg 69) I chose this word for the week because I liked the way that it sounded and I found it interesting that such a long word had such a simple meaning. 
Read more