FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1hr ago
I know the phenomenon I'm describing isn't actually caused by the Doppler effect, I was just using that as an example of changes to perceived pitch.
Medical/neuroscience question for those of you with domain expertise.
It's well-established that the "clock speed" of a person's brain runs very quickly in their youth and slows down as they get older. This is why children's perceived sense of time is so much longer than adults': I'm sure you remember sitting in the back of class in primary school willing the clock to tick just a little faster, but nowadays you sit down at your desk at 9 a.m. and before you know it it's already lunchtime. Many people independently report a sensation of perceived "slow motion" when they find themselves in intense life-or-death situations, which is likely due to the same effect: your body produces massive amounts of adrenaline which temporarily jacks up your brain's clock speed.
Years ago I noticed a potentially related phenomenon. Back when I was a much more avid listener than I used to be, I would often listen to music first thing after waking up, before I'd even finished drinking a cup of tea. I noticed that songs I listened to at this time of day would sound like they were being played at a higher tempo, compared to listening to the same song later on when I'd woken up fully. My theory is that, as my brain hasn't fully woken up yet, its clock speed is marginally reduced (compare an old computer which runs a little slowly for a few minutes after a reboot), causing my perceived sense of time to temporarily speed up until I've fully woken up. The effect is subtle enough that I wouldn't really notice it unless being exposed to a stimulus whose perceived duration I'm already familiar with (i.e. a song I've already heard). And sometimes I get the opposite effect, where a song I've heard before sounds slower than I expect it to. Maybe this is a product of my brain's clock speed having increased, if I'm exerting myself physically?
Is this theory in any way neurologically plausible?
I've noticed a different one recently. The Doppler effect is caused when a moving object emits waves, and the position of the object (and hence the changing position of the source of those waves over time) causes the wave's perceived frequency to change over time. The pitch of a motorcycle engine appears to rise as it drives towards you, then falls as it drives away from you; the light of stars moving away from the earth exhibit a redshift.
On Saturday morning I woke up at 8 a.m. to run a half-marathon. I was tired and hungover, and listening to a favourite album I'd listened to several dozens of times before. In addition to changes in perceived tempo I described above, I noticed certain points in the album where the music actually sounded out of tune. (For reference, I have perfect pitch and can reliably identify the pitch of an individual note, play a song by ear or identify the key of a piece of music.) This definitely wasn't an error on the part of the artist, nor an encoding artefact (it's the same set of FLAC files I've been listening to this album on for nearly a decade, and I've never noticed anything sounding out of tune before). Any disruptions to perceived tonality had dissipated by the time I got to the halfway mark and began my return journey. This suggests it's a psychoacoustic effect caused by fatigue or being hungover.
The "changes to perceived tempo" thing is straightforward: reduced neural clock speed -> time seems to pass faster (and vice versa). But this change in perceived tonality is much odder. Why would a reduced clock speed affect the perceived pitch of a note, in addition to its duration? A computer that's running slowly takes longer to carry out computations (up to and including the display's frame and refresh rate), but it doesn't systematically make every pixel a few shades darker. And it isn't even happening globally: it's not as though the song was recorded in E major, but subjectively sounds as if it was recorded in E-flat until I've woken up fully. It sounds out of tune, meaning my brain is misinterpreting the pitches of certain notes but not others.
Any ideas?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Hmm. I suppose the difference is that women are generally not that interested in casual sex, while men are. It's easy for people of either sex to say something that the other person interprets as indicative of incompatibility for a committed romantic relationship. The sex difference emerges in that, if a man says something like this, the woman he's with probably won't have much interest in having sex with him; whereas if a woman says something like this, that won't necessarily stop a man from having sex with her if the opportunity presents itself. When I was single and horny, a woman whom I found physically attractive would have to come out with some really crazy unhinged shit before I move her to the "don't smash" category.
The difference in this case is that you're not looking for casual sex, but for a committed romantic partner, and you don't want to settle for fucking someone who you find annoying. And you know what? Good for you. I really respect that.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
We're through the looking-glass here, people.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Yeah, true. I suppose we could split them out into "dandymaxxers" (men investing a great deal of time, energy and money into improving their appearance from a sartorial perspective) and "physiquemaxxers" (men doing the same but for their actual physique: going to the gym, taking steroids, testosterone supplements etc.), both of whom fall under the umbrella of "looksmaxxers".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
"Dandymaxxing" is unironically a better term than "looksmaxxing".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Per Wikipedia (take as many grains of salt as you think you need), the intentional homicide rate in the US is 5.763/100k, compared to 2.716 in India, 7.821 in Russia and 39.719 in South Africa. Intentional homicide rate is generally considered a reliable proxy for crime rate in general.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
FYI if you want to tag a user you just have to put an "@" in front of their name.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Does that collection include his account of going to a porn convention? Someone sent it to me and I started reading it, but found it so depressing that I had to stop. I believe the phrase "barely disguised gang rape" appeared in it.
About 40% of the way through The Best Minds. I can already tell this book is going to make me feel sad when I finish it. Fresh out of college, Michael Laudor is offered a prestigious job in Bain Capital, but after a year finds he doesn't really like it, and decides to quit. And yet he's sure that, like the Mafia, Bain isn't an organisation one just leaves: he's convinced they're plotting some way to get him to come back to work for him, and thinks he spies agents of theirs following him. This passes largely without comment, until he accuses his own parents of being Nazis and threatens his mother with a knife, upon which he's committed to an institution. Knowing how the story ends makes it feel like I'm watching a car accident in slow motion.
I'm reminded of Scott's observation that paranoid schizophrenia adapts itself to whatever the sufferer considers evil. John Forbes Nash believed the Soviets were conspiring against him: of course Michael Laudor, a Jew whose family members were killed in the Holocaust, accuses his parents of being literal Nazis. I'm also impressed with how elegantly Rosen weaves in scholarship from various sources to demonstrate that, in the sixties and seventies, the question of whether there was even such a thing as "mental illness" was very much an open one, at least in certain corners of the progressive left. He cites people like Huxley, Zsasz and Foucault who forcefully argued to the contrary. (I was thitherto unaware that Foucault spent a lot of time in gay bathhouses in the US, rubbishing the threat posed by HIV by expressly pointing out how convenient it was that this disease just so happened to overwhelmingly affect gays, drug users and blacks. Uh, yeah dude.)
What is your favourite national anthem from a country other than your own? (Links are appreciated.) I was always fond of the Russian one.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
I'm not really sure what you're asking us, frankly. You could have had sex with a particular woman, but then you realised you didn't want to. What are you confused about?
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
2d ago
Thanks a lot. I ran another half-marathon this morning, although with no improvement over the pace I set last week. In my defense, I was hungover and had only gotten about six hours' sleep. Curious to see how fast I can go with a good night's sleep and no drink taken.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
I wonder if her weasel-pinning days are behind her.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
Bahaha, great stuff. That's honestly how I feel most of the time.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
No, I'm trying to illustrate the flaw in your argument by way of analogy. Just because a given country is the fifth-highest in $metric, doesn't mean it's objectively high. Just because the US has the fifth-highest rate of incarceration in the world, doesn't mean that everyone who ought to be incarcerated is. There's no contradiction between "this country has the fifth-highest incarceration rate in the world" and "lots of people in this country aren't sent to prison even though they ought to be".
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
3d ago
The fifth-richest country in Africa still isn't particularly rich.
This seems like the most likely answer.
More options
Context Copy link