Comments for monster accordion :: everything i read?

Comment on auditory plasticity by mark

mark — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:36:41 +0000

well the whole sensitivity range thing is kind of vague and the established cannon is not a point of total consensus these days. of course there must be mechanical limits to what can be transduced at the high and low ends of the spectrum, but since frequency sensitivity actually tapers off as an exponential curve at the high and low ends rather than simply getting cleanly cut off, it’s difficult to tell where the absolute limit actually lies (especially since once you start cranking up the volume, your tissues are thrown into forced resonance and you start ‘feeling’ it, which throws off the reliability of reports about what we hear).

also, i just noticed the tags. so yeah.

Comment on Hello world! by mark

mark — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:00:36 +0000

i just wanted to add here that i think it’s rad that you, the moderator, are represented in the comments thread by a faceless generic humanoid torso-plus-head, whereas the rest of us are given an empty gray box. way to mine the depths of abstract minimalism!

Comment on auditory plasticity by sarah

sarah — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:52:12 +0000

word. my guess would be that the limits of the audible spectrum are relatively fixed but sensitivity within the spectrum is mutable.

yeah, the hard-wired comment is sketchy, as glib one-line generalizations about innate traits tend to be. :) i don’t really know what, if anything, is truly “hard wired” but an absolute set of sound sensitivities definitely isn’t.

Comment on auditory plasticity by mark

mark — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:48:31 +0000

along similar lines, while the vast majority of humans can typically only distinguish changes in loudness at a resolution of >3dB SPL, it’s common for sound engineers to be capable of distinguishing changes of 1 or (rarely) even .5 dB SPL.

presumably, things like our high- and low-end sensitivity ranges will at times have more to do with the mechanical realities of auditory transduction than with conditioning (e.g. the range of possible frequencies at which the basilar membrane can resonate, the gradual destruction of high-frequency hair cells with age and sonic bludgeoning), but i wonder whether, for instance, we could be trained to hear below 20Hz (the traditionally acknowledged lower limit to our frequency sensitivity).

good metareview!

[meandering enquiry about the "hard-wiring" question deleted for the sake of our mutual sanity]

Comment on for SCIENCE! by sarah

sarah — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:34:53 +0000

agreed! stupid scientists only wanna publish the best-looking one. in fMRI papers you usually just get composite images…

…

OMG THERE SHOULD BE GENITAL TALARAICH SPACE!

Comment on for SCIENCE! by kelly

kelly — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:01:54 +0000

While that study is amazing, I am disappointed by the lack of pictures in that article. It seems like allowing the readers to visually compare the shapes of organs in different positions would be very useful. And kinda sexy.

Comment on elegant variations and all that by yode

yode — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 02:11:04 +0000

Are words like ‘expecially’ and ‘expresso’and ‘vietmanese’ and ’suppovezdely’ and ‘melk/pellow’ a speechipathos? I’ve corrected my milky pillow issue, and it wasn’t that difficult. And I am a certified representative sample of Human species so it isn’t that hard. So perhaps the issue is that they bask in the lazy lack of motivation to do anything about it? Perhaps there should be a public announcement- a sign that says ‘GOD DAMN IT, STOP SAYING EXPRESSO.’

btw. you are like totally hot.

Comment on Hello world! by yode

yode — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 02:00:00 +0000

you are totally hot.

Comment on Hello world! by sarah

sarah — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:24:50 +0000

i can relate. sometimes i wonder if i’ve destroyed my memory somehow…but i have a (comforting) theory that i’ve always been forgetful and have just forgotten how forgetful i once was. :D stuff i forgot this week is so much more salient than stuff i forgot ten years ago!

Comment on Oregon’s healthcare lottery by sarah

sarah — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:21:30 +0000

Yeah. It’s so fucked. Sigh. I’ve been incredibly privileged too…these things shouldn’t be privileges!

To make the picture even grimmer, you can’t even get free birth control or exams in a lot of places (unless you’re incredibly low-income) – it’s mostly dependent on state law and/or PP’s fundraising capacity in a given area. The vast majority of OR/WA birth control funding comes from state-administered family planning programs, which don’t exist in many states.

Title X is the only federal program that funds family planning, and it’s seriously limited…and also, in order to qualify for title X funding, a clinic has to never turn anyone away on the basis of income. That means clinics without state funding often can’t actually use Title X ’cause they’d end up spending millions of dollars on low-income patients in exchange for $100k or whatever of title X money.