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7:34 AM
@TRiG I think the name was @DavidZ's idea. You can thank him :)
We used to be called "The Coupling".
 
@ManishEarth yeesh i bet jokes were made about that on a daily basis
 
8:04 AM
@ManishEarth Nah, it was someone else's idea, I just made the change
"The Coupling" was my idea
 
8:15 AM
I have never noticed that mods names are blue in chat
 
 
2 hours later…
10:07 AM
Don't forget, everyone, a chat session is coming up in about 6 hours!
 
@DavidZ a specific topic or just getting everyone together?
 
11:10 AM
@RhysW: My "Axe murder" horror question got 1k views :)
 
@CrazyBuddy the what now?
@CrazyBuddy linky?
 
@RhysW Aargh.. How did you forget that?
3
Q: Horror story writer moves with his family into a house where the previous family was murderered

Crazy BuddyI watched a movie a few months back. The movie starts with four people hanging by their necks on a tree. The hero is a writer of horror stories. He comes to a house along with his family. He finds a projector with several film rolls on the attic. He watches those films everyday. All films were ba...

 
oooh that one
 
That's what I call SE blockbuster... I think the title attracted more people...
 
the titles on gaming.se is the best
 
11:17 AM
Ohhh... like "How can I kill this guy?" o_O :)
 
How can I tell if a corpse is safe to eat?
How can I kill adorable animals?
My head keeps falling off. What can I do?
Is it dangerous to go extreme pig riding in a thunderstorm?
3
all actual titles
 
@RhysW Yeah... similar ones. Physics.SE gets such titles twos or thrice a year ;-)
 
@CrazyBuddy oooh examples?
 
@RhysW You should've heard those...
31
Q: Why doesn't light kill me?

Shawn McDowellI was attending my philosophy class and in the middle of student presentations, I found myself mentally wondering off and thinking about light. After a few minutes of trying to piece together how the sun works I came to ask a question I could not answer myself. Why does each individual photon hav...

 
oh thats just made me think of a question i want to ask!
 
11:25 AM
@RhysW Ask your questions... Very busy to spend time posting stuff? ;-)
 
il ask it after lunch
or during lunch
or whenever i have time to
its about light
and earth
 
@RhysW Ohh... Enjoy both... ;-)
 
um, thanks?
 
 
3 hours later…
2:26 PM
Anyone around..?
Does "pedagogical virus" mean teaching something crudely ??? o_O
 
2:42 PM
0
Q: Policy regarding intentionally counter-productive users

JimI recently noticed a joke post; a user intentionally asked and answered a question that was a very subtle mockery of research-level physics papers and had no application as an actual question on this site. I've got a sense of humour, it was pretty funny, so I thought "we can let this slide. Close...

 
Anonymous
3:25 PM
@David Zaslavasky: This suggested edit: physics.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/21181 came from the OP's own comments on annav's answer. How does that change too much ? .
 
Anonymous
...
 
Anonymous
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Anonymous
???
 
Anonymous
...
 
3:50 PM
Welcome to our Physics Chat session everyone :)
 
Anyone around?
Also, 9 more minutes to go
 
1 hour ago, by Crazy Buddy
Does "pedagogical virus" mean teaching something crudely ??? o_O
 
I guess it means a teaching tool (could be an analogy, or whatever) that spready easily but is harmful
 
That's it??? o_O
 
@CrazyBuddy it can get confusing when you welcome people to the chat session before the chat session actually starts ;-)
 
4:00 PM
@DavidZ I should add advanced or something next time...
 
Or just wait until noon EDT
which it is
now
so I guess we should "start" :-P
Who's here?
 
@DavidZ It's night..! I'm postponing my dinner everytime for this chat session :)
 
@DavidZ No it's not. You prejudiced EST folks think you rule the world. Hmph
@DavidZ Me!
 
@ManishEarth that's EDT, thank you very much
there, edited :-P
 
user54412
yay East Coast!
 
4:03 PM
@DavidZ I'm the one who reminded you all..! Suffer my infinite wrath :)
 
@DavidZ Hm. Never had heard of that till now. And I used to live there
 
You never heard of daylight savings time?
 
No, never heard of EDT
of course I heard of Daylight Savings time :P
 
user54412
EST -> EDT during Summer
 
I know, I know
 
4:04 PM
@DavidZ I heard... That coal supply was less during WWI (Isn't that the real story? :P)
 
user54412
but most people mistakenly say EST during summer - technically it's 11:04 EST
 
@CrazyBuddy I don't know, perhaps you should ask Wikipedia
 
I know... Okay.... Okay.... :D
 
Anyway, do we have anything in particular to talk about today?
 
@ChrisWhite Somehow I keep thinking you're in California.
 
4:06 PM
Meh... Here we go.... :D
 
Please let it not be tags :P
 
@ManishEarth I'll ping Dilaton .... :D
 
user54412
I'm curious if anyone from the non-astro side of things is keeping up on Cas A
 
user54412
 
4:08 PM
@ChrisWhite no, I haven't heard about it
 
did someone say time crystals?!
 
user54412
@DavidZ basically, it's a supernova remnant that we know the age of quite well (about 300 years)
 
@ChrisWhite Cas A ... hmm, wasn't that related to a quite important radioastronomy discovery having to do with black holes?
 
@RhysW None by the name... Take care now... Bye bye then :)
 
oh ok
(waves)
 
user54412
4:09 PM
and we see the neuton star cooling in real time
 
user54412
so it heavily constrains the physics of the interior
 
@ChrisWhite oh, well I know about Cas A, I meant I hadn't heard about why it's particularly interesting lately
That is pretty cool
:-P
...that was a terrible pun
 
@ChrisWhite wha..?
How can you have fast cooling at that scale?
 
user54412
@ManishEarth look at figures 2/3 in arxiv.org/abs/1308.2137
 
Or is it rapidly ejecting energy like a black hole with an accretion disk?
 
user54412
4:13 PM
basically, before this was observed, it was predicted that there would be a rapid cooling phase due to the onset of superfluidity of various species etc.
 
user54412
the cooling phase probably lasts a decade or three, and we started observing this just at the right time
 
@ChrisWhite nice!
 
user54412
@ManishEarth I should mention, neutron stars cool primarily via neutrino emission in their youth
 
yep
 
It's great how I can read the abstract and the introduction and actually kind of understand what they're saying
 
4:16 PM
That's the nice thing about abstracts :)
 
Not always
 
Well, yeah
Anyone around?
 
@ManishEarth From the audience... Yeah.. me :)
 
yeah
 
Hmm
 
4:24 PM
I just don't particularly have anything to talk about
 
user54412
indeed
 
I've been playing around with a rather interesting system -- music
 
user54412
?
 
I don't usually talk when professionals are discussing "stuff" :D
 
4:25 PM
@CrazyBuddy well there's your problem
 
user54412
@ManishEarth covering up holes over nodes in your flute?
 
In Indian classical music, the notes are separated in a certain set of frequency ratios (Western music has them equally spaced on a log scale)
Now, there's a well-known reason for the ratios; there's good resonance there
 
@DavidZ Of course... I'm not really good.. I'm still learning from you people.. To be true, I can't cope up....
 
But I wanted to see how good the resonance was when compared to other notes
 
user54412
@ManishEarth talking about a raga?
 
4:26 PM
@ChrisWhite nono
 
@CrazyBuddy no I mean you should talk more
or rather, don't have this attitude that when "professionals" are talking you need to stay out of their way.
 
user54412
@DavidZ +1
 
@ChrisWhite The notes themselves. Do/Re/Mi/... aren't separated by $2^{1/12}$ and $2^{1/6}$ like in Western music
 
@DavidZ No... I'm not really like that too... Else, I wouldn't have talked at all...
I'm still trying to communicate... (quite nicely)
 
The notes are arranged so that there's good resonance with the harmonics of other notes. More or less
 
user54412
4:28 PM
@ManishEarth ah ok - keep going (I'm actually really interested in music theory at this level)
 
While usually you deal with 12 notes, there actually are a total of 22 in Indian classical music. But they mostly come in close by pairs. So you have two flat Re's, two natural Re,s, Two flat Mis, etc
 
user54412
22 / octave?
 
user54412
that's rather dense
 
@ChrisWhite yep
 
user54412
this is sounding like resolving doublets in spectroscopy
 
4:30 PM
Each note ^
If you look at it, the numbered pairs are quite close. If you take the capital notes you get your normal octave, if you take the lowercase ones as well you get your umm...12-ave
But most notes are two notes
Interestingly, the 12-ave in Indian music comes pretty close to the 12-Ave in Western music
 
user54412
12-ave <-> chromatic scale?
 
Yeah
I should have remembered that :P
 
user54412
hmmm, wonder how close this is to Chinese scale construction
 
user54412
 
user54412
(to the extent that there is a well-defined Chinese standard, they basically start with one note and apply a series of simple whole number ratios to it to get new frequencies, using factors of 2 to get back into the appropriate octave as needed)
 
4:36 PM
So anyway I'm analysing the overlap of non-sinusoidal waveforms (that contain strong harmonics) with themselves at varying frequencies. I'm getting some strange results, and it seems to be like chaotic behavior with the fixed points as a subset of the notes
@ChrisWhite It's similar in Indian music. You recognize the strength of the harmonic overlap of Sa(Do) and Pa(Sol)/Ga(Mi), and you reuse those ratios a couple of times
The numbers look different though
 
user54412
@ManishEarth 243/128 is suspiciously the last entry in both
 
There's a common 81/64 too
and 9/8
brb
 
user54412
lots of (3/2)^n, give or take enough factors of 2 to put it between 1.0 and 2.0
 
@ChrisWhite: In the meanwhile, I can't really understand how something orbits the lagrange point itself...
> A spacecraft in a halo orbit does not technically orbit the Lagrange point itself (which is just an equilibrium point with no mass), but travels in a closed, repeating path near the Lagrange point. Halo orbits are the result of a complicated interaction between the gravitational pull of the two planetary bodies and the coriolis and centrifugal accelerations on a spacecraft
I got this from Wiki... (Halo orbit)
 
@ChrisWhite That's because the 3-2 resonance is the strongest
1-1 and 2-2 are just fundamentals overlapping, and 1-2 is the standard octave shift
3-2 (Sol-Do/Pa-Sa) is the best overlap there is
Second to it is 2-3 (Fa-Do/Ma-Sa) and then 3-5 (Mi-Do/Ga-Sa)
Basically it's all about the harmonics of a note overlapping
What I'm trying to do is to see if there's a way to construct a way of gauging how pleasing two notes will sound when played together mathematically
 
user54412
4:45 PM
@CrazyBuddy You could try reading my excessively wordy explanation:
 
user54412
0
A: Why are L4 and L5 lagrangian points stable?

Chris WhiteI think there are some good explanations here, but I'll try to add a very simplified, hopefully intuitive explanation. First, let's agree on some conventions. Suppose the Earth is going counterclockwise around the Sun. It's going in a circular orbit at a distance $R$ (from the barycenter) with a...

 
user54412
no equations but it might help to draw a diagram as you're reading
 
@ChrisWhite Thanks... BTW, I haven't noticed that answer of you ever... :)
I'll ping you when I get something wrong (if you're unlucky)... :D
 
user54412
basically, if you are co-rotating (say in Earth-Sun L4, moving around the Sun at 1 orbit /year), then if you are inside the orbit of the smaller mass, you are moving too fast for that radius, so your inertia carries you outward
 
user54412
the reverse happens if you are more than 1 AU from the sun
 
4:48 PM
@ChrisWhite What bugs me is the L2 -_-
 
user54412
@ManishEarth by minimizing beating or something?
 
Dinner, then Chris' answer, and finally chat touch-up... C'yall later :)
 
See you @CrazyBuddy
 
user54412
@CrazyBuddy I think L2 is the most complicated :P
 
user54412
cya
 
4:51 PM
@ChrisWhite That's one way, but I haven't got to that yet (I plan to). There's some interesting (chaotic) behavior when I just plot $\int\limits_0^{n\pi} (flute(x)+flute(kx))^2 dx$ as a function of k and then vary n. It's a sort of chaos that isn't really that chaotic, but it's interesting
 
user54412
flute(x)
 
user54412
?
 
user54412
$\sum_j \alpha_j \sin(j x)$? with $\{\alpha_j\}$ chosen to give the right timbre?
 
Anyway... it's technically end-of-chat-session time (no need to stop talking though), so thanks everyone for coming and see you in two weeks! When maybe we'll have an actual topic of discussion.
 
user54412
@ManishEarth well, when your analysis is advanced enough, I've always been interested in inversions - raising or lowering some notes in a chord by an octave to change their ordering
 
5:01 PM
@ChrisWhite as in?
@ChrisWhite yeah
 
user54412
like, most cultures seem to think a perfect fifth (higher note is 3/2 \approx 2^(7/12) the frequency of the lower one) is just great
 
@ChrisWhite But I'm going to later record some sounds (flute, voice, violin, etc), take their fourier transform, and get better waveforms out of that
 
user54412
but the perfect fourth is not quite so popular afaict
 
user54412
actually, the perfect fourth was more popular than it is today in, e.g., the European Renaissance, but that fad didn't last for some reason
 
fourth as in Fa?
Still quite popular in Indian music
 
user54412
5:06 PM
@RhysW You missed the best title on the entire Stackexchange network: How can I keep monsters out of my nether regions?
 
Indian music is usually solo with a tanpura in the background, and the tanpura either plays a Do-Sol, Do-Fa, or Do-Mi chord
@ChrisWhite o.o
 
@ChrisWhite my bad, i just took the ones from the top voted as example hoping to encourage him to find mroe fun ones :D
 
user54412
@ManishEarth Ah, well, Do-Fa is not unpopular in western music, but it is a bit overshadowed by Do-Sol, despite the fact that they are almost the same thing
 
question
 
@ChrisWhite In Western music they are exactly the same thing
 
5:09 PM
why is physics talking about indian music? :L
 
In Indian music they usually are, though in some ragas you take the slightly higher Ma /Fa (27/20) so it's not always
 
user54412
@ManishEarth well, yes, unless you care about which note is absolutely lower (i.e. break the symmetry imposed by equating all notes off by a factor of exactly 2 into the same equivalence class)
 
@DavidZ C'ya later David :)
 
@ChrisWhite I'm thinking in the symmetric loopy system :P
 
user54412
@ManishEarth which is great - I'm just giving you stuff to think about when your analysis gets tired of easy stuff :P
 
5:12 PM
lol
An interesting question is, does f and 2f sound the same when applied to a sine wave?
Note that there are no harmonics.
Because sine wave
They sort of do sound nice when played together as compared to f and 1.99f or something. But that could be the beats. Another thing I want to analyse
@RhysW Music is math. And physics.
 
@ManishEarth true, just dont start talking about nodes and antinodes on a vibrating string please :P
 
Notes and antinodes in a vibrating air column then?
 
no no nodes :P
 
user54412
@ManishEarth One of the coolest classes I took as an undergrad was an order-of-magnitude physics class, and one of the things we calculated was how close two frequencies could be to be (slightly | very) distinguishable given just the spacing of receptors in the cochlea
 
@ChrisWhite nice!
 
5:57 PM
@ChrisWhite I took down the Chinese data (I can easily swap it in in place of the Indian notes).
Made the graphic above because I wanted to see how they compare
Raw data:
Shrutis = {{1.25, "G1"}, {81/64, "G2"}, {254/243, "r1"}, {16/15,
    "r2"}, {10/9, "R1"}, {1.125, "R2"}, {4/3, "M1"}, {27/20,
    "M2"}, {45/32, "m1"}, {729/512, "m2"}, {1.5, "P"}, {5/3,
    "D1"}, {27/16, "D2"}, {128/81, "d1"}, {8/5, "d2"}, {15/8,
    "N1"}, {9/5, "n2"}, {16/9, "n1"}, {6/5, "g2"}, {32/27,
    "g1"}, {243/128, "N2"}};
Wa = 2^(1/12); Western = {{Wa, "D\[Flat]"}, {Wa^2, "D"}, {Wa^3,
   "E\[Flat]"}, {Wa^4, "E"}, {Wa^5, "F"}, {Wa^6, "G\[Flat]"}, {Wa^7,
   "G"}, {Wa^8, "A\[Flat]"}, {Wa^9, "B\[Flat]"}, {Wa^10, "B"}, {Wa^11,
 
user54412
6:32 PM
@ManishEarth very cool!
 
6:45 PM
Had an F-15 Instructor pilot explain to me what keeps airplanes in the air. That is money and gasoline. Neither money nor gasoline care which way up is. And that is why some planes can fly inverted and others can't. Money (design) and gasoline (engine) — Jerry Oct 21 '11 at 1:53
 

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