hello my foul little beasties, i am taking a (hopefully brief) hiatus to deal with some health & personal issues. in the meantime here are some terrible awful no good wholesome fun facts i’ve been meaning to share:
bone china is called bone china bc yes it contains bones!
sometimes massive fields of ice eggs wash up on beaches. literally just ice shaped like eggs. that is a thing that sometimes happens and i derive joy from this peculiar world
If you have seen Ted Lasso you may have noticed these unusual microphones used by the football commentators.
Despite being a microphone nerd, I had never seen anything like them before. So I decided to go into research mode and discovered these microphones are quite fascinating.
They are called “Lip-Ribbon” or “Commentator’s” microphones.
They were specially designed by the BBC in the 1950s for extremely noisy environments. Soccer Football stadiums have peaked at 130 decibels so they needed something that would not get overwhelmed in that circumstance.
They use several very clever techniques to make sure only the voice is picked up and everything else is rejected.
First, they use a bidirectional polar pattern.
That means it will accept sound from two directions, but reject any sound coming in from the sides. And since the diaphragm is only exposed on one side, that helps reject sound coming from the other direction.
Next, the microphone is not very sensitive so you literally have to hold it up to your lips (hence “lip-ribbon”) in order for your voice to have enough sound energy to vibrate the diaphragm.
That top part rests directly on your lip and there is a little pop filter to keep your plosives in check.
There is a built-in high pass filter so it rejects any sound below the frequencies typically used by the human voice.
But my favorite trick… a labyrinthian internal baffle system.
(I found a diagram of this when researching but then I lost the tab and I cannot find it again. So you’ll just have to accept this crude photoshop I did in 30 seconds to help you understand.)
Sound is energy. And that energy is diminished the farther it travels. The inverse square law for sound states that the intensity of sound decreases by approximately 6 dB for each doubling of distance from the sound source. Sound also diminishes when it reflects off a surface.
That is a very sciency way of saying… make sounds go through a tiny maze and only sounds with the most energy will prevail.
So if you have your lip pressed up against the front of the mic, your voice’s energy will make it through the labyrinth of baffles without issue. But every other sound in the stadium will have a much harder time getting through.
These mics may even be vuvuzela-proof.
And even more amazing… this microphone was designed in the 1950s and they have yet to create anything better for incredibly noisy environments.
marco: hey! visser sixty nine! visser: my designation is visser three marco: i know but like marco: trust me, on earth that’s hilarious rachel: no, it’s not
Ok so for those who didn’t see the news, recently 5 rich people went “””missing””” (they’re totally fucking dead) in a “Titanic tourist submarine”, basically made as a way rich people can tour (what’s left of) the Titanic’s wreckage for a small fee of $250,000 per person.
Anyways, setting aside the horrific implications of dying in a submarine at
13,000 feet (~4km) below sea level, the more I learn about this entire situation the more I become morbidly…amused??
so for starters, the submarine was literally the submarine from Iron Lung. its a metal cylinder with one singular porthole at the front of the vessel that is bolted shut from the outside, and has no seats, its literally just a cylinder
the second thing you need to know is that this thing was wireless, as in it was being controlled from the surface and the people inside had no control, which is concerning in multiple ways because a ship this scuffed should have a safety cable leading to the “mothership” (basically if you’ve ever watched ocean documentaries and they always have that long cable attached to the sub, that’s for in case the wireless control fucks up and they need it to be wired)
what makes this little fact so much more morbidly funny is that this thing was controlled usingthe remains of a Logitech Gamepad controller from ~2004/2005, a controller notorious for being one of the most clunky pieces of gaming equipment ever designed. so clunky in fact that few people even recognized it, originally mistaking it to be a combination of an Xbox 360 and a PS1 controller. estimated price of $30.
“but Fortune” I hear a very few of you asking, “it shouldn’t matter what its controlled with, as long as the connection is good”
and to that my dear reader you would be correct! there are indeed submarines out there controlled with even simple joysticks, and using game controllers to control stuff like this isn’t new (why do you think army recruiters prey on low GPA high school gamers to fly drones)
no you see the issue comes when you realize that what this sub was using to transmit controls. was fucking. STARLINK.
Yes, that’s correct, Starlink, the service that can barely do its job on land was being used to transmit data through 2.5 miles (4km) of water, at a depth where anything that isn’t highly pressurized is crushed instantly
—–
And at the end of this, if some of you still feel bad for the rich people who spent a quarter of a million dollars to get bolted into a metal cylinder with no seats and a singular porthole that was being controlled by Elon Musk’s barely functioning wireless service and one of the most notoriously clunky gaming controllers of all time that was probably bought from a thrift store, just know that it was most likely over quick.
The likely thing that ended up happening was cabin depressurization, and at such a depth this means they were knocked unconscious by the rapid loss of pressure in the vessel almost instantly, and then shortly thereafter crushed by the weight of the ocean around them.
Scientifically speaking, they were likely dead so fast that the brain likely couldn’t even comprehend what was happening, the most they would’ve felt is a little pop in their ears for a fraction of a second.
i think it’s funny to frame this as ‘human’ hubris but more notable is how ingrained the logic of capital is. at some point “safety is just pure waste” because the expenses necessary to make a submersible safer to inhabit cut into profits. at what point? as soon as it’s convenient. it’s just a simple, wretched arithmetic to them
I read that he cheaped out on the forward viewport, installing one that is only safe at depths less than 1300 meters (about 4300 feet), but the Titanic is down at about 3800 meters (about 12,500 feet), nearly three times as much pressure as the ship can safely handle. And when the company’s quality control expert pointed this out to Rush, as well as pointing out that the “early warning” system he installed would likely not give more than a few milliseconds to react, and flat out refusing to let Rush take the ship out without at least a full scan of the hull, Rush just fired him, with security immediately escorting him out of the building.
And then Rush said “Ignore that guy, it’s fine!”, and piloted the unfinished and untested ship down into the depths himself.
There is a very good chance they’ve been crushed to death already (making the whole “we have to find them before their oxygen runs out!” rush moot), and that’s not funny at all. Poetic, maybe, but not funny.
“Private submarine carrying several billionaire tourists goes missing while surveying the wreckage of the Titanic.”
Well, it had to happen eventually. This is where big-ticket extreme tourism and shooting untrained assholes into space and such was always going to lead – frankly, it’s surprising that it took this long for a major incident to crop up.
“One of the missing passengers is the president and CEO of the company that owns and operates the submarine.”
Huh. Well, points for putting his money where his mouth is, I guess. I wonder if–
“The missing CEO’s name is Stockton Rush.”
Oh, bullshit. That’s not a real person – that’s the name of a guy who builds an inexplicably 1950s-themed underwater theme park and then gets eaten by a shark in a cautionary tale about the perils of libertarianism. That’s the name of a guy who carries off an oceanfront real estate scam that somehow ends with Superman fighting a telepathic squid. Fucking “Stockton Rush”. Unbelievable.
At this point I’m half-expecting the next article I read is going to reveal one of the other passengers is a self-styled “explorer” who has strong opinions about the continued geopolitical relevance of the British Empire OH WAIT
