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I’m making a change
Apr 26, 2021 · original
Before the world went digital and we longed to fly out electric hover cars like the Jetsons, we all used to exchange physical bits of metal called “coins” whenever we were interested in buying something. Because coins usually represented small amounts of value – such as a penny – you would invariably end up with a small pile of the things (sometimes called “change”) which wouldn’t amount to very much on their own. But, if you took a phrase like “a penny saved is a penny earned” to heart – that change could build up to much more than you expect. That’s exactly what happened to Ed Knowles, the owner of an Alabama gas station, who set the United States’ record for largest penny collection with over 1.3 million pennies (that’s over $10,000 in just pennies). The record was verified after a coin counting machine took over 7 hours to count the pennies Knowles had stored in eight large oil barre
Some of my biggest mistakes
Jan 18, 2021 · original
Have you ever tried to drive a car with the “wrong” speedometer settings? You may be surprised to find this out, but if you live in America, yes your car has two speedometer settings. You can drive using miles per hour (mph) or kilometers per hour (km/h). This simple difference between US Imperial units and Metric units is small, but the repercussions of using the incorrect measurements are large if you’re driving in another country like Canada or launching a $125 million spacecraft. On December 11, 1998, NASA did exactly that – making a very expensive mistake by launching the Mars Climate Orbiter into space. Though it took over 10 months to discover, the Orbiter’s final destination would see it burning up in Mars’ atmosphere before collecting any data whatsoever. Now, hopefully our mistakes haven’t cost us $125 million (or even more, when considering the work hours) – we still make plen
Audio Buffer Size as Explained by a Whale-Turtle-Octopus
Jan 11, 2021 · original
The year was 1911, and in a showdown that must’ve inspired the knife fight between the Jets and Sharks ( West Side Story, y’all ), ten uber-rich businessmen challenged Harry Houdini to perform an incomprehensible death-defying escape from the belly of a whale. Except apparently whales were hard to come by, so Houdini said “screw it, I’m escaping a whale-turtle-octopus instead!” Keen observers noticed that the seabeast looked more like a giant leatherback turtle than a whale, but today nobody’s quite sure and there are varying accounts as to whether or not it was a whale, turtle, or an octopus-ish thing. And lest you think I’m lying to you about this story, on September 26, 1911, Harry Houdini snuggled up with leg irons and handcuffs inside a sewn up whale-turtle-octopus carcass that was wrapped in chains. Around 15 minutes later, a smiling Houdini emerged unscathed (though nearly having
Professor Butts Teaches Us About Stereo (Interleaved)
Jan 4, 2021 · original
Today, I must regale you with the life story of an incredibly important man who has certainly touched your life – Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, A.K. Now, before you start laughing and say to yourself “Adam, I don’t know anyone by THAT ridiculous name!” – I assure you that you know his work very well. Professor Butts was an inventor who began his work in 1929 and retired in 1931, only to come out of retirment briefly in 1934 to work alongside his friend Boob McNutt until their funding ran out shortly thereafter. And no, I’m not joking about any of this. You would know him for his famous inventions which took simple tasks such as swatting flies, shining shoes, and putting stamps on envelopes and turned them overly complex. Today, you know Butts’ inventive machines by the name of Butts’ creator – comic artist Rube Goldberg. Just like Professor Butts’ machines, you and I often have the
Defeat “I don’t wanna” with Preparation
Dec 28, 2020 · original
Wake up from the alarm. Groan. Stretch. Sigh. Lament that you don’t want to get up. Debate about not getting up. Get up and shuffle off to the restroom. Consider skipping morning productivity and going back to bed. Does this sound like you every morning? Of course it doesn’t – it sounds like ME! Yes, I’m neither joking nor lying when I share with you that mental and physical resistance are at their worst for me first thing in the morning. I’m usually tired, my body aches, and my brain just “doesn’t wanna” (yes, read that like a three year old). The days where this doesn’t happen are a pleasant surprise for me, so I’ve come to rarely expect them. As much as this current reality can suck, what’s really nice is that there’s a surefire way to defeat this morning resistance: preparation. And not only can preparation set you up for success in the morning, it can set you up for regular success
What Atomic Clocks Can Teach You About Bit Depth
Dec 14, 2020 · original
What if I told you that you had exactly 24 hours to make build a clock more accurate than a caseium timepiece? Well, you’d probably reach into your drawer and pull out your laser-suspended strontium clock right out! Right? Well, if you don’t know (as I didn’t) – our modern “atomic” clocks are measured in their precision by the rate at which a given atom resonates. This “sampling period” idea goes back all the way to sundials, which repeated it’s period once per day. Most clocks that you know would either use quartz (10,000 oscillations a second) or caseium (9 billion oscillations a second). But, the most precise timepiece in the world was built around 2005 by Hidetoshi Katori and his colleages at the University of Tokyo using an atom of strontium – which had previously been impossible to utilize despite it’s 429,228,004,229,952 per second oscillation rate. Katori and crew solved the prob
Magic Cars and Digital Audio are the Exact Same
Dec 7, 2020 · original
What would you think if you saw a car rolling all the way up a hill from a dead stop, without the driver accelerating? You’d probably exclaim “that’s impossible!” or “it must be haunted!” or maybe “it’s magic!” But it isn’t magic, and there’s actually a number of places in the world that this very phenomenon occurs. They’re called “gravity hills” or “magnetic hills”. And though you can get in your car and roll uphill just to convince yourself, the only thing truly out of whack in these places is your eyes. Your eyes claim these hills are “magic” because there seems to be no simple explanation in the same way your mind decides that whatever sound does inside a computer is “magic” because your eyes glaze over when you see computer code. But – I assure you – though you’re used to turning mouth farts into machine guns in Pro Tools, how sound is represented inside a computer as completely und
How to Deal with Grief (and Self-Doubt)
Nov 30, 2020 · original
When I was faced with extreme grief, despair, dread, and anger, I responded in a way that I would never recommend – I went to school the next day. On November 28th, 1999, my father lost a year-long battle with prostate cancer. He was just 49 It was, and in many ways still is, a defining moment in my life that shaped my character forever. But to start, I reacted poorly. In the moment, on that very day, I told myself that I would not let his death affect me. So I called a friend, got a ride to school, and acted as if nothing happened. Like me, your normalized instinct may be to react to pain, loss, and failure with anger, defeat, despair, and self-doubt. You may be responding to the loss of a family member, or simply not getting called for an interview after your 5th application. Regardless of your situation, I’ve learned the steps to move forward in a healthy way. What we’re going to cove
Stop Counting Your Losses
Nov 23, 2020 · original
Thankfully, you’ve never done so poorly at your job that you ended up being engulfed in flames. Well, unless your name is Dale Earnhardt Jr. – now retired super-famous NASCAR driver. Earnhardt Jr. is the son of absolute racing legend , Dale Earnhardt Sr., who sadly passed away during the final lap of NASCAR’s “Super Bowl” – the Daytona 500 – in 2001. Just 3 years later, still fairly young in his career, Dale Jr. was still attempting to find his own way in auto racing and chose to enter a Le Mans Series race in Sonoma, CA. While Earnhardt attempted to be competitve in the race, he lost with one of the most famous wrecks of his career. When approaching a turn, he spun out and crashed the back of his car into a wall. The resultant damage caused fuel to begin pouring out of his car and onto the track, which ignited and rapidly engulfed both the car and the driver inside. This had to be a har
Forget that Failure is Even Possible
Nov 16, 2020 · original
“Forget that failure is even possible.” – Steve Sims (Bluefishing) “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” – Henry Ford When you think of “success”, I assume what comes to mind isn’t near national tragedy with a potential death toll in the thousands. And yet, there’s the story of Hartford, Connecticut’s XL Center – home UConn Huskies’ basketball and ice hokey, as well as a former host to NBA and NHL teams. On January 17, 1978, the arena then known as the Hartford Civic Center played host to a Tuesday night men’s basketball game between the University of Connecticut and University of Massachusetts. UConn upset UMass in front of a raucous hometown crowd. Just six hours later, the roof of the building catastrophically collapsed due to engineering failures that miscalculated the pressures of heavy snow. Thus, the largest tragedy in Connecticut’s hist

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