MeetMeAtTheMovies [they/them]

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: January 18th, 2026

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  • To coordinate that many people, you would need either:

    • a political party that would coordinate global actions via some sort of hierarchy
    • a disaster of some kind that affected enough of the population that the entire world could be convinced to act all at once, or at least in quick succession, but still didn’t take out all of our communication structures so decentralized communication would still be possible.

    We saw how Covid worked out so I think the likelihood of everyone not only acting at once, but also in unison, because of a disaster is quite small without a party to coordinate. There need to be constraints on behavior with levers of power to pull and enforce those constraints in order to get literally billions of people to do the same thing at the same time. I don’t see a way around it.










  • Okay so sounds can be broken down into individual tones called sine waves. The math that lets us do this doesn’t care about how tonal or noisy the sound is. It takes arbitrary input. However, human brains and ears (as well as those of many other creatures) seem to optimize for tonality of some type.

    The simplified explanation is that we like when the frequencies of the tones that make up a sound are in whole number ratios (the harmonic series). However, there’s a tolerance for frequencies which are close to those ratios but not perfect. And when harmonics don’t fall perfectly within the harmonic series, we can instead prefer intervals between notes which are slightly “out of tune” compared to what the harmonic series would dictate. For instruments like strings and woodwinds where the vibration of the air happens along a more or less straight line, the harmonics tend to be close enough to the harmonic series for this not to matter a ton. But for instruments with different resonant features (bells are a common example), the effects of this are more pronounced.

    There is also some math which makes tuning instruments solely to the harmonic series impractical. This combined with the tolerance for consonance I mentioned before has led to a rich sea of different traditions which play around with tuning in different ways. The western tradition alone has a long history with how a twelve note chromatic scale ought to be tuned. It turns out that equally diving the octave into twelve notes just so happens to be a good approximation of a lot of harmonic series intervals, but some intervals are less perfect than others. It’s all a series of compromises.