to be 100% clear, i was talking about using a mixer to run sound to make a live band sound bigger, not to record them, but yeah, to this day lots of live sound cabinets are without crossover.

who needs em when there’s a qualified technician with several amplifiers setting everything up and running the board?

It’s an incorrect comment based on a real thing.

There was equipment with switched panning, but knob panning was so common it was referenced in diy electronic project books aimed at high schoolers.

There are some tube amplifier circuit types where the pan control actually changes directly what signal goes to what grid of what tube, and in those cases it would be useful to have switch instead of pot pan, but there were circuits to mitigate the problems and even tubes intended to take multiple grid inputs by that time.

Another comment explained how a person could work around that problem and get pot pan with split channels and they’re right.

One of the biggest reasons for switched panning was that it wasn’t always clear that you were going for a stereo effect! Often in the case of reinforcing a live band, you had some speaker cabinets for different frequencies and it would be stupid to send the trumpets to the big cabinet meant for the tympani!

Partial panning was also used in lots of the movie versions of stereo and multi source sound from over a hundred years ago so it’s not like switched panning was the only option or something

Switched panning is famously present on mastering machines though for the old (er than single groove stereo) two groove stereo record type.

So switched panning isn’t the reason for the wild mixing of the 50s and 60s, but it did exist.

The early days of stereo (which is what you’re talking about, the recordings of 70s which aren’t using stereo as an “effect” almost universally have the vocals panned to the center. The old way to take the vocals out of a recording was to adjust how much of the signal present equally on both channels was allowed to be played) were all about two things: backwards compatibility with mono systems and giving people with stereo systems a recognizable effect no matter what goofy system they had.

Wild panning accomplishes both goals.

Studio engineering that used the stereo format to create the illusion of a room or capture the sound of the room the players were playing in wasn’t developed yet and came from the experimental stereo recordings that sound crazy now like silver apples of the moon.

The difference between a reference guide intended for plant identification written and edited by experts in the field for the purposes of helping a person understand the plants around them and the ai is that one is expressly and intentionally created with its goal in mind and at multiple points had knowledgeable skilled people looking over its answer and the other is complex mad libs.

I get that it’s bad to gamble with your life when the stakes are high, but we’re talking about the difference between putting it on red and putting it on 36.

One has a much, much higher potential for catastrophe.

Do not use ai for plant identification if it actually matters what the plant is.

Just so ppl see this:

DO NOT EVER USE AI FOR PLANT IDENTIFICATION IN CASES WHERE THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES TO FAILURE.

For walking along and seeing what something is, that’s fine. No big deal if it tells you something’s a turkey oak when it’s actually a pin oak.

If you’re gonna eat it or think it might be toxic or poisonous to you, if you want to find out what your pet or livestock ate, if you in any way could suffer consequences from misidentification: do not rely on ai.

I’ve taken deer with 556. Even if I hadn’t, I know people do because all the heavy loads sell out around deer season.

Yes but my measuring tape actually has 32nds on it. The meter side only has whole divisions, not tenth graduations.

So the sae “ridiculous fraction” is a measurement I can easily make with tools I have on hand to the tools own limit of precision and double check in my head with five seconds of fifth grade level mathematics while the metric one can’t be actually measured without a set of calipers and honestly would merit long division or a calculator to double check and still needs rounding off a vile eighth of millimeter to hit what is in your own words “a practical number of significant figures”.

Imma throw something out there and I hope the earnest admission that I can’t divide 752.5 by four in my head with the level of confidence required to cut materials by is enough to recognize it not as an attack but as a real grasp at understanding:

People who make posts like yours either don’t measure things in any meaningful way (cutting, dividing, scribing lines, etc) or don’t know how to work with fractions.

Like I said: it’s not an attack, I just can’t see how someone would suggest that the metric equivalent to 13/32 is easier to work with unless they didn’t intend to actually measure it or couldn’t do fractions.

I’m afraid you’re confused. Not voting for the candidate literally doing genocide is the right thing.

You know, because it’s right to not support genocide.

No.

I’m going to not support the genocide and I’m going to accomplish this by not voting for the parties and candidates supporting it directly.

I’m not going to make a utility calculation. I’m not going to try to participate less in the probabilistic social apparatus.

I’m going to vote for a party and candidate that didn’t do a genocide and isn’t going to do a genocide.

Edited my shit. You should vote for the Pakistani super league tho…. I bet soccer players would stone cold do a better job than the average member of congress.

Sortition 2024!

Don’t support the genocide, don’t vote for Biden or trump. Vote psl instead.

E: it’s party for socialism and liberation! Not Pakistani super league, but vote for that too.

i’ve worked in a few factories and this is not always true, especially with short runs.

to make a machine assemble a thousand things you gotta “tool up”. that used to mean designing and building the tool that would do the repetitive motion but nowadays its just as much laying out gcode as it is figuring out how to make the more generalized machinery perform the specific tasks required for putting together some thing.

so take a computer mouse, there’s like four parts. a usb wire, a circuit board, the bottom and the top. assembling the mouse is plugging the wire into the circuit board, aligning the board to the standoffs in either the top or bottom and make sure the wire is going out the hole then snap the top or bottom to it’s counterpart then test.

probably fifteen seconds from parts to tested and ready for packing?

so in a thousand unit run you’re looking at four and a quarter hours of human work. lets go ahead and round up to five, since someone is gonna have to set up our mouse assemblers bench, write out instructions, unpack the parts and dump them into bins, etc. it won’t be 45 minutes of work, but more slop is better!

so for a thousand unit run you could pay your mouse assembler $15/hr and still only have 7.5c unit cost of assembly.

packing is another one that often gets done by people, but a mouse is pretty much wrap, tie, bag, box. maybe another fifteen seconds of labor, so add 7.5c onto your assembly and youre looking pretty good.

now your contract factory isn’t gonna quote you what they think they can hit, they’re gonna drag their laziest, slowest worker over to do the process five times, take the average and quote that. then they can charge you for ten hours when it only took five and pocket the difference. even then 30c per unit is most likely less than the robot equivalent.

just the cost of a quote to tool up for that run is maybe $50? free quotes weren’t the norm domestically back in the day, but they were becoming more common overseas. then you’ve got the cost of the tooling (we’ll keep ip like part layouts and gcode here) and the machine time itself!

there’s also the actual injection molding of the top and bottom, making the cord, assembling the board, etc, but thats a whole nother conversation!

Usually when I’m making a precise line, I’ll put an edge on the pencil lead so it will make a mark thinner than its diameter.

I seem to remember you as the one who brought up calculators, but I’m open to being mistaken.

here’s how i did: 2’/4=6", 5 5/8"/4=1 13/32, so it’s 7 13/32"

smart to pick a prime numerator!

well, it’s 3.16 mm, not 31.6, but i get your meaning.

in that case if you wanted to be real precise, you’d measure from the left or right side of one graduation to the same side of the next graduation. using that technique a person could get a better 1/8" off a ruler than someone eyeballing fractional mms would.

I still don’t see how a calculator helps though.

you’re right. the person who initially brought up 9.5 was comparing it to the sae equivalent 3/8 (9.525mm, but whos counting).

Just wait for an American to tell you how it’s easier to use fractions with imperial. I’ve legit seen them say shit like 3/8 of an inch is easier to think about than 9.5mm.

the reply was what i was thinking of, the obvious answer: “what if you need to divide by 3?”

so good eye.

one scenario when i’d want a precision answer to 1/3 of 9.5 but also not have immediate access to a calculator is when woodworking. you know, seeing as how 9.5 is (the actual metric defender this time’s approximation of) 3/8… and there’s no way that a calculator would help me there because the result of 9.5/3 is 3.16, a length i’d need at least tenth millimeter vernier calipers to accurately scribe. even 9.525/3 is 3.175, a measurement that requires um precision to scribe!

the inch side of my ruler, however, is graduated in eighths of an inch and i can make that measurement easily with it.

i’ve also used a third measurement of a known diameter when drilling holes in metal to use a technique described in machinerys handbook to cut slots.

you were the one who asked what a third of an eighth was. i’m not sure why. why did you bring up a third of an eighth? was it because you thought it would allow a person to more easily answer the question what is 1/3 of 9.5?

i guess my real question is this:

how does a calculator help you make more accurate measurements?

string would be tough at that scale but weirdly might be easier to make that measurement with than a ruler. just cut your string to 9.5mm length, then divide it by three, one of those divisions is your target length and you even have the other two to check your division’s margin of error against.

to calculate and measure with a ruler would have you measuring 3.16666… which i would not be able to measure with a ruler. now a vernier caliper would be the right tool to make that measurement, and even if mine only had tenths of a millimeter id just round to 3.15mm and mark in between the mm graduations when forced to use that group of tools.

of course that’s if you know how to use a set of calipers. its not as easy as one might think.

lets not forget that your response to the one third of 9.5 conundrum, which was posed by a metric defender, is:

okay then my answer to the hypothetical is 9.5/3, which is every bit as easy to find on any measurement device, or to use for any practical purpose, as 1/24th

which is literally not true as i have explained about the 24th scale ruler and even my digital calipers don’t do repeating digits or express portions of metric measurements in fractions.

of course, in a real world situation i’d never be trying to mark 3.1666…mms because it’s 1/3 of a thou under 1/8 inch. i’d just mark an eighth of an inch like a normal person.

even using a calculator to figure out the length suggests that a person in that conundrum stop using the metric side of their ruler.

well, considering i was sitting in the bathroom looking at my phone while wearing clothes when i saw your response, i’d say string and a calculator were both equally close at hand.

only one of those can be used as a measuring tool, though… I guess you could mark off how many calculator lengths something is and measure it later. ngl, i hung a shelf using that technique once, but i wouldn’t use it to find one third of a length. the nice thing about string is that if you don’t have a measuring stick you can always stuff it in your pocket and measure it later when the appropriate tool is at hand.

apologies for any confusion about checking measurements, i wasn’t referring to using my own foot to verify the length of a line, but the common practice of using fractional mathematics to make and verify calculations thousands of years ago and to this very day. we have records of this method being used across language and unit barriers in the ancient world.

there’s another post earlier itt blaming the mars climate orbiter failure on sae unit conversion but nasa puts the blame on itself for not double checking the software and measurements they got back from lockheed. I remember back in the day hearing about that failure on the news and seeing how it was not a problem of difficulty of conversion between the compound units involved, but failure to actually convert between them at all!

since you brought up calculators, there’s a salient point to be made here using a long winded anecdote: when i was in school there was a point in time when suddenly teachers began providing calculators for the exams. this wasn’t that magic moment when the mathematics became just too complicated to expect a middle schooler to do it all on paper. last years class had to use longhand, this years class were provided little blue texas instruments scientific units with a ten digit display and helpful guide to performing logs and other operations that would have been taught using super and subscripts glued to the inside of the cover that would be taken back up at the end of the test.

this didn’t happen going from one grade level to another, but right smack dab in the middle of the academic year. a whole classroom of students yanked bodily into the digital age.

when the parents found out you’d think the questions were gonna be written on the proctors inner thigh. “i had to do it by hand, my kid should too!” “you’re supposed to be teaching them math, not how to use a calculator!” and it’s sister “you’re supposed to be testing their ability to do math, not use a calculator!” but the most common one by far was “they’ll all just get the right answers and we won’t know who studied and learned.”

when the grades came in there was almost no change from last years class.

there were some individual students who did better or worse than their test history would suggest and a whole bunch of new common wrong answers, but by and large aside from errors the ability to perform calculations in response to a prompt was unaffected by ten signed digits of precision.

how could it be that a calculator made no difference?

it turns out that understanding what a question was asking for, verifying ones work and recognizing wrong answers that needed to be rechecked couldn’t be performed by the little blue rectangles.

and many years (and measurements) later i have the same outlook about metrology: comprehension of the goal of a measurement gives you a much better chance to get it right than a calculator.

No, like I said in my edit, my drafting ruler has a three or four inch long 24ths scale.

Even if it didn’t, having to mark the halfway point between graduations is hardly helpless.

18ths would need two divisions by three, but thankfully dividing a known measured length by three is easy with a piece of string.

There’s a reason millennia of our ancestors used fractional divisions of standard lengths and weights. They can be measured, calculated and double checked (this one is doubly important for stuff that really pisses off metroids like the hogshead/tun) using cheap, universally available tools and deceptively simple mathematics that have been the foundation of what constituted a good education for centuries.

Metroids itt btfo, malding, fractionally mogged upon.