phishead - Slashdot User

Comment Re: Astronomy, and general poor night-time resu (Score 1) 550

by phishead on Friday July 25, 2014 @07:57AM (#47529909) Attached to: Laser Eye Surgery, Revisited 10 Years Later

Ophthalmologists will put an eyedrop on your eye to force the pupal to dialate. They can then look inside with a bright light and a lens to inspect the health of the retina and optic nerve.

Comment Re:some data (Score 4, Informative) 668

by phishead on Monday July 22, 2013 @09:23AM (#44349679) Attached to: Fifteen Years After Autism Panic, a Plague of Measles Erupts

That's strange. If the coverage level is the same, why would there be 2-3x fewer cases in 2004-2008 when compared to 1990?

There's a transient effect of the current infection rate on future rates. If you have the same immunization coverage, but fewer people are infected, the likelihood of a non-immunized person coming in contact with a carrier is lower, thus the present infection rate will be lower.

Submission + - Why dissonant music sounds 'wrong' (nature.com) 1

Submitted by

ananyo

on Tuesday November 13, 2012 @08:17AM

ananyo writes: "Many people dislike the clashing dissonances of modernist composers such as Arnold Schoenberg. But what’s our problem with dissonance?
There has long been thought to be a physiological reason why at least some kinds of dissonance sound jarring. Two tones close in frequency interfere to produce 'beating': what we hear is just a single tone rising and falling in loudness. If the difference in frequency is within a certain range, rapid beats create a rattling sound called roughness. An aversion to roughness has seemed consistent with the common dislike of intervals such as minor seconds.
Yet when cognitive neuroscientist Marion Cousineau of the University of Montreal in Quebec and her colleagues asked amusic subjects (who cannot distinguish between different musical tones). to rate the pleasantness of a whole series of intervals, they showed no distinctions between any of the intervals but disliked beating as much as people with normal hearing.
Instead the researchers propose that harmonicity is the key. Notes contain many overtones — frequencies that are whole-number multiples of the basic frequency in the note. For consonant 'pleasant sounding' intervals the overtones of the two notes tend to coincide as whole-number multiples, whereas for dissonant intervals this is no longer the case.
The work suggests that harmonicity is more important than beating for dissonance aversion in normal hearers (abstract)."

Comment Want to know how Bourbon is Made? (Score 1) 128

by phishead on Friday May 27, 2011 @04:32PM (#36266968) Attached to: CmdrTaco Visits Pixar

If you're in Kentucky I can show you around the Buffalo Trace Distillery. We make bourbon and organic vodka from scratch.

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