@JtC

and in the biggest possible way.

Here's an anecdote from earlier in my career that illustrates the color metaphor. I was tasked with designing a sound synthesis IC for a well known musical keyboard company, to help reduce the cost of their products. One thing that is needed for making synthetic sounds (especially realistic sounds, ideally indistinguishable from actual instruments) is a source of *noise*, of all things. Think of the sound of a cymbal, or the hiss of air over the reed of a saxophone or the mouthpiece of a flute, or the kiss of rosin on a violin's strings. White noise, like FM interstation hiss. Musically neutral- which can then be added into other sounds to mimic the real instrument, regardless of which note they are playing.

This turns out to be an inordinate pain in the ass.

We can create pseudorandom noise via digital means, too nerdy to go into here. But with pseudorandom noise, there's always a perceptible tone down in the hiss- pseudorandom noise sings. Think of the unspeakably lousy cymbal sounds from the early Roland drum machines...

So we simulated more and more sophisticated algorithms, in the quest for the perfect unpitched hiss. And no matter what we tried, there was still always a tone down in there. We got to sequences of pseudorandom numbers that would only repeat once every hundred years or so. No joy. After a month or so, I got an idea. In a company full of musicians with well-trained ears, let's take our best pseudorandom source, and have everybody listen to it- and then walk over to the keyboard yonder, and play the pitch they hear.

And sure enough, everybody played a different note.

We all heard something different, but we still heard it. Caused a lot of consternation, that did, but we finally concluded that we simply couldn't do it digitally. Nowadays, random numbers are all the rage due to widespread adoption of crypto-everything- but you still can't do true-random digitally.

I was going to publish a paper on it, but time did not permit, and Management wasn't any too thrilled about disclosing our technology in any case. I ended up using the actual true-random analog noise derived from current flowing through an imperfect diode, and they sold thousands of instruments using that chip.

I pointed out that our brains are hardwired to find correlation in the noise- perhaps so that we could recognize our bearskin-clad mother's voice from the cave over the wind when we were outside foraging for food in a blizzard, or the like. That didn't go over well, but nobody came up with a decent counterargument.

Fun times, being there before the phrase "everybody knows that" applied... (;-)

#3
my friend. The truth, being subjective, is sometimes best left unsaid.

In my 30s I became fixated with physics. With no formal training I sought out every book I could find at Barnes and Noble on the subject, written in layman's terms, of course. I still have all of them. Carl Sagan's book The Cosmos, started me on that quest.

For me, at the time, it explained much of the unexplainable. Until I came to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Harumph.

Now that I think about it, there's a correlation between the Uncertainty Principle and Bill Casey's quote from above.

We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.
---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

@JtC

#3
my friend. The truth, being subjective, is sometimes best left unsaid.

In my 30s I became fixated with physics. With no formal training I sought out every book I could find at Barnes and Noble on the subject, written in layman's terms, of course. I still have all of them. Carl Sagan's book The Cosmos, started me on that quest.

For me, at the time, it explained much of the unexplainable. Until I came to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Harumph.

Now that I think about it, there's a correlation between the Uncertainty Principle and Bill Casey's quote from above.

We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.
---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981