Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound (opens in new tab)

The sad thing for me is that a lot of those strange, eclectic sites are still there, only they became really hard to find. Thanks to Google and other search engines prioritising recency and Brands (with a capital) in all results, the eclectic is penalised to the point of near invisibility.

There was never a point to them, but they were hugely interesting. Today there's no point bothering as it would be gone forever a month after posted to twitter or a Facebook group now bloody everything has to have a stream or timeline. So akin to a chilling effect it invisibly promotes things that have releases. Products.

Nostalgia is some of it I'm sure, but I really do think there's something more concrete there too.

> I wonder if that's going to happen for my kids.

I've got a four month old. By the time she's in third or fourth grade, I expect that VR will give her the same kinds of experiences that I had with the web at that age. What made the web exciting wasn't just the fact that it was run by amateurs, it was the fact that there was just an enormous amount of possibility waiting to be explored where we genuinely didn't know the answers.

I actually think the web itself may go back into that kind of phase again after a couple more iterations of Moore's Law make programming easy enough for people who wouldn't be able to do it today, especially when combined with blockchain opening up new kinds of relationships that people can have with one another. The web currently has some issues, but I think a lot of people have given up on it prematurely without taking into consideration the new kinds of experiences the recent and upcoming improvements to the underlying infrastructure are going to make possible.

I think you're totally right that it feels like that wonderful old Web, the one that felt like a magical place, a weird place, seems to have vanished.

For me, some of that's moved on to YouTube. Even today, I find channels full of crazy stuff, brilliant stuff, beautiful stuff, educational stuff, stuff I'd never even heard before, just randomly stumbling around. It's hard to find them, what with the suggestions throwing only the lowest-common-denominator version of the stuff I get baited into clicking on, but sometimes I manage to run across it.

>* My fondest memories of my teens was finally having a computer in my room and the freedom to stay up late and explore the online universe*

This is something i think about regarding my kids... specifically that my experience was free and unfettered - theirs is contolled, walled and full of ads and bullshit.

No, I think that very sadly you're 100% right. They won. The internet is commercial. The internet is the corporation's, not the people's. The early, magical, futuristic Internet is gone for good. All we have now is a bastardized version of that ideal of global network.

The method given on that site for computing the component that comes from the last 2 digits of the year can be made a lot easier for mental calculation. I'll give some known improvements below, and then offer one of my own that is noticeably simpler.

In the following, let Y = the last two digits of the year (e.g., 18 for 2018), and let N be the value we are trying to be compute. We only actually need N mod 7, but I'm going to leave out the reduction mod 7 in the equations to reduce clutter.

The simplest way to compute N is simply:

  N = Y + Y//4

I'll use Python3-like arithmetic and pseudocode in this comment, so "//" is integer division (with x for times to avoid accidental italics).

To keep the numbers smaller during mental calculation, people have developed alternatives. The one given in that link is this:

  N = Y // 12
  N += Y % 12
  N += (Y % 12) // 4

An interesting alternative, called the "odd+11" method, is given on the Wikipedia article [1]:

  if odd(Y): Y += 11
  Y = Y // 2
  if odd(Y): Y += 11
  N = -Y

For the last step there, N = -Y, it will usually be easier and clearer to reduce Y mod 7 before doing that N = -Y. Also, given Y, sometimes the simplest way to get -Y mod 7 is to just note what you have to add to Y to get to a multiple of 7. For example, if when you get to that step Y = 20, note that adding 1 to Y gives a multiple of 7, so -20 mod 7 = 1.

Anyway, here's my method. It keeps the numbers smaller--if you reduce mod 7 aggressively never more than 12--at the cost of slightly more branches in the logic.

Let the last two digits of the year be T and U, so Y = 10 T + U.

  N = 2 x T
  if odd(T): N += 3
  N += U
  if odd(T):
    N += (U+2)//4
  else:
    N += U//4

That if...else is taking into account the number of leap years that have occurred in the current decade (not including the year T0). When doing mental calculation, it is probably easier just to remember that if T is odd, at 1 if U >= 2 and add another 1 if U >= 6, and if T is even same except at 4 and 8.

Here are examples, using some years from the link, with parenthetical explanations for some of the numbers:

2018: T=1, U=8. 2x1(T) + 3(T is odd) + 8(U) + 2(U>=2,6) = 1 mod 7.

1929: T=2, U=9. 2x2(T) + 9(U) + 2(U>=4,8) = 1 mod 7.

1999: T=9, U=9. 2x2(T%7) + 3(T is odd) + 2(U%7) + 2(U>=2,6) = 4 mod 7. Note that I reduced U and T mod 7 inline when using them. You can do this as long as when checking odd/even you use the original T, and when adding in the leap year correction you use the original U. E.g., for 99, you could compute it like it was 22, except you have to add the 3 for odd T, and use 9 for the U>=2,6 check.

1982: T=8, U=2. 2x1(T%7) + 2(U) = 4 mod 7.

1969: T=6, U=9. 2x(-1)(T%7) + 2(U%7) + 2(U>=4,8) = 2 mod 7.

Some might find changing the leap year handling to this a little easier instead of just remembering the 2,6 or 4,8 +1 points. Change the if...else to this:

  N += U//4
  if odd(T) and N%4 >= 2: N += 1

E.g., compute the leap year adjustment with U//4 regardless of whether T is odd or even, and if U is in {2, 3, 6, 7} and T is odd, add one more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule#The_%22odd_+_11%...

or Zeller's congruence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeller%27s_congruence

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On a motorcycle one is much more connected to the environment and I think that is one reason people like them. Its fun to come down into a hollow and feel the temperature change. Smells are also easily detected. Sound, on the other hand, is mostly the motorcycle noise (which can be fun too). Reading this comment made me think it would be really interesting to try out an electric motorcycle.

I wear headphones when I'm out most of the time, but at least half the time I don't have anything playing (and a third of the time it would be an audio book, not a constant noise like most music). It's still a big difference in how connected I feel to my surroundings. I'm not sure it's related to sound, as my headphones don't dampen much. I think it's just the expectation of people when they see someone with headphones and it allows me not to interact as much.

I don't often listen to loud music in headphones, but if I have headphones on where I need situation awareness, I'll be quick to remove one --- usually the one I expect to be closest to whatever I might need to hear (most often car traffic).

Windows down in a quiet (electric) car is pretty amazing too, even in a traffic jam.

One of my hobbies is birding: specifically going out and trying to count all the birds I can find down to a species level. This requires a good ear to do well. Many times I find myself closing my eyes and pausing all bodily motion to really listen intently for the low chips of a sparrow, or distant drumming of a woodpecker.

As one example, I’ve seen kids develop perfect pitch growing up in highly musical environments. I think it’s easier for them to learn it than adults, but it becomes a lifelong skill.

Listen to Morse code.

Recognizing intervals. There's a lot of free apps for this.

Have you ever tried? I find the article's description a bit too advanced for a first try. I have personally had success finding walls or large furniture after only a couple minutes of very slowly walking around a room and clicking my tongue (higher pitched) with my eyes closed. True, I probably won't ever be able to ride a bike, but it's sufficient to quickly test out basic echolocation. I have done many trials with friends and everyone is able to hear at least a subtle difference when standing directly in front of a wall as opposed to a few feet away.

I didn’t know he passed. What a remarkable person. Thanks for the update.

I recommend this excellent podcast on the same topic https://www.thisamericanlife.org/544/batman

Also helpful in really foggy roads, slow down and roll down windows a little to pick up other vehicles

The blindness/sightedness phenomenon you're describing is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight .

There's a controversial opposite, called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%E2%80%93Babinski_syndrom...

(Semi-relatedly, plug for Peter Watt's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) )

Your sentence about "It almost seems to me as if..." seems to be hinting at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism / https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/ . This is a theory/proposal that consciousness does not actually cause behaviour, but is simply a subject experience caused by the physical processes that do cause behaviour (how's THAT for a gross oversimplification, fite me bro). I suggest that this is both an interesting theory in its own right, but also an interesting mental exercise to limber up how one thinks about things like volition/free-will and responsibility.

He should have used "inebriated", technically cannabis does act as a toxin to you, but, I find it misleading to categorize it like that =]

It definitely does. I've practiced this a little myself and in louder environments you need a louder click. On the other hand, ambient noise can give rich information about close obstacles without yourself or that object needing to actively make any noise.