h a l f b a k e r y"Bun is such a sad word, is it not?" -- Watt, "Waiting for Godot"
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Why should I use weeks to measure the time I'm dating
somebody, and miliseconds to measure the time between
the
finish of two racing cars? Because 20/60.480.000 th of a week
probably sounds kind of silly to express the difference
between the finishing of those two cars.
But what if there
would be a measurement unit that would
be
as acurate as miliseconds, but also be confortable to use as
it
is with weeks? Maybe logaritmical (I'm not a math wizard so
I'm
not sure)
So it would sound like: "we broke up 1,5 units ago" and also:
"I
finished just -0,2 units before him". The unit should be
usable in both
situations and you don't have to remember how to convert
those unit type of things.
Like I said, I'm not much of a math wizard, so I could be way
off
base here, and it's probably not even practical to use such a
complex unit (then again, I'm still having problems
converting
degrees celcius and farenheit), but it's something that came
up, so I committed it to my favorite bakery. :-)
Maybe one of you guys can shine some light on my idea.
Exponential birthday intervals
http://www.halfbake...irthday_20intervals
[hippo, Sep 27 2002, last modified Oct 04 2004]
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Annotation:
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'Maybe one of you guys can shed some light on my idea' |
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No, psneeks is asking for a logarithmic unit of time. Say we set the base as 60 and the zero point as one second, this will give |
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1 second = 0 ulmus
1 minute = 1 ulmu
1 hour = 2 ulmus
1 day = (gets calculator out...) |
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1 day = 2.78 ulmus
1 week = 3.25 ulmus
1 year = 4.22 ulmus
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-5 ulmus = 1.29 picoseconds
-4 ulmus = 77.2 picoseconds
-3 ulmus = 4.63 microseconds
-2 ulmus = 278 microseconds
-1 ulmus = 0.0167 seconds (1/60 of a second)
0 ulmus = 1 second
1 ulmu = 1 minute
2 ulmus = 1 hour
3 ulmus = 2.5 days
4 ulmus = 150 days
5 ulmus = nearly 25 years
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all, of course completely arbitary and fairly pointless. Cute, though.
(puts calculator away) |
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Hmm... relearning the concept of time.. Nope, not my bag, sorry. |
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Logarithmic units are only really useful when comparing quantities which tend to be logarithmic in meaning. For example, if on a recording a person's voice is 6db louder than the jackhammer in the background, it will remain so regardless of the volume at which the recording is played. |
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A useful place to which this sort of scale might be applied is audio frequencies, with the formula being 12*lg(freq_in_hz/8.1758) [so middle C would be a value of 60 and frequencies would line up with MIDI note numbers. |
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Give me .1693 ulmus to decide if I'll ever utter a public ulmology. |
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[admin] Corrected spelling in title, changed category. |
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Logrithmic units are used for many things already. A few logrithmic units I can think of off of the top of my head: |
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Decibels (sound)
Richter (earthquakes)
Stellar Magnitude (stars)
Storm Magnitude (storms)
pH (Acidity) |
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I'll buy [supercat]'s idea for logarithmic frequency units. I've seen way too many cases where log(f) is more directly useful than f itself. But I'm not sure if the normalization to the MIDI note numbers would be as universally useful as a plain log_2(f) or log_10(f). |
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ulmu.com is available. Cool.. I can't imagine there are many 4-letter domains available... |
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BigBro: I'll grant that lg(f) may be more useful than the MIDI-normalized value (i.e. a difference of one unit per octave); I don't see much use for a log10-based scale, though. Two pitches may be easily heard as being in a 2:1 ratio (or 4:1, or 8:1, or 16:1), much more so than a 10:1. |
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[supercat]: I was thinking more general-pupose signal analysis, not audio necessarily. But on further thought, octaves are still more useful (generally) than decades, so log_2(f) it is. |
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// Two pitches may be easily heard as being in a 2:1 ratio // |
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Not in your typical high school band. :) You'd be hard pressed to find an integer ratio in that mess. |
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If you are doing scientific work, then you already work in seconds. With some very large and very small multipliers. Which are powers of ten, so I think we are already using logarithmic measurement! |
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¯waugsqueke: utus.com (as in arbutus) is available … I also wonder how many four letter domains are available. |
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