Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
Part of what makes recording studios somewhat odd, a little museum-like in spirit, is that the gear of the past is not always rendered obsolete, even as the very latest technologies are welcomed in. A Telefunken U47 microphone from the 1940s is a favorite among artists across genres. Still. A Fairchild 670 compressor from the 1950s—they can cost some thirty thousand dollars on the vintage market—is regularly used in the digital environments of today’s best commercial studios. “There is a mystical air about a Fairchild 670,” Pete Townshend has said. “Sorry, but that’s a fact.” Old technologies, mythic technologies, and the very latest gear mix together in a way that is singular to recording culture. With the shift from analog to digital recording, the mixing of old and new would be ever more conspicuous and common. Imagine an office in which individual workstations have equipment from different eras: a typewriter in one, a Macintosh from 1985 in the next, and, in the following cubicle, a MacBook Pro from 2022. It wouldn’t happen. When the new stuff comes in, the old goes out. Computers, printers, copiers. In a recording studio, because different eras of technology do come together, a common language must be found.
Deliver Me From Nowhere
Warren Zanes
no one—in the game today works harder or invests more in his body and surrounds himself with the right people to keep it in peak condition. But it’s still not easy, and Kobe makes that decision, every day, to do the work. Again: the most talented guy working harder than anyone else. It’s a choice. Each of Kobe’s workouts takes around ninety minutes, and a half hour of that is spent just working on his wrists, fingers, ankles . . . all the details. That’s how the best get better—they sweat the details. And every workout, at some point he’ll glare at me and ask, What we got left? Because let’s face it, the work is hard and tedious, and sometimes that hoop looks as if it’s a thousand feet in the air and you’re trying to reach it wearing lead boots. But he does the work because if he can’t put that ball in the hoop, everything else goes away.
By carrying out such simple experiments, scientists can measure the strengths of the electric and magnetic fields, and Maxwell’s equations predict that the ratio of strengths gives the speed of the waves. What, then, is the answer? What did Faraday’s benchtop measurements, coupled with Maxwell’s mathematical genius, predict for the speed of the electromagnetic waves? This is one of many key moments in our story. It is a wonderful example of why physics is a beautiful, powerful, and profound subject: Maxwell’s waves travel at 299,792,458 meters per second. Astonishingly, this is the speed of light—Maxwell had stumbled across an explanation of light itself. You see the world around you because Maxwell’s electromagnetic field drives itself through the darkness and into your eyes, at a speed predictable using only a coil of wire and a magnet. Maxwell’s equations are the crack in the door through which light enters our story in a way that is every bit as important as the discoveries of Einstein that they triggered. The existence in nature of this special speed, a single, unchanging, 299,792,458 meters per second, will lead us in the next chapter, just as it led Einstein, to jettison the notion of absolute time.
Why Does E=mc2?
Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise