Tendo City

Okay here's an interesting page...
http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/mcgreevy/

What this consists of is some fellow's experiments with recording certain light frequencies and converting them directly to sound, as in, the same sound waves. The light waves are actually of such a low frequency that they are in the realm of sound wave frequencies. Specifically, really low radio wave frequencies.

Anyway, since it's a direct conversion, there's no pitch substitution like one might do with other odd conversions, and it really is pretty much hearing light.

These waves are produced by our own lovely magnetic field on the planet, which is being bombarded by the solar wind.

So um, what does it sound like?

Well, the entire reason I'm posting this here is because I thought of a certain video game. Listen to the first few files there and you may think, as I did "Hey, Earthbound!". It's like those crazy background sound effects (either played on their own or "under" the game's normal sounding music" used all over the place in that game for odd alien sounding effect! I have a feeling this is where they got the idea.

Okay if you want something else Earthboundy, check out this noise.

http://cassini.physics.uiowa.edu/space-a...sini/SKR1/

Seems they just recently measured some light from Saturn's atmosphere, light waves literally miles long, and converted it to sound (with a pitch adjustment this time as you can imagine).

Another thing you can do if you want to hear weird stuff is to stick a radio with an AM band up to a running TV or computer.

Converting light to sound---so this isn't actually what we would hear if we were there then? It's just an enormously wasteful use of computer power, making sounds out of things that don't make sounds, so in fact, they're not real sounds?

Well, it's what you would hear if you could hear light.

Oh, and I would say that there are more wasteful uses of computer power than this.

Well Darunia, you would have a point if this was something along the lines of using a laser to measure the distance of clouds and converting that to sounds, and perhaps even specific instruments for varying height levels. There is no corrolation there except what the programmer decides on. (However, I would not call that a waste. What good is art? What good is a newborn baby?!)

This however is a pretty direct conversion of light waves to their sound wave equivilant. Instead of oscilating electromagnetism, it's oscilating matter. It is a much truer equivilant of sensory conversion than other such things one might do (like a visualization plugin for example). As I said, the light waves for the first site, at least, are actually within the range of human hearing as far as the numbers go, except that it's light. This conversion is pretty accurate.

Oh yes, that'll work too GR. It works basically because of interference, and it'll work with other things too, like a microwave or refrigerator, or basically anything that produces a fairly strong electromagnetic field. Keep in mind those fields have zero chance of giving you cancer. They aren't energetic enough to break apart the bonds in DNA.

Something more wasteful of processor time: reading TC. Since your processor is sitting idle for about 99% of the time you are reading this page, I imagine that would have to be more wasteful than anything that actually uses the CPU.

No I'm saying I don't run anything that uses up unneeded processor time. "Need" is determined by what I feel like doing at the time. Constantly updating the weather is not needed at all. This policy prevents me from saying one day "gee, my computer is running more and more slowly, I WONDER WHY?!" when I have like 30 things running at once in the background that I for some reason decided were ALL essential to be running constantly at all times.

You know, like every single computer I end up having to clean up.

No, I was talking to Darunia. I don't like to install a ton of background stuff either, because you forget it's there. But it's not like this is some waste of a precious natural resource either.

Well maybe Darunia is a waste of computer power! OH BUUUUUUURN!

(I kid, I kid :))