Sonar

How the Navy Hears Subs 3,000 Miles Away. (It's Genius)
Second Order Science

Previous related posts:

• SOSUS - my run-in with SOSUS in college
• Star Trek Science - submarines so quiet they can't hear each other

Wikipedia:

• SOSUS
• SOFAR Channel

What's Old is New Again

New Acoustic Drone Detector

Another chapter in the drone wars.

Soldiers Operating an Acoustic Locator in 1940

Power

Why The Baldwin Centipede Broke Every Railroad That Bought It — 91 Feet Of Failure
Cab Forward

I'm watching this video about the Baldwin Centipede locomotive, and he mentions the La Vergne 608SC diesel engine and I get distracted. He don't show a picture, or at least not a good one, so I go looking and found some passable images on The Baldwin Diesel Zone. 

La Vergne 608SC
Click to embiggenate

The 608SC shows up in 1945, but the company was around for another 20 years. So what were they building? In 1964:

The last 600 series engine was built at Eddystone. Stationary 608A #7113

Eddystone, where's that? Ask Google and the first interesting thing that pops up is the Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy. Okay, a power plant is not a locomotive, but they are like brothers from different mothers, brothers under the skin, so to speak. They are both industrial power machines, which is close enough. Besides, I have a soft spot for power generating stations, so I go take a look. On Google Maps, Eddystone is a suburb of Philadelphia and the power plant looks like this:

Eddystone Generating Station
The image is about one-half mile across

The power plant is surrounded by a double set of railroad tracks and most of the land inside the tracks appears to be flat, bare ground, or maybe concrete. If this power plant was burning coal, both of those features would be useful, but there doesn't appear to be any coal. However, there are two big oil tanks.

The company website gives a synopsis:

Ensuring Grid Stability Through Fuel Diversity

Eddystone Generating Station plays a critical role in delivering reliable power through fuel diversity. Owned and operated by Constellation, this six-unit, 820-megawatt (MW) power plant is located on the Delaware River in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, just south of Philadelphia.

Eddystone Units 3 and 4, each with a capacity of 380 MW, were installed between 1967 and 1970. These subcritical steam boiler-turbine generator units can operate on either natural gas or oil, providing flexibility based on market conditions.

Units 10, 20, 30 and 40 are oil-fueled peaking units with a combined capacity of 60 MW. They are designed to run during periods of high demand and were installed in 1967 and 1970.

Construction of Eddystone began in the mid-1950s, with the now-retired Units 1 and 2 coming online in 1960. Both were supercritical steam boiler-turbine generator units that operated on coal. Unit 1 was retired in 2011, and Unit 2 followed in 2012.

Eddystone has been in business for 70 years, and for most of that time they were burning coal. It's only been in the last 15 years that they've fully changed over to gas and oil. I wonder how much it would cost to replicate that railroad track today. Google says one to five million a mile, for straight lines on level ground. I'm gonna say 10 to 20 million for this industrial location. Is there any other commodity that could use such a setup? A grain terminal maybe? Probably not while the power plant is operating.

There seems to be some disagreement over whether Eddystone should be operating or not. There's too many competing interests and it's too far away, I'm not gonna stick my nose in there, though maybe I should. Data Centers are one of the competing interests, and there are a bunch of them being built around here. I suspect they are piggy-backing on the electrical power distribution system that was installed to support Intel's Giant Ronler Acres Microchip Foundry. They might be piggy-backing as well on the tax deal Intel got when they set up shop in Hillsboro.

---

An aside: While I was writing this post I tried to copy the phrase

Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy

from Google's search page, but when I pasted it I got:

Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy

Curious as how this was being done, I used Blogger's html mode and found that pasting that line came with 3KB of html fluff. A little poking around reveals that including this little bit of text:

style="display: inline-block; transform: scaleY(-1);"

inside a <p> tag will do the trick. 

P. S. When I looked at this post on Feedly, the inverted text was not inverted.

---

Horseshoe Curve Pennsylvania - on the way from Altoona to Gallitzin

The narrator in this video repeats some of his stuff a little excessively. I don't know whether he is just filling time, hoping to pound these phrases into the listener's brain, or whether he just likes the sound of his own voice. Is that even a real thing? Liking the sound of your own voice? I don't even know what I sound like, I guess my voice is acceptable. Anyway, I suspect the phrase 'liking the sound of your own voice' is just something some wag made up to describe someone who talked a lot.

The point I was trying to make is that I have seen several videos like this, and I guess I got to give these guys credit for putting together a polished video. Not everybody can do that, but I suspect some of these, especially the ones where the narrator never appears, are just having an AI read a script.

Blasting

Bachman Turner Overdrive - You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet 1974 Video Sound HQ
NEA ZIXNH

It's a nice day today, so I've got the windows down in my car, cruising up Highway 217 and this tune comes on the radio. Actually, YouTube Music via my smartphone and then through a headphone cable to the radio. So this tune comes on and it's a banger, so I wanna hear it loud. But I've got the windows down. Ever notice that nobody ever drives with the windows down anymore? Anyway, back to the radio. Can the radio handle it? And more importantly, can the speakers? I've dealt with dead speakers before (for example) and I don't want that. Unfortunately the only way to find out if they can take it is to turn up the volume, so I did. All the way to 35. Normally I'll have it around 15 or so when I am driving around in town, 25 MPH or less. On the highway with the windows up I'll turn it up to 20 to 25. This 35 business is uncharted territory, but the radio and the speakers handled it just fine. I think full volume on this radio is 40 or 50. Never tried it.

I think somebody spent a couple of bucks on the sound system before I got the car. The radio is a Kenwood with a detachable faceplate. It has one big knob that, besides turning like a volume control, it also acts like joystick to do I dunno what. I kind of learned a couple of things, but then I started using my smartphone and forgot all about the front panel controls. Now I use the buttons on the steering wheel. On the right side of the wheel I have buttons for the cruise control, which I use the heck out of. The stereo controls are on the left side of wheel. They allow me to changed the volume and channel and also mode. It has five or six modes (USD, CD, Radio, Blank/Inactive?, and Auxiliary, which is the one I use with my smartphone). So I no longer even have to touch the front panel.

New Ear

Still Machine - Echoes Within (Official Music Video)
Someoddpilot Records

I dunno about this tune. It's not pop-rock with snappy lyrics and a cool beat. Atmospheric is what I say now. We shall see. But this story on Willamette Week is why I'm posting the tune:

Portland’s Salvo Beta Releases New Music for the First Time in Decades by Daniel Bromfield

A cochlear implant has inspired Sean Wolfe to try making music in a new way.

Salvo Beta, the project of Portland electronic musician Sean Wolfe, just put out its first new music in nearly 25 years. And in order to make it, Wolfe had to learn to hear music in a totally new way.

His two remixes of the Chicago band Still Machines’ song “Echoes Within” are directly inspired by his experience with a cochlear implant, or CI—a surgically implanted prosthesis he received in 2024 after losing most of the hearing in his right ear.

“There’s basically a wire with a bunch of electrodes, and each electrode only triggers a certain frequency band,” Wolfe explains. “The in-between sounds are kind of weird.”

In order to achieve the desired effect on the remix, Wolfe manipulated a Moog synth sound through spectral shaping, a production technique that allows producers to alter individual frequencies. The result sounds something like a bell pinging underwater; the post-punk source material is clear, but the music sounds waterlogged.

“One of the things that really kind of shaped how I started making the music is inferring how frequencies can be shifted and perceived by someone like me, who has one of these CIs,” he says.

Tone of Voice

Lone Star Parson posted a video about soldiers of the Gloucestershire Regiment. I tried watching the video, but the narration repulsed me. I can't explain why exactly, perhaps it sounds like a marketing spiel. Tone of voice has a lot to do with whether I will watch or post a video. Can anyone explain this?

The Answer - Imagination Audio Books

The Answer
Imagination Audio Books - Topic

The question is 'who started the war of nuclear Armageddon?' An American and a Russian scientist discuss their plan to launch 50 kg of anti-matter high up and watch it as it falls back to Earth. What a good idea. 30 minutes is just enough time to wear myself out walking around the block. Could it be that the bomb that started the war wasn't a bomb made on Earth by human beings, but a chunk of anti-matter from another galaxy that just happened to strike Earth?

Resurrecting Old Tape Recordings

How a beef jerky machine saved a lost 1980s dance music classic from oblivion!
creativeplanets

That's the problem with all this new fangled technology, it can't stand the test of time.We should be carving our records in stone, the way the ancients did it, and we have their records, don't we?

Creative Planets has a video of the restored song. You have to go to YouTube to watch it as they have disabled embedding on other web sites. Twerps.

Airplane Headset

Bose A30 Aviation Headset

Marc brought his very expensive and recently repaired Bose headset for show & tell last week. The headset cost like $1500. The reason they can charge so much is because of the noise canceling. Small airplanes, like Cessnas, are very noisy, so you want your headset to be noise canceling. Evidently the noise in small planes has a low frequency component that ordinary noise canceling headsets can't cope with. This one does, hence the price.

Joe Rogan Experience

Joe Rogan Experience

I like Joe Rogan. I haven't been listening to his podcasts until yesterday when I got some Bluetooth ear phones.

Eigsupia Open Ear Headphones

I didn't want noise canceling earphones, I want to be able to hear what's going on around me. I can understand why some people might want the noise canceling feature, like if you are listening to music and you don't want to listen to the cats yowling next door, or you are working in a noisy environment. I wanted these for when I am out walking around.

Last summer I was going for 2 or 3 mile walks several times a week but I eventually gave it up, I just lost my desire for it. I finally figured out what my problem was - I was bored. I had walked all over the neighborhood and I had seen all there was to see and it wasn't that interesting. 

IAman has been telling me about the podcasts he listens to, but I always found them slow paced and tedious, but now I understand. If you are engaged in doing something physical a voice droning in your ear can keep your mind occupied. I walked two miles each of the last three days and it was a breeze.

I started with Antonio Brown, a former professional football player. One of subjects they discussed is CTE:

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, is a progressive degenerative disease affecting people who have suffered repeated concussions and traumatic brain injuries, that may occur in some athletes and others who have been exposed to concussions and repetitive head impacts.

Tone Matters?

Making an old piano sound new
The Piano Doctor

I am going to assume this guy believes what he is saying. I'm sorry, I can't hear any difference between old and new. Okay, I might be able to hear a slight difference, but not enough for me to say one is better than the other. It might be because I am old, or because my loudspeaker is weak, but I suspect my brain is not as sensitive to sound as some other people.

I was talking to a guy I know about tunes and he tells me he doesn't really care for instrumental music, he prefers singing. That shocked me. I never understood the popularity of opera. I find opera tedious in the extreme. Singing by itself is not my favorite. I like a tune with music, singing and lyrics that are clear. Lyrics don't have to be totally clear, nonsense is sometimes okay, and there are any number of tunes out there I have zero affection for. Rock and roll and jazz are more my cup of tea.

Treasure

Lightbox Diamond Factory, Gresham, Oregon

At lunch today, Iowa man tells us he has discovered a diamond factory in Gresham, just east of Portland. There is a story in Oregon Live from a few years ago. Who'd a thunk it? (Previous posts about Diamonds.)

I mentioned this video I came across recently. Jack thinks the Federal Reserve Bank in New York's gold bullion hoard is worth more. Let's see:

Gold on hand	6,331	tons
times	2,000	pounds per ton
times	12	ounces per pound
times	2,600	dollars per ounce
equals	395,054,400,000	dollars

Jack is right, 400 billion is more than 10 billion. Of course this depends on the Federal Reserve telling us the truth about how much gold they have and I am not sure I trust them any more than I trust the Federal Government.

In the Netflix series Black Sails, the pirates recover many tons of gold from a wrecked Spanish treasure ship. Gold is heavy, so they convert a portion of it to gemstones which evidently have a higher value to density ration. This seems to like a risky proposition to me. Gold can easily be measured, gemstones need an appraiser both when you buy them and again when you sell them, which means you are at their mercy, that is, if you can even find one. A couple of pounds of gemstones could be worth as much as a ton of gold, so if portability is an issue, then the risk entailed might be worth it. Gemstones have no particular attraction for me. Oh, they are pretty enough, but not they are not pretty enough that I am going to spend a pile of loot to acquire one just so I can look at it. If one did fall into my hands I would probably hang onto it because it is more likely to hold onto its value than anything else. Some people like to have them so they can show them off. I am not one of those people. My wife has to remind me to shave when we are going out.

Jack's sister recently sold a pile of silver coins she inherited from her father. A lump of silver the size of a pack of cigarettes is worth about $1,400. The coin man used the ping test on her coins.

Ping Test for Silver Coins & Bars
SilverCoins.com

Ping test is a good thing to have in your pocket if you are dealing in silver. There are any number of videos talking about the ping test and they are a real grab bag. First problem is that the ping test is not definitive. The second is it can be very hard to tell the difference between a real coin and a fake, especially if you don't have anything to compare it to. Third is that some real coins will fail the test. I picked this one because it's not too long and he just balances the coins on his finger.

Update the next day: changed ounces per pound from 16 to 12 per Stu's comment.

Tubular Bells

Came across a couple of people playing with sound in tubes today.

Innovative Thinking
The_Curiousguy

COPPER PIPE MADE INTO A STUDIO DELAY THAT RUNS AT THE SPEED OF SOUND
LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER

Roland CR-78 CompuRhythm

The electronic looking box in the video is a Roland CR-78 CompuRhythm, the first actual drum machine from 1978. Used ones are still available.

Since we are looking at electronic black boxes, here's a couple of shots of a strange looking box from the Nexflix series Kleo.

Black box with blinking lights hanging on the wall in Uwe's garage in Kleo season 1 episode 4 just after the 30 minute mark and the 50 minute mark.

It plays no role in the story, it just hangs on the wall, blinking its lights. I have not been able to identify it and I even asked reddit but I have not received any response. Let me know if you recognize it. The show is set in East Berlin in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.

Here's the original tune, in case you have forgotten, or maybe you never heard it. I mean it came out in 1973, so for pop music, it's old.

Mike Oldfield - Tubular bells
4esno4ok

Get a Move On

Get a Move On
Mr Scruff

This tune just came over the ether and I said Man! haven't heard that tune in a long time. Why has it been so long? Was it part of some previous musical environment that somehow didn't manage to follow me around? I mean it was all digital, I have, I dunno, maybe a hundred CD's but I don't think I have played a single one in years. Well, okay, there was a time when I was playing the same tune over and over again while I was doing a few minutes of exercise, probably going up and down the stairs. But I was just playing whatever was already loaded, which I believe was an album by America, possibly Ventura Highway. 

1967 Buick LeSabre dashboard

At some point I went over to digital. I had those cheap computer speakers which were probably not very good, but for somebody raised on single 6 x 9 speakers mounted under the steel dashboard and playing through a steel grill, they were just fine, as long you didn't need a lot of volume.

Not too long ago I splurged on a Blue Tooth speaker and it does very well for me. One of these days I might look for something better, though how can you tell until you hear it? I went looking for loud speakers once when I lived in Austin. There was a store not too far from me that had a large selection of loudspeakers, all hooked up, in a separate room, for you to listen to as you desired. Acoustic suspension speakers were all the rage then, but they all sounded a little dull, not crisp and clear like the giant V2 speakers that didn't use acoustic suspension. They wanted $600 back then which was not undoable, but it was a big chunk of change so I did not buy them.

Just went looking for the post about the Blue Tooth speaker and I was surprised how many posts I have made about speakers. I ain't even an audiophile.

CETI Whale Project

CETI Whale Project

Aljazeera has good video about the CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) Whale Project. All the stuff on YouTube is wretched.

Voices

Voice actor performs 10 popular styles of voice over
Tawny Platis

This is great. I have noticed that there are different styles of speaking, like the flat, disjointed AI reading a script and the super annoying woman on the radio cramming more emotion into an ad for something useless, but to have all these different styles laid out is just wonderful.

Save Byron's Bar, Part 2

Podcast from IPR (Iowa Public Radio). The first ten or fifteen minutes we have a woman interviewing Byron so we get to hear from the man his own self. After that it kind of turns into a drone of people talking, or maybe my brain just tuned out. I listened to Byron and that was enough to convince me that it was worth posting, i.e. I enjoyed listening to it so I'm sticking it up here.

Rumor has it that a fund raiser is being set up.

Save Byron's Bar Part 1 Here

This and That

WICKED

I'm working the Sunday Jumble and one of the words, after it's been unscrambled, is WICKED. Now WICKED is a perfectly cromulant word. You might notice that the first four letters of WICKED is WICK. WICKED looks like a past tense of the verb WICK, but I don't think WICK is a verb unless you are referring to someone's violent actions, like 'he went all John WICK on the bad guys'. But WICK, as far as I know, is a noun, not a verb, so you can't have a world like WICKED unless you are making it out of some other kind of WICK. Maybe we should look up WICKED and see what we find:

wicked - evil or morally wrong.

Origin Middle English: probably from Old English wicca ‘witch’ + -ed1.

But there's something funny about tacking ED onto the end of WICK. If you tack ED onto the end of some verb like CALL you get CALLED, but you do not pronounce the ED like you do in WICKED, It's more like CALL'D, whereas with WICKED you get a distinctive ED sound at the end. Or maybe that's just me.

I looked around for some code to embed some audio clips, but I got nowhere. Probably wasn't holding my mouth right.

SUBTITLES

We're watching the Portland Trail Blazers basketball game this evening and I notice that the subtitles have gotten turned on. They don't seem to bother my wife and she's the devoted fan, but they bug me. They cover the top, I dunno, 20% maybe, of the screen and they don't really interfere with watching the game, being as they are usually giving us long shots so we can see the whole of the action. The court occupies the middle half of the screen, so the top and bottom quarters of the screen are just noise, you can fill them with whatever you want and it won't interfere with the game. Vital information goes in the bottom quarter and the top quarter is just the audience, so the subtitles can go up there. But they bug me, so I turned them off.

After the game we switched to True Detective on HOMAX or whatever it's called, and now I gotta turn the subtitles back on again.

So what's the diff? When we're watching the game, the announcer fills the sound track and it's like a pleasant hum of background noise. Nothing he says is of any import, but we've been listening to him for years and whenever the Blazers play in some foreign city we sometimes get foreign announcers, and those guys just grate on me.

When we are watching shows off the internet, be it Netflix, Prime or HOBOAX, we like to listen to the dialog, but sometimes we can't quite hear what they're saying, either because they talk so quietly, or background noise, or an accent, or, what's probably the worst, is when they make a quick out-of-character quip and you have nothing to grasp onto that will help your mind make sense of what they said. So we turn on the subtitles,

Yesterday I said that I don't listen to people unless they are right in front of me. That's not exactly true, I listen to TV dramatic shows, and I watch YouTube videos. I think the difference might be that they are like basketball games, I'm watching the action and the audio track is just warm background noise. I suspect that I keep going back to the same ones because I like the sound of their voice, or at least not repelled, which some voices do.

 

Tina – The Tina Turner Musical | West End trailer

We went to see Tina at Keller Auditorium last night, and there was something very wrong. I don't know if it was me or whether the sound director was asleep at the wheel, but the sound was awful. I mean, it's probably me. I'm old and my hearing is not that sharp, and a big production company that's putting on this show would certainly have people who know how to deliver the sound they want, so it must be me. But good lord almighty, why did it sound so bad?

At times the sound was normal, but anytime they got into full song (which was most of the time) it was like somebody had turned up the volume to 11 and the loudspeakers were being overdriven. It was like a big blare of noise.

I enjoy listening to pop and rock music at home, so I am not completely clueless, but I usually listen at much lower volumes.

What is going on? We were sitting in the box seats which are like the first balcony above the main floor, if that makes any difference.

Anyway, here's one of her hits. It doesn't sound anything like it did in the show last night.

Tina Turner - What's Love Got To Do With It (Official Music Video)

Sound

Puttering

I use the YouTube music app on my smart phone to supply me with tunes both at home or when I am out driving around in my truck. The truck might have BlueTooth and I know my phone does, but I'm still not sure about this BlueTooth business. I use it connect to my portable speaker when I am outside on the patio, so I'm not a complete Luddite. But the truck also has a mini-stereo jack in the console, the phone has one as well, and I have a cable with the correct plugs on both ends. When I was growing up, everything was connected with cables. Wireless remote controls were something only the Jetsons had. I like cables, so I use the cable to connect my phone to the truck.

Volume control is iffy using the sliding volume controls on my computer. They don't give me fine enough control. I don't know whether it is the control or my fingers, but it doesn't really matter, the result is the same. The upshot is that I will use the two volume controls in tandem. I am tempted to say that I preferentially use one for coarse volume adjustment and the other for fine control, but I can't say which one is which.

With the truck I turn the volume control on my phone all the way up. Evidently that gives the truck a big enough signal that I can get decent volume control using the truck's volume control knob (not a slider).

AIWA NSX-V21 Stereo System
Looks just like my stereo

I connected my phone to our home stereo the other day when we had some people over and I used the same technique of turning the volume on the phone up all the way. The stereo was just providing background music and we were having a lively discussion, so I didn't really notice the music. Eventually the person was sitting nearest the stereo alerted me to the fact that sound from the stereo sounded like garbage. I think I switched to CD's or something.

Today I tried the phone with the stereo again, and now when I don't have big crowd of people around it is obvious how bad the sound is. Turn down the volume on the phone to half way or so, and turn up the sound on the stereo and it sounds much better.

I don't exactly how old the stereo is, it might be older than this house, which means it is like 25 years old. It came with a remote control, but I don't think we ever used it. I tried it out today and unsurprisingly it didn't work. Pop open the battery cover and we have dead corroded AA batteries. Take them out, shake out the debris, scrape the contacts with my pocket knife, load new batteries, and Oh wonderous miracle! It works!