by mikecarlton on 1/30/24, 9:30 AM with 44 comments
by mdip on 1/30/24, 6:22 PM
An hour or so from where I live there have been complaints about an infrequent low rumbling sound for years[0]. I'd wondered -- at the time -- why you couldn't just do something like they do with the gunshot detectors to find the source of the sound[1]. I suspect there must be a technical/physics reason that I am not familiar with. This article re-enforced that thinking for me -- I think I've heard one of these air cannons, before (I have not heard the Windsor Hum), and its characteristics seem more like a gunshot kind of sound than what's described here but ... if you can record the time it starts from three different points (and all you're looking for is "an area roughly the size of a large factory" because it had always been suspected to be one of the plants along the river), wouldn't this approach have been simple/cheap enough to do to figure it out[2]?
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/04/898853311/it-took-a-pandemic-... -- it was solved because a steel plant shut down and the problem went away.
[1] Part of the problem was that a subset of the population could hear it and a subset of that population noticed it enough to be bothered about it so it kind of led to a large number of people dismissing complaints as "people who complain about WiFi signals harming their health"
[2] And if I answer my own question: I suspect it probably was and I suspect the reason it wasn't done is that nobody cared enough to do it, really. :)
by gwern on 1/30/24, 5:36 PM
by efitz on 1/30/24, 6:35 PM
Why did you use pixels on a map image for location, instead of GPS? Phones have GPS these days. You could have a simple app where you push the button when you hear the noise, it reports to a cloud function, and instantly triangulates and throws a point on your favorite map program.
by NotYourLawyer on 1/30/24, 4:45 PM
But I guess not. Sound is slow on a distance scale of miles, so timing it to the nearest second is good enough.
by mixedmath on 1/30/24, 4:35 PM
At first, I thought there was a clear improvement. This problem essentially boils down to finding the intersection point of three circles. But it's also likely that with the small fuzz from imprecise time measurement that the three measured circles wouldn't actually intersect. I would guess that a small boost could be achieved by sampling points near the two intersection points of any two circles, but this is moot when it's just possible to brute force the whole grid.
by gorkish on 2/1/24, 11:57 PM
This is the point at which I would have changed my attitude to the situation quite dramatically. Given the opportunity to own up and simply apologize and fix the issue, the fellow just went full lie-to-your-face mode. What in the everloving heck is wrong with people?
by DylanSp on 1/30/24, 11:51 PM
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural_Airlines_Flight_178. There's a good article about the accident at https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/russias-potemkin-miracle....
by ok_dad on 1/30/24, 7:29 PM
The Army is doing some artillery training during the day and night for the past week or so in my area, but luckily they aren't doing it every 2 minutes all day and night, just for a few hours up until about 11 or 12 at night and maybe every 5 or 10 minutes they will fire a few rounds. It doesn't bother me anymore after hearing it constantly, but I also live directly next to a very busy street, so I am pretty used to loud noises. Maybe next year when they do the training again I'll try to pinpoint the explosions using this method (just for fun, because I am pretty sure there's only one firing range around here).
by VMG on 1/30/24, 7:15 PM
by PaulHoule on 1/30/24, 8:19 PM
(I do have reports though that the eggs are great, I think commercial goose eggs make the best Pirogi, and that someone was able to take two eggs from a nest year after year and even though they hissed bitterly the same pair would come back again year after year.)
by Log_out_ on 1/30/24, 6:57 PM
Imagine using such a farmers setup as vortex cannon, you could down non turbulence resistant air vehicles such as drones and glide bombs, with good timing.
by sandworm101 on 1/30/24, 6:13 PM
No. I strongly suspect they are dealing with Canada Geese. They are dominant in the photos. Canadian geese would be some random species of geese carrying a Canadian passport. Canada geese are the distinct grey-black species aka cobra chickens.
https://midwesternnewspapers.com/dont-cross-the-dreaded-cana...
by xnx on 1/30/24, 4:33 PM
by andrewla on 1/30/24, 6:14 PM
by mmh0000 on 1/30/24, 5:44 PM
This is a clean install of Python straight from the Python developers in a clean container. And it doesn't work. I figured I must need "points" so I pip-installed that.
Feels like every time I try to use Python, stupid, incomprehensible errors such as this occur:
```
root@1623eb794014:/# ./tri.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "//./tri.py", line 6, in <module>
from points import Point, Block
ImportError: cannot import name 'Point' from 'points'
(/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/points/__init__.py)