“School districts currently work with processing companies to offer cashless payment systems for families. But the companies can charge “processing fees” for each transaction. By law, students who are eligible for reduced price meals cannot be charged more than 30 cents for breakfast and 40 cents for lunch. With processing fees, however, families can end up paying 10 times that amount. Processing companies charge as much as $3.25 or 4% to 5% per transaction, according to a recent report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”
Yesterday I was saying how Biden’s penchant for getting stuff done without anybody knowing was probably what lost democrats the election, but that hopefully it would save a lot of people in the next 2.5 months
Electron microscope video of a needle on a vinyl record.
H O W
like you can tell me all you want how the sound is stored in the grooves but fucking H O W
HOW DOES THAT GET INTO THE NEEDLE
HOW ARE THE VIBRATIONS TURNED INTO MUSIC THAT YOU CAN HEAR???
H O W
The vibrations aren’t “turned into” music, they are music. When vibrations occur inside your inner ear, your brain processes this as sound.
The grooves in a record are an analogy for these vibrations, a method of remembering them so that they can be recreated later on.
Put your hand on a speaker while loud music is playing and you’ll feel the vibrations. Those are exactly the same vibrations happening inside your ear when you hear the music.
But how do you capture that?
Take a surface that vibrates strongly when a sound is played, like the skin of a drumhead for example. Connect that surface to a little tool – when sound causes the surface to vibrate, the tool digs a little bit into some wax, leaving behind a pattern that matches – in proportion – the vibrations of the surface caused by the sound. This is your analogy (hence: analog music).
Now, when there’s no sound playing, you run that little tool back over the pattern. This causes the skin to vibrate again, this time in response to the tool running over the pattern instead of because of an external sound. The vibrations should match, proportionally, the original vibrations of the music.. and thus these new vibrations, if you were to amplify them, would be a recreation or “recording” of the original music.
That’s oversimplified of course and things have changed a lot since the days of wax, but that is very basically how the process of recording music worked at first, and the general idea of how sound gets from a groove in a record into your brain.
(reblogging for Disparition commentary)
Thank you Science side of tumblr
I hugely appreciate people taking to the time explain stuff like this, as it helps put an end to the “wow, science is magic!” trope that’s become far too common.
I actually got to do this in a music class in college. we basically made a rudimentary gramophone using a pin for a needle, connecting it to string and that string piercing a paper horn. Had something spinning the record against the pin and out came the music. Granted it came out extremely distorted and at a low volume, but it really was that simple.
The upside is that there was an absentee ballot recount in our most populated and very blue county and it pushed us over for a blue Senate win. So yay for that because I was fucking miserable seeing the Republican win there too.
Btw, this is another reason to call your county clerk and make sure that your absentee ballot was counted! Even if we get another Trump presidency, which is very likely, those absentee ballots make a huge difference when it comes to the Senate, the House, governors, and other federal and state officials who can completely change the balance of their governments. My state’s electoral votes may be going to Trump and the majority of the elections went red, but we still got a Dem Senator and that win still means a lot.
Reblogging this for the day crowd. Even if you don’t think your ballot is enough to help sway the presidential election, there are still so many elections happening that CAN be changed with a recount.
Someone in the tags said that they couldn’t find out the race that this was about but hoped it was true so, I’ll be a bit stupid.
This post was about the Wisconsin Senate election. It was initially Eric Hovde ® who was declared the winner and then Milwaukee did an absentee ballot recount and it put Tammy Baldwin (D) just barely over the top. This is a MASSIVE win for Wisconsin, especially with so much of the state being red, and for the rest of the country to have another Dem in the Senate. And it happened because of an absentee ballot recount.
So yeah. There is the tangible proof you need that recounts DO make a difference and are worth demanding, especially in situations where polling places were closed due to threats or a bunch of absentee ballots were conveniently declared ineligible.
ALT
amhrancas 