Perplexing sentence of the day
Was reading up for my Multimedia Techniques paper when I came across this gem of a sentence. It’s from the chapter on audio in multimedia, sub-chapter phase. For understandable reasons, I will leave the name of the text and the author anonymous. Thankfully I have two better texts to read from and was going through this one ‘cos a friend recommended it. Guess who’s not recommending text books to me anymore? 
Anyway, here’s the paragraph (part of it). I’ve made the sentence bold - just to give it a little lift.
“…..There is some controversial evidence that humans can hear absolute phase. More importantly, phase problems occur in stereo transmission. If two signals are exactly out of phase, they cancel, resulting in the sound of silence. For normal listening this rarely happens. But consider the case when a stereo soundtrack from a movie is mixed to mono for conventional monophonic televisions. It can and does happen that some sound engineer somewhere mixed up the phase on some sound effect or two. There are true stories of the network executive heating up the telephone after the machine gun on his television suddenly spoke silently…”
Now can someone please make sense of the sentence for me? I’m wide awake - not drowsy at all. I’ve quoted verbatim from the book!
In other news, a gentleman from Australia found that water, an iPod and a screwdriver do not make the best combination.
Gotta hit the books - not literally 
.
Until next time - may your machine gun stay silent!
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At least this is clearly nonsense. Try this one: “The noncentral chi-squared distribution is given by [insert complex derivation here] where I(x) is a modified Bessel function of the first kind and F1 is a regularized confluent hypergeometric limit function.”
You’ll believe it when you see it? Here:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NoncentralChi-SquaredDistribution.html
May the Force be with us all…
Posted by Anshul
Comment by Anonymous — May 14, 2005 @ 2:37 am
If you hear the same sound (=mono) thru two boxes with a phasedifference of 0.5 the sound wipes itself out. Where the one box gives a plus wave gives the other box an identical minus wave, which together = 0.
This technique is used to make cars more silent for example.
Posted by temposchlucker
Comment by Anonymous — May 18, 2005 @ 1:58 am
That’s fine. It can also be done by a simple phase inversion on 180 degrees and playing the sound to intersect the originating wave. That’s not the point - it’s just that I found the sentence construction and semantic highy amusing - so I put it up
Posted by AC
Comment by Anonymous — May 18, 2005 @ 10:10 am
Sorry, my native language is Dutch, so the subtlety of the sentence doesn’t come through.
Posted by temposchlucker
Comment by Anonymous — May 18, 2005 @ 3:57 pm