What do all these buttons actually do?
That’s a mixing board in a recording studio. It’s a pretty large one. Fundamentally, it’s the same as a smaller version. Each strip down the board controls a single audio input – you’ve got an equalizer to tweak the frequency of the sound, a volume fader to control how loud it is & probably another knob to set your left/right position of the audio. There’s a few more advanced things like effects sends and what not but they’re just complications.
These things look more intense than they are. Each channel has a collection of nobs that can have different effects on the sound. From the channels, the sound goes to one or more outputs, after the channel controls have mixed them all nicely together. The outputs would generally be the sound(s) that goes into the computer where they can edit even more. Before computers, being good on the mix board was more important than it is now. You needed to get it right the first time with the full band. It was a much more intense process.
A pro would want such a huge number of channels because they might want to hook up an instrument, like a piano, to a few microphones so they have more control over the sound. If they want more sound from the left side of the piano (or add an effect or whatever), they have that control.
– ameoba
Why is Picasso considered to be a great artist?
Picasso did not make images the way he did because he couldn’t do realism. He was more than capable of realism. He would break down a subject into its core elements, remove what wasn’t necessary, and emphasize what was.
One famous example is his series of bull images, showing the range from realistic to highly-abstracted. The most abstract image is still clearly a bull, but has eliminated the extraneous details. The bull is still there, but the photorealism has been banished.
Here’s a better article on his bull series
– mouseasw
How did Helen Keller learn to read, write and speak?
Below are some excerpts from her autobiography The Story of My Life where she describes how she learned the abstract concepts.
I remember the morning that I first asked the meaning of the word, “love.” This was before I knew many words. I had found a few early violets in the garden and brought them to my teacher. She tried to kiss me: but at that time I did not like to have any one kiss me except my mother. Miss Sullivan put her arm gently round me and spelled into my hand, “I love Helen.”
“What is love?” I asked.
She drew me closer to her and said, “It is here,” pointing to my heart, whose beats I was conscious of for the first time. Her words puzzled me very much because I did not then understand anything unless I touched it.
I smelt the violets in her hand and asked, half in words, half in signs, a question which meant, “Is love the sweetness of flowers?”
“No,” said my teacher.
Again I thought. The warm sun was shining on us.
“Is this not love?” I asked, pointing in the direction from which the heat came. “Is this not love?”
It seemed to me that there could be nothing more beautiful than the sun, whose warmth makes all things grow. But Miss Sullivan shook her head, and I was greatly puzzled and disappointed. I thought it strange that my teacher could not show me love.
A day or two afterward I was stringing beads of different sizes in symmetrical groups—two large beads, three small ones, and so on. I had made many mistakes, and Miss Sullivan had pointed them out again and again with gentle patience. Finally I noticed a very obvious error in the sequence and for an
instant I concentrated my attention on the lesson and tried to think how I should have arranged the beads. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, “Think.”
In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea.
For a long time I was still—I was not thinking of the beads in my lap, but trying to find a meaning for “love” in the light of this new idea. The sun had been under a cloud all day, and there had been brief showers; but suddenly the sun broke forth in all its southern splendour.
Again I asked my teacher, “Is this not love?”
“Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky before the sun came out,” she replied. Then in simpler words than these, which at that time I could not have understood, she explained: “You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love you would not be happy or want to play.”
The beautiful truth burst upon my mind—I felt that there were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirits of others.
From the beginning of my education Miss Sullivan made it a practice to speak to me as she would speak to any hearing child; the only difference was that she spelled the sentences into my hand instead of speaking them. If I did not know the words and idioms necessary to express my thoughts she supplied them, even suggesting conversation when I was unable to keep up my end of the dialogue.
This process was continued for several years; for the deaf child does not learn in a month, or even in two or three years, the numberless idioms and expressions used in the simplest daily intercourse. The little hearing child learns these from constant repetition and imitation. The conversation he hears in his home stimulates his mind and suggests topics and calls forth the spontaneous expression of his own thoughts. This natural exchange of ideas is denied to the deaf child. My teacher, realizing this, determined to supply the kinds of stimulus I lacked. This she did by repeating to me as far as possible, verbatim, what she heard, and by showing me how I could take part in the conversation. But it was a long time before I ventured to take the initiative, and still longer before I could find something appropriate to say at the right time.
Learning to read and write
After learning to spell a few words, the next challenge before Anne Sullivan was teaching Helen how to read. For that she would give Helen slips of cardboard which had printed words with raised letters. Helen would touch the slip, learn the word and would understand that each word stood for a new object.
She began writing using grooved board . She wrote on the groove under which a sheet of paper would be placed. She also learned Braille script which helped her a lot to read and write.
Learning to speak
When Helen was ten years old, she came to know about a girl in Norway, deaf and blind like her, but who had been taught to speak. This fired her passion to speak like any other ordinary human being.Anne took her to Sarah Fuller, then the principal of Horace Mann School for Deaf. Sarah would place Helen’s hand on her lips, tongue, face and throat while she was talking. Helen would feel the positions of Sarah’s lips and tongue and vibrations of her throat. She would place her other hand on her own lips and tongue and would try to imitate the positions of Sarah’s lips and tongue. This was exhausting but she uttered her first sentence “It’s too warm here” within a few days. Though she learned to speak, she was never able speak with clarity.
Why is the Opera from the “Fifth Element” considered to be not humanly possible to sing?
“When composer Eric Serra showed soprano Inva Mula (who dubs the voice of the Diva) the sheet music for the Diva Dance, she reportedly smiled and relayed to him that some of the notes written were not humanly possible to achieve because the human voice cannot change notes that fast. Hence, she performed the notes in isolation – one by one, as opposed to consecutively singing them all together and they digitized the notes to fit the music. There are a few moments when you can hear the differences in the vocal tones of The Diva’s voice.”
As people sing higher notes, the vocal folds stretch to become longer and thinner, and as people sing lower notes, the vocal folds become shorter and fatter. The composer wrote the end section of this piece from The 5th Element without accounting for what is physically possible for a singer to do. Picture a pianist with only one hand, who is expected to play a fast piece where he must go back and forth playing the highest note on a keyboard, and the lowest. It’s impossible because the distance between the notes is too great to go back and forth quickly with only one hand. In order to achieve the effect the pianist would have to do exactly what the singer had to do in The 5th Element: record the notes in isolation, then edit them together later.
What is a 401(k)
Back in the day, companies would give employees a pension, where after retirement the company would keep paying a portion of their salary. The problem was that the company had to invest and earn money to pay those obligations, and sometimes they couldn’t.
The 401(k) gives companies the ability to put money toward employees’ retirement, but put the responsibility for investing on the employees. If they don’t enroll, or don’t contribute to get the maximum match, it’s not the company’s problem. The match serves as a benefit to attract better quality employees.
– paul-j-a
Is this as worrying as it sounds? “Resistance to last-resort antibiotic has now spread across globe”
It’s pretty terrible, yes.
R&D on new treatments, especially antibiotics that aren’t based on tetracycline, mycins, or macrolides, is slow going and has significant maturation time. In the meanwhile, drugs that are used to treat life-threatening infections will become ineffective.
Last resort antibiotics have significant systemic side effects already, and if even those are ineffective, we could see survival rates of bacterial infection drop to rates similar to those from before pencillin was developed; in effect, it would be as if we didn’t have antibiotics.
We can still contain this threat, but it will take a concerted worldwide push to totally eliminate unnecessary antibiotic use (such as doctor visits for flu or minor illnesses) and ensure maximum adherence to regimes as prescribed.
– NATOMarksman
How do radio stations know how many listeners they have?
Surveys, (primary Nielsen), and user engagement – it’s one of the reasons they run competitions on air. Only a tiny fraction of listeners respond, but the size of that fraction is relatively consistent. Some people have listening devices (PPMs) that send data back to Nielsen. A range of people are selected to cover different demographics.
Some stations use Arbitron. Arbitron sends out letters in the mail with dollar bills in them and asks people to fill it out for more dollar bills. It’s usually crispy $1. However, Arbitron reports quarterly listeners. Based on this reports, stations then review them to see how they can either improve or continue doing what they do. As for day-by-day listeners, it’s just a guessing game.
– Juliet-November
How would a $15 minimum wage ACTUALLY affect a franchised business like McDonalds?
It really depends on the Franchise, and what percentage of gross sales go to payroll costs, but lets look at your McDonalds example. About 10% of the stores are corporate owned, & the other 90% are franchised locations. The Franchisees pay annual fees to McDonalds for “royalties” & national advertising campaigns, which are calculated as a percentage of gross sales. About 1/3 of McDonald’s corporate revenue is collected from Franchisees
Here’s a sample income statement for an Average Mcdonalds franchise store based on typical figures.
“Crew”(non-managerial) Payroll costs amount to about 20% of sales. Most store-level Mcdonalds employees make anywhere between $7.25 – $9.25/hr – so lets assume employees at this location are making $8.25. If Minimum wages are hiked to $15 as proposed, that will equate to about an 82% wage hike. Assuming all sales stay the same, & no employees are fired, total crew payroll costs will rise to about 36.5% of sales. In the above example, that would equal about $442,800 per year more in payroll costs.
However, the company is only making $153,900 in net profit. If they made no other changes, this store would be operating at a $288,900 loss. That is obviously unsustainable.
The only way to recoup that lost income is either raising sales revenue, or cutting expenses. Most people in this situation say “Ok, just raise the price of food to increase revenue”. The problem is, McDonalds franchisees are already hemorrhaging due to competition & a changing market. In most cases with food, higher prices, will result in lower sales volume. Especially with low quality chains like MickyDs – nobody in the US is going to want to pay $5-$6 for a big mac – keep in mind that the only people immediately benefiting from a minimum wage hike are people making below the future $15 minimum wage – everybody else (over half the country) will be making the same amount until the rest of the economy catches up. (If McDonalds could charge more per burger & still make money, they would already be doing it.). Others say “You need to get higher food quality to charge more”. Fair, but higher food quality means lower margins per sale, so it wouldn’t necessarily help your bottom line – it also takes considerable time & money to implement drastic process changes like that.
So increasing revenue isn’t really a viable option – the only solution to stay in business is to cut expenses. McDonalds is a highly mature company, that has massive economies of scale…meaning most variable expenses are probably already as low as they can get at this point. The only expense you could really cut & still maintain sales, is Payroll. That means cutting hours, firing employees, or increasing automation.
It becomes clear, that many McDonalds will either have to shut down, or get rid of workers. Considering that many under-performing locations have probably already cut workers down to the lowest possible amount, the currently struggling stores would have no choice but to automate or get shut down. However, automation costs a lot of money up front though, so if the Franchisee doesn’t have the cash to shell out, they will be left with no other option but to close.
If store locations shut down, that means less franchise fees are going to the corporate entity. Currently, about 33% of McDonald’s Gross Revenues comes from Franchise Fees.
If 20% of franchised locations shut down, that would equate to $1.854 Billion in lost revenue. The operating expenses would also be reduced by 20% ($339 million). So Net Profit for the corporate entity would decrease by about $1.515 Billion – about a 30% loss in profits.
Loss in profits lead to falling share prices – they will also probably have to cut back dividend payments issued to stockholders, which leads to a further drop in share price. Falling stock prices are generally a bad indicator for future investors & lenders. It would likely result in less interest from potential franchisees, as well as increased lending costs from banks who would see McDs as a greater risk.
Additionally, there are about 1.7 million McDonalds workers worldwide. About 440,000 of them in the US. So if 20% of the stores closed, that would be about 88,000 Americans losing their jobs.
Granted, most of the minimum wage hike programs being proposed would be rolled out over 3-4 years. So they would have a little bit of time to adapt their business model.
My prediction would be that companies like McDonalds would have to change their business models which rely on low wage employees producing low quality products, or they will fail.
– Murican_Popeyes
If being attractive is an important aspect of sexual attraction, why hasn’t natural selection turned us all into super models?
In comparison to even a couple hundred years ago, we are generally super models. We are taller, freer from birth defects, ethnically interesting, overall healthy, generally able to spend time and resources on our hygiene and appearance.
The bar just keeps rising.
– placebo-addict
How does the brain learn to lose consciousness less? As in, boxers that can stay conscious during blows to the head that normal people can not
Most non trained fighters that you see “knocked out” aren’t really out cold. When you get hit, and you’re not used to it, you equilibrium gets thrown off, you see lights, and you go into almost a form of shock. That’s what you can get used too. There are people that can, just naturally, take more punishment before being knocked out(Mark Hunt being a famous example).
Another factor is fighters learn how to “roll with the punches” and help dissipate some of the force along with good head movement keeping the punches from hitting them “on the button”.
Usually a boxer who is knocked out cold never saw the punch coming
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