Aegis J Hyena's Super Hyena Fun Show: Random Banter Thread #215

[Amidus Drexel]

Sounds like you at least did some real mathematics. We had a class in "industrial economy", which basically was three weeks of accounting. Certainly useful if you want to create a start-up, but economists can't do math if their life so depends on it.

ION:
Almost recovered. I'm trying to tell myself to be responsible today, but my mind is having none of it...

Yeah, it's a little better than just accounting, but that's the bulk of it. Lots of different ways to compare investments.

Pfft, don't be responsible! Everybody needs a day off now and then.

The lecturer had a really complicated formula for how you apply compound interest, turning the percentage into a multiplier, applying it, and then turning the product back into a percentage. Iteratively. So you would do that again for the next year of interest. The entire class of engineering students boggled.

A friend of mine which has taken that class with another lecturer has told that she put a ± in front of a variable to denote that it could take on a negative value. Just hearing that is painful to me.

...I have no words.

Of course, this now means I've learned an even better way of hiding secret messages than

Call me old-fashioned, but is it really better?

--
ION:

On a whim, I decided to spend all most some of my free time today building a little analog synth. Currently I have a small, voltage-controlled pulse-wave oscillator with some interesting timbre characteristics (a by-product of how one goes about making a 555 timer into a VCO - the duty cycle is roughly proportionate to the (control:supply) voltage ratio, only really giving a full, square-wave sound near 50%), but as soon as I finish the second VCO circuit I'll be able to do some simple frequency modulation synthesis, and I can have all kinds of fun with the output (okay, it'll probably be mostly bell tones and other simple FM timbres. I'll need to build more oscillators to do the crazy stuff).

Edit: or would this count as phase modulation instead? The line's usually a little more clear with digital (and also usually PM, by virtue of that being the easy way to do it in code, most of the time), but I suppose there's still a difference on an analog synth.