See my comment about inharmonicity in real instruments. Unfortunately it's not as simple as 440 Hz * 2^(n/12)

It's a bit like laughing. Synchronise the mood of the group. I assume other mammals have contagious yawns too?

Cats certainly do.

Strangely, dogs sneeze to show deference.

African wild dogs use sneezes to "vote" to make decisions. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/284/1862/201...

My cat always responds when I yawn regardless of what room either of us are in.

Is yawning contagious between species?

It is! https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9332820/

I think you're onto something here. Does anyone know if there are examples of very non-social species yawning (i.e., something that has a brief mating period with no prolonged pair bonding, and then it lays eggs and takes off)?

So, I tried to track down an answer. And, apparently, there’s currently no well-replicated study showing true contagious yawning in a species that is otherwise non-social and non-bonding.

You can usually deny those. If they ask for them without a good reason, that's already suspicious.

With real instruments, you must also manage inharmonicity.

A real piano string, for instance, is made of metal and resists bending slightly unlike an idealised string. This affects higher harmonics more than lower ones (think of all the bends in the string on the 7th harmonic, for example). This increases the harmonic frequencies slightly above exact integer multiples of the fundamental.

As a result, pianos require "stretched tuning" so the harmonics better match the higher notes. It's always a bit of a compromise. The higher harmonics will be more "off" than the lower ones.

So even if you were to tune the fundamental frequency of all the keys on a piano "perfectly" in a given key (so-called Just Intonation), the harmonics would not perfectly match up.

There is actually an interesting mathematical method for piano tuning that takes harmonics into account [1]. The core idea is to minimize the integral over the logarithm of the sum of all spectra. This basically favors spectra that are smeared out less. Instead of the logarithm, one could also use another sublinear function, such as the square root, but I guess it just makes for a better story to call it „piano entropy tuner“. The paper also shows a nice plot about the „stretched tuning“ that you mentioned.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.5101

It serves to demonstrate that in most cases, "principles" are only a rhetorical device.

Yep. It’s just who/whom all the way down.

Ironically a benefit of underwater datacenters would be reduced cosmic rays. Not so great in orbit, I imagine!

You mean Microsoft® Office™

"Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging" (2006)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

I’d forgotten all about this gem. I think it was made by some Microsoft employees, too, which makes it even funnier to me.

That was deeply funny. I can almost smell the inside of CompUSA watching that.

Nineteen years ago. Nothing has changed.

Rclone can "sync" with a range of different ways to check if the existing files are the same. If no hashes are available (e.g. WebDAV) I think you can set it to check by timestamp (with a tolerance) and size.

Edit: oh I see, delta transfer only sends the changed parts of files?

It only sends the changed parts of files (the diffs) is my understanding which saves bandwidth.

However this is only really good for slow connections. If your connection is faster than about 50MB/s then the delta calculation mechanism becomes the bottleneck. On fast connections you should use the -W option for rsync which switches the delta algorithm off.

Saving on transmitted bandwidth costs is more important to me than speed of transmission for my use cases which I feel are likely to be common use cases.