Some cars have gone so far on the isolation and sound damping front that they pipe back in a little bit of engine noise (but only the part that sounds sporty) via the speakers.
There's only so much you can do. A car is filled with funny angles, plastics, and a lot of glass. It's never going to be a particularly good acoustic environment even if you manage to shield 100% of the road noise.
You can't have a proper soundstage in a car no matter your setup, which kinda degrades a lot of music that wasn't designed for clubs. In a car it's basically background music when you're driving because you can't really give the music your full attention anyway (passive listening), where the lack of focus also masks a lot of details you'd hear on a proper stereo system (active listening).
Edit: to answer your question below, I like both, active and passive listening. But I wouldn't try to optimize for active criteria like details in a passive evironment like a car, so I'd spend more money on fun things like buttkickers instead of high end detail.
Obviously a car isn't a dedicated listening room. Music can be enjoyed by just listening to it and not focusing on all the nuances. Or are you one of those hardcore audiophiles who can't listen to music without a ultra high end sound system?
Also soundstage can be greatly improved by placing speakers on non factory locations because manufacturers usually prioritize packaging above all else. A tweeter placed at the bottom of the A-pillar near the windshield is the worst possible location and sounds like it was put in a tin can.
Background noise in a car also has a solution, turning up the volume. Plus getting quiet tires.
Sure is for bass. It's a sealed box that you're in, with shapes that stop anything from acting like a simple room shape, and surfaces that can soak up highs, and so small that this absorption is a huge percentage of surface area.
There's a reason mix engineers have always done 'check the mix in a car'. It might be way more revealing of what's happening in the bass, even when the speakers are relatively weak. Once you get anything decent, watch out. It's a bit like having your whole body inside headphones.
Whenever I think about light speed being fast, I imagine myself standing at the edge of the solar system and watching a hypothetical photon travel from the Sun to the Earth and taking 8 minutes. Suddenly it doesn't feel like light is really all that fast except at human scales. 5 km/h would be fascinating though.
The speed of light is unbelievably slow, not even as a cosmic scale, but on earth.
We cannot play competitive multiplayer games globally, without 300ms ping. I dream of a world playing Black Ops 2 on a original PS3 in 2026 getting into a lobby because latency is low.
Still not as unbelievably slow as signals in our body. If you hook up a fiber connection from a button to an LED, then stub your toe on the button, the fiber can be thousands of kilometers long and you'll still (via the LED) see that you've stubbed your toe before you feel it.
This is of course assuming instant activation, a direct connection and no additional latency from network hardware.
The LED will display it first, but will the signal reach your visual centers first? And how about the time for your brain to process that signal and make you consciously aware of the visual vs. the way the pain signal is forwarded to conscious processes?
Fair issues, but none of them impact the fundamental point. I'm not trying to make a point on touch vs. visual sensing or with regard to consciousness (time shifting of visual input is a thing, which could be impactful here, see "chronostasis").
The point is to quickly and accessibly convey an intuitive understanding of the propagation speed of information in biological circuits vs. the max speed of information in our universe (to our current knowledge at least) and in our technology.
light is 186k miles per second, the other side of the globe is 12.5k miles away - so 67 ms / 130ms+ round trip in optimum conditions. Add more for network hops and consider that fiber is not quite as fast as vacuum.
300ms feels extremely optimistic coming from my perspective of someone living on an island in SE Asia
I wish the guy who created this included a 'your perceived velocity relative to [some fixed point]'. The speedometer shows what an at rest observer would perceive your velocity as, not what you would perceive it is. The 'magic' of relativity is that the speed of light is not really a speed limit. You can travel endlessly far ahead of it. Distance and time then begin to distort, and you effectively travel into the future, but you can go arbitrarily faster than it.
If we ever reach the technology to enable relativistic starships (basically able to accelerate at 1g or so for years at a time), then the universe is going to get seriously weird. Not only for us, but also for people in the distant future who will regularly have ancient relics from the past traveling into their time, when they will likely scarcely resemble us, and going 'Hello fellow... humans?' That'd be some next level archaeology opportunities though.
It'll also be socially odd as the elite and powerful travel off into the future seeking immortality, unable to ever return, at least so far as we currently understand.
> The 'magic' of relativity is that the speed of light is not really a speed limit. You can travel endlessly far ahead of it. Distance and time then begin to distort, and you effectively travel into the future, but you can go arbitrarily faster than it.
You cannot. The speed of light limits you, even as you approach it, by changing distance itself.
There is no absolute distance between two points; all astronomical distances are calculated in a non-relativistic framework. This is perfectly acceptable, since we all live in that framework relative to each other, and even if we were talking to multi-generational "friends" on Alpha Centauri, it would still hold true for both sides (to within an imperceptible error).
This is why it is sometimes suggested that photons don't "travel" at all; because they move at c, every spot they go to is the same spot to them. A divide-by-zero non-error.
You cannot what? Everything I said is completely accurate. As is your conclusion - with the speed of particles being infinite, from their perspective.
This is also why it's 100% possible for a human to travel to Alpha Centauri, or even the edge of the known universe all within a single human lifetime, from his own perspective. Of course for an at rest observer, billions of years would have passed, but for him - mere decades.
On the other hand think of the wavelength of light and how absurdly fast the oscillation frequency is to provide a wavelength of a few hundred nm at the speed of light. 8 minutes is a lot of cycles, and 150M km is a lot of wavelengths!
But light is not really even light except at human inference level. Like yes if you were a god like being looking at this and understanding light in a proton level way, it wouldn't be very impressive but I would say that is not the right way to think about physcial phenomena. How can you even be sure time has any definite meaning outside human's concept of it? In that sense what do words faster or slower or minutes even mean
> They're bouncing off the interior walls of it at like a 45 degree angle billions/trillions of times before it reaches the other end of the cable
At the risk of exposing how little I remember from physics, doesn't light in a single mode fiber not bounce? (right about now I'm thinking that it's probably not great to think of photons bouncing because this is quantum level stuff, right? light is a wave, etc. gosh it's been a long time since I tried to really know any of this...)
The bouncing is more a metaphor, the refraction of light bending at an angle is sort of like how if you as an exterior observer look at a person who is standing waist deep in a very calm and clear swimming pool, their legs appear to be at a different position than their torso. Now imagine that 'bending' repeating trillions of times.
> Even Iran has a better payment infra than the US.
That is a big claim. What would prevent someone from setting up something equally as good in the US, aside from the network effect and users unwilling to try something new for uncertain gain?
End-users don't have much agency here, network needs banks.
In Iran, they simply don't have much choice, so banks use the only network available to them. It just happens to have been built in this century, so it's not as archaic as Visa.
Here in the US, I guess only regulators could realistically create a new network and have enough power to convince banks to adopt it.
Nothing, of course, stops anyone from creating a new network. But the network effect is THE driving force here, it's not a minor factor.
This is where you find out which banks suck, and which do not. I will say that while USAA is a long ways from perfect, when someone swiped my wife's debit card and took $5000 from our checking account, they put that money back within a day while the investigation was pending. No police report necessary, either.
It is interesting the breadth of experiences in this regard. I pay basically everything on my card, to the tune of 5-6 grand a month, including utilities. The only time I have ever seen a surcharge is for things like contractors doing work at my house. The gas company, electric, the city, all take the card with no extra charge. I rack up a lot of airline miles just from day-to-day use.
There is some nuance there. Cash is hardly free to process, and I have seen arguments that it is not far from the same overhead as credit card fees. So people who pay in cash are not subsidizing credit card users. Maybe it could be argued that debit card users are, though.
Many of us use it exactly that way, though the rewards (in my personal experience) are immediate as soon as a transaction clears and not yearly. Carrying a revolving balance is a quick way to spiral into bankruptcy because the rates are so high (and the minimum payment is typically 1% of the balance).
It may be a partial factor. Similar to how CC companies have a logical reason to reject high charge chargeback items , but may also be ideologically driven to push certain agendas as well.
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