Why haven’t I heard about this before? This seems too important a detail for my school textbooks to have left out and for popular culture to lack any references to it whatsoever. What am I missing?
> That doesn’t mean it’s not worth studying, Ritzwoller adds.
The same reason it's not important enough to finish the article ;)
The jungle is vast and there are only so many curious chimps.
As the first paragraph of the article has mentioned, at least xkcd has a reference [0].
Many people who have built or used GIS applications are familiar with "Null Island." It should probably have been called "Bug Island." If you have bugs in your GIS code, this is where they tend to lurk.
The 0 latitude could be relevant, but that the 0 longitude is in there is more an historical accident.
The shape of the African continent is also interesting there.
Yet, here is another thing to think about: Zero longitude is the longitude of Greenwich, i.e. London, a significant city through the ages. Cities and towns, especially ones with old age, aren't positioned randomly but in geographical suitable locations: valleys, rivers, coast, etc. Since the position of London is not random, the 0 longitude isn't totally random as well. Still seeing no connection to this 26s pulse tho.
Thanks for the link. I needed a good belly laugh this morning.
Jesus wept.
It's probably just part of the "Earth's hum", which is waves.
(Don't confuse this with the world wide paranormal hum people claim to hear)
You probably should have learned of the hum at school, if you did, you'd have probably forgotten. As a 10 year old you'd either find it amazing and think of it forever or just forget.
It would be interesting to rank it on the importance level though. Or, it'd be interesting to work out how you could rank it. What are important things to know... in order... for personality types.
Did many other people here learn that?
Taking this sort of random swipe at at people who experience this is kind of rude. Even though it's pretty much confirmed it's not a real audio signal coming from outside of a person's body, there isn't quite enough evidence it isn't a real auditory sensation for these people (instead of psychological or "paranormal" issue).
I do get the hum sometimes, usually happens when my shoulders are tense. Also usually only in one ear, which is why I was able to pretty quickly rule out an external source (though when it first happened, I did spend some time opening and closing windows, listening at ventilation ducts, trying to locate it).
Edit: I'll add it here that sometimes it is a real sound. We live a couple of km away from a harbor, and the sound we get to our place from an idling cruise liner is very similar to what my ears sometimes generate by themselves. It's really hard to tell them apart except by trying if it gets louder (and more high freq components) by opening a window. The point is, at least in an urban environment it can be pretty hard to tell if the hum is real or not.
> Even though it's pretty much confirmed it's not a real audio signal coming from outside of a person's body
Why would you not think you have the well documented medical condition Tinnitus?
"The Hum" is "a real audio signal coming from outside of a person's body", except it's not real. (And the first Google result for "The Hum" is this legend, not the vibrations from the oceans hum)
It was on the X-Files for instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_(The_X-Files)
William Shatner's The UnXplained - https://www.history.com/shows/the-unxplained/season-1/episod...
I have friends who believe in the paranormal. I don't disagree with them, even if it's medical like this. But I also won't agree with them. I'm not sure if that's cowardice.
My understanding is that hum-like low-frequency tinnitus is not all that well documented. Feel free to provide links to sources to prove me wrong.
I'm fine dismissing out of hand paranormal hums and paranormal phenomena generally. You don't appear to even be in this group and yet you feel personally attacked?
I read the quoted part as the whole class of people with this auditory issue being binned as truth-is-out-there nutjobs, and decided to offer a bit of perspective. It was probably an overreaction on my part.