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Comment by muhwalt | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those things I never gave much thought but is super facinating. The technology connections youtube channel just did a video about this, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DdUvoc7tJ4

View on HN

Video of the needle and grooves under an electron microscope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuCdsyCWmt8&t=301s

Incredible video!

The TC video was good, but the link here sure is a faster way to learn the same basic information!

watching paint dry is faster than getting info out of that video.

I was just going to post this. Others have given some of the math and technical explanation below but if you would like to see this in action with a bit more of the history behind it all, I highly recommend this video.

I frequently find myself wanting to think more critically and guess about things like this. If I had thought a bit further before reading (one needle, but what is the groove like?) I would gotten to assuming that it was one dimensional, but then stepped from there to it actually affording two dimensions.

Does anyone have recommendations for reading or exercises to improve this kind of thinking?

When I was a kid I used to wonder how everything worked and would disassemble things to find out. Started to take apart those disposable cameras people used to use for vacation photos. Learned the painful way what a capacitor is and how it discharges enough electricity to make that camera flash in a hurry.

So my recommendation is electro-shock therapy. Self administered of course.

Ha, excellent.

I have pretty good mechanical sense & experience and can reason through how things work. I guess I just want to get better?

But this applies to thinking that gets you into a rut working on a bug. Sometimes es I find that if I would have stopped, backed up, and thought through the whole stack more critically, I would have gotten the fix faster.

I was actually expecting the HN link to be it )

What age range is this channel's target audience? The slow pace and sophomoric description of 2 channel audio at the beginning makes me thing it is aimed at a young audience.

> The slow pace and sophomoric description

This seems needlessly condescending. 1.5x is your friend.

> a young audience.

Or just people who don't know much about 2 channel audio (or whatever else he's talking about this week/month/whatever). Not everyone does, after all.

It's not playback speed that's slow. It's the sophomoric definition of stereo. It's the absolute dragging of the feet to deliver that definition that isn't even a good description of stereo.

I'm 30 or 40 years old, and this is one of my favorite youtube channels. :)

I am also 30 or 40 years old. I'm Schrödingers millenial.

I quite enjoy the delivery of technology connections. A nice change of pace imo, compared to other youtubers that edit out every millisecond of quiet time between words and sentences.

But I'm not watching the videos to learn new stuff either

Slower videos just means they last longer, and that I can keep up with them while I'm crocheting.

I absolutely love this channel even though I find the guy's delivery excruciatingly slow and his style very annoying. I watch it on 2x to solve the first problem and just cringe through the dorkiness.

Yeah, the dorkiness can be a bit too much sometimes. One time he made a dorky joke, and then made a meta-joke addressing how dorky that joke was, and it was extra cringe...

I think the simple explanations are just that guy's style. He often has oddball videos about stuff you've probably seen but never thought about in depth - from lava lamps to retroreflectors.

He gets quite a few views and educates a lot of people. No need to look down on it - if it isn't for you thats ok.

I’m 60 and am one of his paying subscribers.

As someone who is younger than HN demographic, it is consistently funny to me how many on Hacker News seem to think that 20-30 year olds are teenagers, whenever a YouTube video targeted towards that demographic is posted. Here's a thought that might frighten you: The oldest Zoomers (the first generation where being exposed to Windows XP is optional) are now 26.

I suspect you're not really inferring this from the sophomoric descriptions, as there are plenty of science/engineering documentary films dating back to the 19th century that are aimed at non-researcher adults and use simplified easy-to-understand descriptions, but rather gen Z stylistic choices like using the word "wiggly" to describe the groove of a vinyl record.

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