In particularly hectic environments, my AP Pros struggle to really block a lot of noise, mostly just voices and car sounds, but larger noises still make it through the headphone itself, bypassing the mic (but also hitting the mic, so you get some amount of ANC on it) and hitting your ear.

I’ve never used noise cancelling headphones…my question is, do they have a slight white noise to them at all times? That can’t be good for your ears if they do.

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Why philosophy when we all die anyway?

So would it be medically accurate to call you a dickhead?

So you could have just said, 'Managers can't understand details finer than what's right in front of them.'

Everyone everywhere has known that the answer to Did you get stabbed in head or kicked by horse in face? is You have thinky problems now.

Recently read a theory like this, that consciousness is more of a universal field that our individual bodies “pick up on” with our brains acting as the sensing object, similar to how our ears might hear a noise in the distance but that doesn’t mean our ears are the object that generated that noise.

I don’t think it’s true tbh, but it’s an interesting thought experiment in the goal of understanding consciousness.

Town over already has a "Main Street", guess we can't use the name for our first road! ...What do you mean King, Queen, and First street are all taken too?!

The question is if you make a Thales triangle, is it a right triangle? You start by assuming that if you have a right triangle, then you flip it over the hypothenuse, and you get a rectangle. Well, of course you do, it was right triangle to begin with! If it wasn't a right triangle, and you did your construction, you wouldn't get a rectangle.

I'm always amazed that it's able to respond so quickly. I'd think the processing time required would introduce more offset than it does.

I guess I've been shaving wrong

When you're in the bath, you can push the water in one direction to make a wave. A wave has a point where the water is highest, the peak. And a point where the water is lowest, the trough. If you have two waves in the same body of water, they can overlap. When the peaks overlap, you end up with an even bigger peak. But when a peak overlaps with a trough, they cancel each other out.

Active noise cancelling works in the same way, but with sound waves instead of water waves. A microphone picks up the sound you're hearing from outside, and the speakers make the opposite sounds at exactly the right time to cancel them out.

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Awesome ELI5.

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> Budget is power and status; there's no reward for returning unspent money to the company.

This is not universal. Many companies have internal policies where managers are rewarded for unspent budget.

There is also an increasing practice of zero-base budgeting, where the entirety of the budget is revisited every year (or period of years) and all expenditures must be justified again, regardless of previous year's spending.

You don't hear two opposite sounds. The sound waves destructively interfere with each other and no wave remains, thus the membrane in your ear remains still.

Not really, no. You're cancelling our outside noise, but the sound made by the speakers inside is largely unaffected.

In practice, the cancellation is imperfect (that is, you can't use ANC to obtain total silence) so remaining outside sound will impact resultant listening quality...

But that's the case without ANC too, and it's worse then.

And yet, in real life people do try to spend their entire budget rather than risk getting it cut. For example, federal agencies spend an average of 4.9 times more in the last week of their fiscal year than in a typical week during the rest of the year. (Citation: https://www.nber.org/papers/w19481 )

Budget is power and status; there's no reward for returning unspent money to the company.

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What about all the cities named Columbus or Springfield, Washington state vs Washington DC, or all of the roads named MLK?

Okay, thank you so much!!

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