Back in grad school our professor [Tom Holman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomlinson_Holman) did some amazing work in spatial sound, specifically for cinema. He chose to double the number of channels from 5.1 to 10.2 and the results were pretty amazing.

If my memory is working correctly, the channels chosen were Left, Left-Center, Center, Right-Center, Right, High-Left, High-Right, Left Surround, Right Surround, Back surround, and two low frequency channels. His research indicated that the human ear has better vertical localization towards the front (potentially having evolved to detect tree-dwelling predators, for example), and experiments with dummy head recording produced inadequate results for theatrical reproduction.

Sadly it doesn't seem to have caught on (yet), probably due to the expense of having to retrofit cinemas. Anyway, it was really cool to listen to. I imagine the use of ambisonic recording rigs will greatly benefit the 360° video playback experience. Don't know what the other use cases might be yet.

Rather than adding fixed channels, many cinemas moved to Dolby Atmos, which has 128 audio streams with spatial placement metadata. Those are rendered to whatever speaker array is available.

https://www.dolby.com/us/en/technologies/cinema/dolby-atmos....

Looking at that postfix main.cf gave me flashbacks and not in a good way. Google can have it. Or ProtonMail. Running my own mail server didn't pay enough ($0) for the complaints I got from its users (family). I'll focus on VoIP PBX and home automation until someone gobbles that up too.

I feel sad reading the emotional pain that Musk goes through and a part of me wants him to find peace and happiness. But a bigger part of me hopes Musk never resolves this internal struggle, as I believe it is a major contributing factor to his professional successes, and may have a lasting positive effect on the future of humanity.

Maybe it holds him back. Whenever I am suffering, I am not performing at my best. When I feel at peace, I seem to do a lot better with my work.

So the saying 'fucked up people make great art,' applies to engineers, too?

CGP Grey did an animation of it here: https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE?t=3m46s

That video is just full of false assumptions. For example at 0:25 he attributes the delays between cars starting at traffic lights to bad reaction times of humans.

No, you start with a short delay because otherwise there is no way to reestablish the safety distance to the car in front of you. Which you still want to have with automated driving because self-driving cars won't solve sudden mechanical failures.

How do you think that safety distance is derived?

The conference rooms in my office are named for local cities and towns, many of which are nearby. We have a conference room named for the city that our office is in. In my foolish engineer mind, "we're meeting in Northeast 2-A" would make more sense than "we're meeting in Whoville."

And all the printers have names of cartoon characters.

Thank goodness we have a searchable indoor map.

I studied film production in grad school, and one of the reasons I didn't pursue a career in that industry is because of the rampant, pervasive abuse like that mentioned in the article. "12 on/12 off" was a movement started by an industry veteran that cried for limiting the work days to 12 hours and providing a minimum of 12 hours down time before having to be back on set. It was started after a crew member died from falling asleep at the wheel on the way home from a shoot.

I am so glad to work in a place that a). not only doesn't have insane deadlines and the corresponding pressure but, b). has a sub-discipline dedicated to project management. And that I get to push back with my favorite mantra, "poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."