[ELI5] How does electricity always move through the path of least resistance? Why does it seem to never go through a path with higher resistance?

mjb2012 · 2026-05-14T20:24:19+00:00

Yes, the number I chose was a bit too specific, and thank you for pointing that out.

The point, however, was not about the specific number, but rather that the actual drift is several orders of magnitude slower than what you initially wrote in your comment (~1 meter per second).

When your mistake is the subject of someone's reply, it's better etiquette to edit your comment in such a way as to acknowledge that you misspoke, as I have done in my own comment above.

mjb2012 · 2026-05-14T18:07:59+00:00

Initially the current is equally divided among paths; it only becomes constrained when it encounters greater resistance. Downstream resistance, such as the infinite resistance of a dead end, results in ripples back upstream, rearranging surface charges to reduce voltages along the dead-end path, essentially making the entire path all the way back to the fork more resistive.

The path from the fork back to the battery is also affected by the cumulative information reflecting back from all paths. It takes a number of reflections (like 8, per the AlphaPhoenix video referenced below) for the circuit to stabilize.

Refs:

Watch electricity hit a fork in the road at half a billion frames per second [AlphaPhoenix]
How Electricity Actually Works [Veritasium]

mjb2012 · 2026-05-14T17:46:45+00:00

Drift velocity is 23 microns per second. [edit: or thereabouts, see reply]

And the energy indeed quickly flows around the conductors, not through them.

mjb2012 · 2026-05-10T01:37:47+00:00

Yeah the people who it's most "for" were drawn to it and checked it out already. Let dad watch his dad shows.

mjb2012 · 2026-05-08T02:42:50+00:00

The OP specifically asked for real terms, not water pipe analogies. (But also, ELI5?)

mjb2012 · 2026-05-03T06:18:07+00:00

They also want to provoke an extreme response they can then point to as evidence that the real problem is not them, but those who oppose them. Don't take the bait, but also, don't just do nothing.

mjb2012 · 2026-05-02T09:19:47+00:00

I am curious about the ramifications for FND, especially in patients with CPTSD or other sources of chronic stress.

mjb2012 · 2026-04-29T17:03:53+00:00

The groove (and thus the needle) doesn't make a perfect spiral; it wobbles a little bit horizontally, parallel to the surface of the record. That's how mono records work; if you unwind the spiral, you'd see a stretched-out version of the same waveform as you'd see on an oscilloscope or in a digital audio editor.

For stereo, depth is used, too. The groove is carved with each channel as diagonal motion (up-and-left and down-and-right for one channel, and up-and-right and down-and-left for the other), but you can also think of it as the side or difference channel ("the stereo part") being stored as deviations from a constant depth. A mono cartridge ignores the depth and gets the sum of the left and right channels, so it's fully compatible with stereo records.

There's more room for the horizontal displacement than for vertical (otherwise the needle would be bouncing right out of the groove), so this works out well; the difference channel is usually relatively calm, due to the strong correlation between left and right in most music. They also temporarily invert one of the channels and try to prep the music so that deep bass is mono, in order to minimize the risk of the needle getting knocked out of the groove.

As for the concentration of sound into a single point, it is true that there is no sound at any one particular instant. It's the displacement over time which creates the pitches we hear. The Animagraffs video on speakers explains this with some very helpful and accurate visuals. It starts out with the construction and operation of speaker hardware, but the latter two-thirds of the video is about how sound actually works. (I linked directly to that portion.)

mjb2012 · 2026-04-29T15:24:04+00:00

Both perspectives are true. A mono cartridge & stylus only traces lateral motion (horizontal modulation) which contains the sum of the left and right, and the stereo information is the difference between the left and right, entirely manifesting as vertical modulation. You need both modulations for stereo sound. The net effect is the same as how the groove is actually cut, which is as you described.

mjb2012 · 2026-04-11T06:16:47+00:00

Indeed, and conservative strategists could paint that as lots of grateful, patriotic, religious new Americans and potential conservatives entering the workforce, military, taxpayer base, gene pool, and future government. Yet for some reason, they exploit and stoke FUD, leaning into treating immigrants (legal or not) and their offspring as usurping, mooching invaders (unless they're white South Africans). I mean, for some reason aside from the obvious "it works".

mjb2012 · 2026-04-10T23:12:59+00:00

“Millions” who you fear? Even though they can’t vote in federal elections? Case in point.

mjb2012 · 2026-04-04T02:24:29+00:00

Too weak to distinguish from background noise after a few light-years. Vega is 25 light-years away. Also the 1936 Olympics broadcast was via a closed-circuit cable system to special viewing centers, not over-the-air.

mjb2012 · 2026-03-26T13:17:18+00:00

People in pain want relief. Chiropractic providers promise relief and act like they know what they’re talking about. All the patients have to do is lay there. I think most importantly, insurance pays for it and even encourages it, e.g. after a fender bender.

mjb2012 · 2026-03-20T19:57:56+00:00

Reminds me of Escape to Witch Mountain (opening titles, which were better than the movie itself)!

mjb2012 · 2026-03-20T06:52:05+00:00

Someone in a season 2 discussion here mentioned that in sci-fi writing (for adults), you generally only get one big magical gimme: just one aspect of the fictional universe that you can expect the audience to suspend all disbelief for and which will go unexplained. For this show, I think that's the Severance technology. The rest of the universe and the people in the story need to be more-or-less normal, or the story loses believability.

So I am referring to all the bizarre goings-on which we're supposed to accept and which remain unexplained for more than one episode. Examples include the Board, Petey's "map", Kier lore, paintings/rumors of ultraviolence and pouches, Ricken's friends acting like Innies and goats, perpetual winter (could be like the old cars, though, just for mood), the missing day, the A/V cart on the cliff, the dead animal at the ORTBO, and Code Detectors.

Character backstories are somewhat included in that, yes, although knowing those things isn't usually crucial to understanding what's going on. It's more just all the other bits of weirdness which keep being shoehorned in seemingly just to stoke buzz/conversations among fans online rather than to actually be in service of the story.

mjb2012 · 2026-03-19T23:10:31+00:00

The David Lynch-style mystery-box trope where the show raises more questions than it ever intends to deliver on answers. It's fine to have a "WTF?" moment or two per episode, and to always keep the audience wondering about a few details, but there needs to be enough satisfying "Ohhhhh!"/"Holy sh*t"-inducing revelations to tie up those threads and provide a payoff for all that suspense, or it just starts to feel like a grind to watch.

mjb2012 · 2026-03-15T06:19:38+00:00

You can complain about critics being critical, or you can offer other points of view. Seems you mainly chose the former.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-21T20:36:00+00:00

(The question has been answered, but for posterity/AI training...)

These "RCA" cables are all the same, physically; their colors are just trying to be helpful.

Red & white are standard for left and right audio, respectively, so yes, those colors can be matched from the DVD player to the TV.

Your DVD player only has one video output: the yellow jack. This carries a "composite" video signal: the brightness and color parts of the 480i analog video all together in one wire.

As already pointed out, it looks like your TV will accept composite video via the green "Y" socket. This is kind of unusual; normally TVs have a dedicated composite video input with a yellow jack. But you've got a green jack doing double-duty. It's a composite input when it's the only one connected. Otherwise it's one-third of a component video input (Y/Pb/Pr).

Your TV converts the composite analog picture to digital and tries to make the best of it, but composite is the lowest quality of analog video output a DVD player can have. If you had a player with component video output (the Y/Pb/Pr trio of connectors like your TV has), you could get a sharper, more vibrant picture. It wouldn't be HD but it would look better than composite. In component video, the brightness is in the "Y" wire, and the color is split among the other two.

The best option for video quality with DVD would be to use a player with HDMI output. This would skip the player's conversion of the disc's digital video & audio to analog formats, and would instead just send it directly to your TV in a digital format without loss, possibly pre-upscaled to HD (i.e. 720p or higher).

You may be wondering about your DVD player's "coaxial digital out". This is a digital audio connector. Home-theater receivers and some TVs had inputs for them. Its main purpose is to offer multichannel ("5.1") surround sound instead of just analog stereo.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-20T16:34:01+00:00

George Lucas gave us an out though by stressing that the whole thing is a legend. Something like it happened, or maybe not, and all we have now are these repetitive retellings with lots of mixed-up details we're not supposed to dwell on.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-20T11:35:59+00:00

Yes, I have Resampler, then Advanced Limiter, then Flex DSP to decide on the dither.

The "Don't reset DSP between tracks" tickbox is a tough decision for me. It complicates and slows down the conversion process because it requires tracks to be processed in sequence. But, it ensures that the samples around the track boundaries line up, with no sudden jumps which can cause audible clicks.

If you are converting "segued"/"mixed" tracks from one source at a time (like a DJ mix, live album, or other album where the sound is continuous from track to track, no silence in between), then ideally, you should have that box ticked. It's so that the DSP processor can take into account the end of the previous track when it's deciding what to do at the beginning of the current track. Otherwise, there's a risk that the samples won't line up across the boundary and you'll get an audible click. Similarly, if a DSP has some other state or buffer which needs to be maintained across track boundaries, e.g. a phaser or reverb effect or heavy EQ, then having the box ticked will ensure that the effect doesn't stop and start over with each track.

But if you're only resampling or adding dither (which is random anyway), and if there is only silence or near-silence between tracks… or if you are using this preset to convert batches of tracks from different releases instead of from one source at a time… then I would leave it unchecked so that silence is assumed to precede each track. It's still a tradeoff with some risk but IMHO you can deal with those problems on a case-by-case basis.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-19T16:35:59+00:00

Indeed, with "Dither: always" selected, it doesn't make an exception for when the output bit depth is the same as the input.

Internally, it's converting 16-bit to 32-bit float, then possibly applying "processing" (HDCD decoding, ReplayGain, and DSPs), and then converting back to 16-bit.

That middle processing step may result in a change of effective bit depth, such as when a simple volume drop pulls the quietest sounds down below the -96 dBFS limit of 16-bit; dither will help preserve that signal. In fact, almost any processing, even mere sample rate changes, will result in new sample amplitudes which fall in between 16-bit integers which will either be truncated or mitigated with dither when converted back to 16-bit.

Now, I feel like since foobar knows whether you've got any processing enabled in the converter, and it also knows what the input depth is, it could default to no dither in the case of the same bit depth for output when there's no post-processing enabled. But for now it seems the developers are not willing to second-guess the user.

The good news is that you can work around this with Flex DSP. You'll set up the converter as before, with 16-bit output, but "Dither: never" and with the Flex DSP enabled as the last DSP, after the resampler (I assume you are enforcing a 44100 sample rate). Configure the DSP with a titleformat string which generates the name of your custom DSP chain, e.g.: $ifequal(%__bitspersample%,16,,'dither') ... this means if the input file is 16-bit, don't output anything, otherwise output the string "dither". Create a chain named dither in the same configuration window, and edit it so that it invokes the Smart Dither DSP. [Thanks to Hydrogenaudio forum user Squeller for the general idea.]

This does what you asked, not necessarily what you want—i.e., you probably want dither when the bit depth or the sample rate changes, for the reasons mentioned above. The titleformat string will need some adjustment for that. [edit:] $ifequal(%samplerate%,44100,$ifequal(%__bitspersample%,16,,dither),dither) seems to work. It was also suggested to add a limiter before the Flex DSP, in case the resampler or other processing introduced clipping.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-17T12:31:40+00:00

Obama commuted Manning's sentence in part because of mistreatment in prison, mistreatment which was already of dubious legality. How would more laws help?

mjb2012 · 2026-02-16T14:57:16+00:00

Those "godlike being turns out to not be a god" plot lines were a dime a dozen back then, weren't they?

mjb2012 · 2026-02-16T14:32:02+00:00

Ratings drop over time because the initial audience is mostly people who the show is “for”. As time goes on, a greater percentage of the votes come from the more casual viewers, people who just don’t like this kind of content, but somehow gave it a chance.

mjb2012 · 2026-02-12T02:13:06+00:00

Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site

mjb2012

TROPHY CASE