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Top of the sine wave
Jun. 21st, 2013 08:33 pmSummer greetings to all!
If the length of the day is a sine wave with a frequency of 3.1676 x 10E-8 Hertz (that is, one cycle per year), than here in Boston we are at its peak.
Of course, the length of a day is not a continuous function, but discrete quantities that represent a sine wave sampled once per day.
How pure is that sine wave, I wonder? How much harmonic distortion does it exhibit? Does the second harmonic increase in inverse proportion to one's latitude? At the equator, after all, the day peaks at the equinoxes, and the wave must be nearly a pure second harmonic.
If one were to amplitude-modulate it, one would have to encode the modulating signal by varying the tilt of the planet's axis.
If one were to frequency modulate it, one would have to vary the radius of the earth's orbit.
And either way it would take forever to show up in the Arbitrons.
Yeah, I'm weird.
If the length of the day is a sine wave with a frequency of 3.1676 x 10E-8 Hertz (that is, one cycle per year), than here in Boston we are at its peak.
Of course, the length of a day is not a continuous function, but discrete quantities that represent a sine wave sampled once per day.
How pure is that sine wave, I wonder? How much harmonic distortion does it exhibit? Does the second harmonic increase in inverse proportion to one's latitude? At the equator, after all, the day peaks at the equinoxes, and the wave must be nearly a pure second harmonic.
If one were to amplitude-modulate it, one would have to encode the modulating signal by varying the tilt of the planet's axis.
If one were to frequency modulate it, one would have to vary the radius of the earth's orbit.
And either way it would take forever to show up in the Arbitrons.
Yeah, I'm weird.
