You can literally hear the power going through the lines.

Which is the problem. People get scared of them, even though there’s no danger, but they convince themselves there is, and they get a Nocebo Effect.

This has been widely tested. Some people claim that WiFi makes them ill, so they did tests. The tests showed no difference in people’s reported symptoms when they were next to a real WiFi router that was emitting WiFi signals vs. a sham WiFi router that was designed to look real but didn’t have any active radio components.

They’ve also done studies that show that exposure can result in symptoms. Exposure to media claiming WiFi is dangerous, that is.

He experienced a visual disturbance in his periphery manifesting as the false perception of a person

Which can’t be explained by an unfocused eye. They do a lot of speculating to come up with a reason why he could possibly see something out of the corner of his eye. But, that’s only the physical part of it. It doesn’t explain why he might think that whatever he was seeing was “a figure” and moved like a person.

That’s like saying that ghosts can be explained by wearing glasses with dirty lenses, then going into detail about how dirty lenses can cause someone to see something that isn’t there, while ignoring the elephant ghost in the room. Except it’s even worse because a smudge on your glasses causing you to “see something that isn’t there” is really easy to test and barely needs an experiment to confirm it’s true. But, low frequency waves causing someone to see something that isn’t there isn’t something that has been tested. It’s pure speculation.

So, pure speculation that low frequency waves can cause someone’s eyes to blur in such a way that the corner of their glasses is mistaken as something that isn’t there. No proof that has happened or can happen, just speculation.

Then ignoring the elephant in the room that just because someone might not see clearly if their eye is vibrating, that is somehow magically interpreted as a figure moving like a person, which they interpret as a ghost.

There’s a humongous jump there from “a certain frequency might cause the eyes to wiggle” to “and therefore that’s why he saw a ghost”.

Ok, that’s a paper that attempts to explain the feeling that a building might be haunted. There’s nothing in there about causing people to hallucinate. They talk about the supposed “resonant frequency of the eye”, but then they say:

The resonant frequency is the natural frequency of an object, the one at which it needs the minimum input of energy to vibrate. As you can see from above, any frequency above 8 Hz will have an effect and some sources quote 40Hz

If the values are that vague, then there is no resonant frequency. There may be frequencies that transmit vibrations to the eye, but with a big enough speaker you can cause anything to vibrate.

The closest the get to hallucinations is to say that "the eyeball would be vibrating which would cause a serious “smearing"of vision. It would not seem unreasonable to see dark shadowy forms caused by something as innocent as the corner of V.T.’s spectacles.” So, no hallucinations, just some blurry vision that might vaguely count as an excuse for seeing a ghost if your eye is vibrating significantly. Notice that that’s all just speculation, saying “this seems like it could be possible” rather than actually testing for that hypothesis.

It’s pretty clear it’s a BS condition. Jimmy even tests him. It doesn’t mean that Chuck is lying, it’s also pretty clear from the show that it’s some kind of Nocebo Effect. He doesn’t want to believe he’s a bad person, so his body effectively comes up with this “solution” to the problem.

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), a non-profit organization, said that high- and low-frequency sounds emitted by these industrial sites can be heard and felt for hundreds of feet in surrounding areas, with noise levels reaching as high as 96dB for 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

It says “these industrial sites” so it’s making a generalization, it says “as high as” so that’s presumably the maximum they measured at one of those many sites. They also talk about high and low frequency sound, so it may not be the infrasound that is “loud” but the high frequency sound, which doesn’t as easily travel through the ground, etc.

Because sound tends to follow an inverse square law, if they measured that 96 dB at 100m from the sound’s source, it could be just 2% of that level at 800m away.

So, that “96 dB” figure needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The figure as actually measured in some person’s home might be a tiny fraction of that amount.

Again, it doesn’t mean there’s no problem, just that it needs some further investigation.

Anxiety, nausea and sleep problems can be caused by many things. One of those things is believing that a nearby datacenter is making you ill.

Sure, investigate it and see if it is actually happening. But, do a proper double-blind study.

I take this personally because my mother is a conspiracy nut who thinks that everything is making her ill: wifi, chemtrails, street lights, electricity, gluten… if she heard about infrasound she’d add it to the list of things that are hurting her health.

That’s right. Even if the person won the lawsuit it doesn’t mean the science is true. It’s one really frustrating thing about the legal system, sometimes people win lawsuits based on absolutely terrible BS science. A persuasive lawyer has to convince a jury that something is true, not convince a scientist who knows about that field.

Exposure to this level of infrasound

What level is that?

[citation needed]

I fully believe that at times infrasound can result in anxiety, nausea, etc. But, in 2026 so can reading the news. So can thinking that your health is being affected by a datacenter, resulting in you worrying and losing sleep.

This whole thing about the “resonant frequency of the eye” and that causing someone to hallucinate… that smells like utter BS. A much more likely explanation in a basement is carbon monoxide.

What’s interesting is that the Voting Rights Act has been used to gerrymander states to elect more GOP members.

The way you gerrymander is by creating one area that overwhelmingly goes for one party, and a bunch of other areas that very slightly go the other way. It’s often hard to come up with a legal pretext to do that (back when that sort of thing mattered). The voting rights act said that not only was it legal to create districts that would give black voters a majority, it was necessary. How do you do that? You group all the black voters together into one district, thereby creating a strong democratic-voting district. What side effect does that have? It creates a bunch of other districts that are not democratic-leaning so the overall state goes Republican.

If other laws still mattered, Republicans might have been fighting to save the VRA because it was their best tool to legally gerrymander in their favour. But, with the modern “laws don’t matter lol” supreme court, it’s different.

Riker plays a complex instrument with no fixed resonant settings where your arm extension and lip tightness determines the note and your breath drives the volume. It is an instrument you play with your entire body.

Data plays an instrument with no fixed positions that requires careful control. It’s an instrument capable of playing multiple notes at once, but requires neither lips nor lungs, perhaps indicating his slight lack of humanity.

Picard plays a recorder using someone else’s hands:

There are many other kinds of salmon though, and some of them are native to parts of Japan, like Hokkaido. It just wasn’t traditionally part of Sushi. Even tuna wasn’t considered sushi-worthy for a long time. It used to be food for poor people.

Also, Salmon sushi isn’t a Japanese thing.

By “well below” do you mean -30? Or do you mean -5? Either way, you must have much better insulation than I do, because I have multi-kilowatt heaters and even on not-so-cold days my poor PC can’t compete, no matter how hard I game.

Yes, what is that motor doing? If it’s a drill, it’s spinning a drill bit and that drill bit generates a lot of friction when it tries to make a hole in something, and that friction generates heat. If it’s spinning a tire, that tire generates a lot of friction with the road.

Sounds like your cold winter nights are not very cold.

Is there anything about dead languages that is different from current languages?

On one hand, there shouldn’t be. Anatomy hasn’t changed. The language didn’t “evolve” to something better, it’s just that people stopped speaking it.

OTOH, I know that certain things have changed about languages in living memory. For example, the loss of thee / thou in English, Mexican Spanish dropping “vos”, and in French using “tu” more often than the more formal “vous”.

What I hate is when I’m searching for a word in another language I speak and it comes to me, but it’s just the English word said with a different accent, so I don’t trust it, but it’s actually right.

Probably near zero. Any ad that slips through is noticeable and it’s a company I especially hate, and am less likely to ever do business with.

This sounds like something the advertising world would want you to believe. It’s in their interest to keep the public thinking that advertising works. It’s good for their bottom line if people believe that even if you don’t act on an ad immediately it’s something that eventually nudges you.

Maybe that’s not true. Maybe, in fact, sometimes advertising is a net negative because you’re bombarded so often with an ad that you come to resent the company pushing it. I don’t know what Raycon is, but based on what you’ve said I’m also not interested in ever giving them money. So, the worst case for the advertiser is that not only do their ads reduce sales from people who are reached by those ads, they also reduce sales in anybody those people talk to.

The idea that advertisers’ psychological manipulation just works on people needs to die and stay dead. If you saw it, it had an effect on you, and if that effect is negative then it’s obviously worse than nothing.