I’ve been doing a lot of driving this summer, back and forth between home and the hospital or rehab center to visit the wife, and whatnot.
I like to listen to the radio when I drive. It’s about the only time I get to listen to music anymore. My favorite genre is Classic Rock, but sometimes I just surf the dial until I find something interesting to listen to.
Recently I’ve noticed some glitches in the songs as I’m listening. I’ll be listening to Journey or REO Speedwagon or AC/DC and all of a sudden the song will ‘skip’, sort of like records did back in the days of vinyl. Sometimes a record would get played so much a scratch might happen, then every time you played record it would skip and repeat a part of the record, over and over. You had to manually move the needle of the record player to get it to stop. The song on the radio will all of a sudden jump ahead two or three seconds. Or it might jump backwards a few seconds and play a part of the song that just played. It’s rather annoying when I’m grooving along to the song and it doesn’t go the way I expect.
I assume that radio stations these days are entirely digital and playing digitized versions of the songs. I would think they left vinyl records behind decades ago and went to Compact Discs, thus avoiding the ‘skipping’ problem mentioned above. Even if some stations are still using CDs, they are supposed to hold up much longer than vinyl and be immune to skipping, unless someone carelessly scratches the surface of the CD.
If the radio station is using digital copies of the songs have we now reached the equivalent of a scratched record / CD? Have the .MP3s (or whatever the stations are using) been played so much they are wearing out and glitching like their physical counterparts do?
Maybe this is just a sign we’re all living in a virtual world simulation like The Matrix and it is slowly breaking down? The digital world is about to come crashing down around our ears unless it is rebooted we’re all in for a world of shock! It’s not that ridiculous given the state of the world these days.
You don’t want to get stuck in a loop. You might not like the loop you get stuck in. Best get to all those things on your bucket list before the program permanently glitches, my Hordeling.
If you’d like to support my efforts, why not buy me a chocolate chip cookie through my Ko-Fi page? https://ko-fi.com/jhusum
Okay, this post has pushed a bit of a button. Interesting premise, but it’s symptomatic of what is to me a very disturbing phenomena.
We live in a wonderful universe. And I mean that literally – full of wonders. Some wonders we understand, others we don’t. I’m inclined to believe that the ratio of what we understand to what we don’t understand is still pretty low, but that is only an opinion. But James noticed something – glitches in his radio reception. Shouldn’t happen with the current state of our audio technology, yet it does. He wonders why. And posits a possible explanation – we’re living in a simulated reality that is breaking down. Well, that’s certainly possible, but he presents no evidence for it, and it is no more or less likely than countless other explanations for his observations. Explanations that are much more mundane, boring, and dull. “We’re living in the Matrix!” makes for a better blog post.
And there’s no problem with that. Except for the phenomena that I keep noticing. People like the flashy explanations. They ignore the millions of boring potential explanations and insist the flashy, the news breaking, the revolutionary, the contrary must be the true explanation. For all practical purposes, they say that liking this answer or believing that answer will benefit them actually constitutes positive evidence for its truth. And this is dangerous.
One example: not quite 4 years ago we were poised to stop Covid in its tracks, but too many people found it convenient to believe either Covid is not real, or vaccines are not useful. And for the record, Covid killed more people in its first 2 years than HIV killed in over 40 years.