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0 pointsjacobolus2y ago0 comments

You absolutely can measure an octave or decibel. It's just a relative quantity, in just the same way any quantification of orientation is relative.

(For example, you can measure an octave by marking out a particular fret on your guitar; it will make an octave change whichever particular note you start with.)

You can feel free to "reject" whatever you want. You'll just be wrong/confused. ;-) (But you'll be in good company. Most working engineers, scientists, and mathematicians don't have or need a particularly clear philosophical understanding of angles.)

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Misdicorl2y ago· 3 in thread

I think this will devolve at this point. But you should consider that you are perhaps far too confident in your position here. My last attempt is due you to consider what happens when you

A) multiply two degrees together

B) multiply two dBm values together

The output "units" in A change but do not in B. dB and angles are very different.

Edit: the units in B do change, but the dB part doesn't. Tired.

jacobolusOP2y ago

Multiplying degrees together is not a meaningful concept.

But you can compose rotations.

Multiplying decibels together is also not meaningful, but you can compose scaling.

Misdicorl2y ago

> Multiplying degrees together is not a meaningful concept.

Curious what you think of the d_theta * d_phi term in a spherical coordinates integral...

jacobolusOP2y ago

You can compute solid angle (a.k.a. spherical excess, normalized spherical surface area) by taking a surface integral, but the units are not "square degrees" or "square radians", but instead an entirely new type, usually just measured in radians ("steradians"). Some people have defined https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_degree but that is a stupid unit.

While rotation is naturally oriented like a bivector (plane), solid angle is naturally oriented like a trivector (3-space).

The natural representation is as a kind of (unitless) ratio formed from 3 vectors, not the product of two vector–vector ratios.

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