New Release: Audio Effects, Mixing and Mastering (Kindle)

This book is a quick guide to effects, mixing and mastering for beginners using Cubase as its platform. The first chapter highlights the most commonly used effects in audio production such as compressors, limiters, equalizers, reverb, delay, gates and others. You will learn about how they work, when to apply them, the story behind the parameters and what traps you might encounter. The chapter also contains a quick peek into automation and what it can do.

In the second chapter we focus on what constitutes a good mix and how to achieve it using a clear and comprehensible strategy. This is followed by a look at the mastering chain that will help to polish and push a mix. The guide is sprinkled with helpful tips and background information to make the learning experience more vivid. You get all of this for a fair price of $ 3.95.

Table Of Contents:

1. Audio Effects And Automation
1.1. Compressors
1.2. Limiters
1.3. Equalizers
1.4. Reverb and Delay
1.5. Gates
1.6. Chorus
1.7. Other Effects
1.8. Automation

2. Mixing
2.1. The Big Picture
2.2. Mixing Strategy
2.3. Separating Tracks

3. Mastering
3.1. Basic Idea
3.2. Mastering Strategy
3.3. Mid/Side Processing
3.4. Don’t Give Up

4. Appendix
4.1. Calculating Frequencies
4.2. Decibel
4.3. Copyright and Disclaimer
4.4. Request to the Reader

Released Today for Kindle: Physics! In Quantities and Examples

I finally finished and released my new ebook … took me longer than usual because I always kept finding new interesting topics while researching. Here’s the blurb, link and TOC:

This book is a concept-focused and informal introduction to the field of physics that can be enjoyed without any prior knowledge. Step by step and using many examples and illustrations, the most important quantities in physics are gently explained. From length and mass, over energy and power, all the way to voltage and magnetic flux. The mathematics in the book is strictly limited to basic high school algebra to allow anyone to get in and to assure that the focus always remains on the core physical concepts.

(Click cover to get to the Amazon Product Page)

Table of Contents:

Length
(Introduction, From the Smallest to the Largest, Wavelength)

Mass
(Introduction, Mass versus Weight, From the Smallest to the Largest, Mass Defect and Einstein, Jeans Mass)

Speed / Velocity
(Introduction, From the Smallest to the Largest, Faster than Light, Speed of Sound for all Purposes)

Acceleration
(Introduction, From the Smallest to the Largest, Car Performance, Accident Investigation)

Force
(Introduction, Thrust and the Space Shuttle, Force of Light and Solar Sails, MoND and Dark Matter, Artificial Gravity and Centrifugal Force, Why do Airplanes Fly?)

Area
(Introduction, Surface Area and Heat, Projected Area and Planetary Temperature)

Pressure
(Introduction, From the Smallest to the Largest, Hydraulic Press, Air Pressure, Magdeburg Hemispheres)

Volume
(Introduction, Poisson’s Ratio)

Density
(Introduction, From the Smallest to the Largest, Bulk Density, Water Anomaly, More Densities)

Temperature
(Introduction, From the Smallest to the Largest, Thermal Expansion, Boiling, Evaporation is Cool, Why Blankets Work, Cricket Temperature)

Energy
(Introduction, Impact Speed, Ice Skating, Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen!, Space Shuttle Reentry, Radiation Exposure)

Power
(Introduction, From the Smallest to the Largest, Space Shuttle Launch and Sound Suppression)

Intensity
(Introduction, Inverse Square Law, Absorption)

Momentum
(Introduction, Perfectly Inelastic Collisions, Recoil, Hollywood and Physics, Force Revisited)

Frequency / Period
(Introduction, Heart Beat, Neutron Stars, Gravitational Redshift)

Rotational Motion
(Extended Introduction, Moment of Inertia – The Concept, Moment of Inertia – The Computation, Conservation of Angular Momentum)

Electricity
(Extended Introduction, Stewart-Tolman Effect, Piezoelectricity, Lightning)

Magnetism
(Extended Introduction, Lorentz Force, Mass Spectrometers, MHD Generators, Earth’s Magnetic Field)

Appendix:
Scalar and Vector Quantities
Measuring Quantities
Unit Conversion
Unit Prefixes
References
Copyright and Disclaimer

As always, I discounted the book in countries with a low GDP because I think that education should be accessible for all people. Enjoy!

Self-Publishing – A Rat Race

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat. (Lily Tomlin)

Self-publishing seems like a cozy thing to do. You are free to choose any topic, free to write any way you like, free to set your own schedule … in short: a fantastic opportunity to express oneself and to share your ideas with the world. But as with anything on God’s green Earth, you gotta read the small print. There’s a good chance that self-publishing sucks you into a rat race filled with uncertainty, stress, anger and sleepless nights.

You chase the Amazon ranks like an addict chasing the drug that will bring his doom. You rush to finish the next book before the previous one drops out of Amazon’s “new releases” list. You are downright angry at an invisible algorithm that doesn’t make your book appear in the “also bought” list. You spend hours and hours of searching new ways to be seen and spend hours and hours frustrated when you can’t achieve the visibility you desire. You are happy about the sudden rise in sales and wonder obsessively about the following drop. You feel fantastic about the praise and are devasted for days about a bad review. If you get sucked in, there’s little left of the original idea: express oneself and share the ideas.

Any book takes a lot of work. The actual writing and researching, the creative process, is only a part of it. Thorough editing takes patience and time. You have to proof-read your book until you can’t stand the sight of it. This is the only way of making it error-free if you don’t intent to hire an editor. You have to format the whole thing for Kindle properly, including making it pass the EPUB validation (which will most likely cause you to scream at your innocent computer screen on more than one occasion), make the right book cover and write a catchy blurb. Then comes the worst part: marketing. Like a desperate and lonely vacuum cleaner salesman you go from virtual door to virtual door, begging for attention and feeling dirty all along. All for this little gain in visibility and rank, the self-published author’s cocaine. Then come the rollercoaster sales and reviews. If you kept your cool up to now, this will get to you. It’s amazing how much a negative review can hurt. But it’s just part of the job.

The rat race is on and you are rat #2,534,287 trying to find your edge. Remember the original idea? The expressing and sharing thing? Rat #2,534,287 doesn’t, all it wants to do is chase ranks.

I’m not making a case against self-publishing. I’m making a case for remembering why you do it or want to do it. The original idea that made writing your first book a joy. The first book! Just pure creative process. No thought wasted on ranks, promos, new releases, also boughts, pricing, … That’s how it should be. And that’s why I’m taking a break from publishing, to get back to this state of mind. I want to be me, not rat #2,534,287.

Distribution of E-Book Sales on Amazon

For e-books on Amazon the relationship between the daily sales rate s and the rank r is approximately given by:

s = 100,000 / r

Such an inverse proportional relationship between a ranked quantity and the rank is called a Zipf distribution. So a book on rank r = 10,000 can be expected to sell s = 100,000 / 10,000 = 10 copies per day. As of November 2013, there are about 2.4 million e-books available on Amazon’s US store (talk about a tough competition). In this post we’ll answer two questions. The first one is: how many e-books are sold on Amazon each day? To answer that, we need to add the daily sales rate from r = 1 to r = 2,400,000.

s = 100,000 · ( 1/1 + 1/2 + … + 1/2,400,000 )

We can evaluate that using the approximation formula for harmonic sums:

1/1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + … + 1/r ≈ ln(r) + 0.58

Thus we get:

s ≈ 100,000 · ( ln(2,400,000) + 0.58 ) ≈ 1.5 million

That’s a lot of e-books! And a lot of saved trees for that matter. The second question: What percentage of the e-book sales come from the top 100 books? Have a guess before reading on. Let’s calculate the total daily sales for the top 100 e-books:

s ≈ 100,000 · ( ln(100) + 0.58 ) ≈ 0.5 million

So the top 100 e-books already make up one-third of all sales while the other 2,399,900 e-books have to share the remaining two-thirds. The cake is very unevenly distributed.

This was a slightly altered excerpt from More Great Formulas Explained, available on Amazon for Kindle. For more posts on the ebook market go to my E-Book Market and Sales Analysis Pool.

Five Biggest Mistakes In E-Book Publishing

Are you thinking about publishing an e-book? If yes, then know that you are entering a highly competetive market. Publishing a book has never been easier and accordingly, many new authors have joined in. To have a chance at being read, you need to make sure to avoid common mistakes.

1. Lack of Writing Experience

Almost everybody can read and write, it’s a skill we learn from an early age on. But writing is not the same as writing well. It takes a lot of practice to write articles or books that make a good read. So before you start that novel, grow a blog and gain experience. This provides a chance to see what works and what doesn’t. And the improvement will become noticeable after just a few weeks and months. As a plus, the blog you grew can serve as a marketing platform once your e-book is finished. In such a competitive market, this can be a big advantage.

2. Writing for Quick Cash

Writing for quick and easy cash is a really bad idea. This might have worked for a short while when the e-books were new and fresh, but this time is long gone. Just browse any indie author forum for proof. The market is saturated. If your first e-book brings in 30 $ a month or so, you can call yourself lucky. If it’s more, even better, but don’t expect it. Writing and selling e-book is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s tough work with a very low ROI. If you do it for the money, you’re in for a disappointment. Do it out of passion.

3. Lack of Editing

If you spend three weeks writing a book, expect to spend another three weeks on fine-tuning and proof-reading. To find the mistakes in the text, you have to go over it again and again until you can’t stand your book anymore. You’ll be amazed that seemingly obvious mistakes (the same words twice, for for example) can be overlooked several times. And no spell checker will find that. Tedious editing is just part of writing and if you try to skip that, you will end up with many deserved one-star reviews.

4. No or Ineffective Marketing

With 2.5 million e-books on Amazon, many of high quality, getting noticed is tough. Without any marketing, your sales will most likely just disappear in an exponential fashion over time. The common marketing means for indie authors are: growing a blog, establishing a facebook fan page, joining facebook groups and interacting, becoming active on twitter, joining goodreads and doing giveaways, free promos via KDP Select, banner and other paid ads (notably on BookBub – as expensive as it is effective), and and and … So you’re far from done with just writing, editing and publishing. You should set aside half an hour a day or so for marketing. And always make sure to market to the right people.

5. Stopping After The First Book

Publishing the first e-book can be a quite sobering experience. You just slaved for weeks or even months over your book and your stats hardly move. Was it all worth it? If you did it out of passion, then yes, certainly. But of course you want to be read and so you feel the frustration coming in. The worst thing you could do is to stop there. Usually sales will pick up after the third or fourth book. So keep publishing and results will come in.

E-Book Market & Sales – Analysis Pool

On this page you can find a collection of all my statistical analysis and research regarding the Kindle ebook market and sales. I’ll keep the page updated.

How E-Book Sales Vary at the End / Beginning of a Month

The E-Book Market in Numbers

Computing and Tracking the Amazon Sales Rank

Typical Per-Page-Prices for E-Books

Quantitative Analysis of Top 60 Kindle Romance Novels

Mathematical Model For E-Book Sales

If you have any suggestions on what to analyze next, just let me know. Share if you like the information.

How E-Book Sales Vary at the End / Beginning of a Month

After getting satisfying data and results on ebook sales over the course of a week, I was also interested in finding out what impact the end or beginning of a month has on sales. For that I looked up the sales of 20 ebooks, all taken from the current top 100 Kindle ebooks list, for November and beginning of December on novelrank. Here’s how they performed at the end of November:

• Strong Increase: 0%
• Slight Increase: 0 %
• Unchanged: 20%
• Slight Decrease: 35 %
• Strong Decrease: 45 %

80 % showed either a slight or strong decrease, none showed any increase. So there’s a very pronounced downwards trend in ebook sales at the end of the month. It usually begins around the 20th. Onto the performance at the beginning of December:

• Strong Increase: 50%
• Slight Increase: 35 %
• Unchanged: 10%
• Slight Decrease: 5 %
• Strong Decrease: 0 %

Here 85 % showed either a slight or strong increase, while only 5 % showed any decrease. This of course doesn’t leave much room for interpretation, there’s a clear upwards trend at the beginning of the month. It usually lasts only a few days (shorter than the decline period) and after that the elevated level is more or less maintained.

Mathematical Model For (E-) Book Sales

It seems to be a no-brainer that with more books on the market, an author will see higher revenues. I wanted to know more about how the sales rate varies with the number of books. So I did what I always do when faced with an economic problem: construct a mathematical model. Even though it took me several tries to find the right approach, I’m fairly confident that the following model is able to explain why revenues grow overproportionally with the number of books an author has published. I also stumbled across a way to correct the marketing R/C for number of books.

The basic quantities used are:

• n = number of books
• i = impressions per day
• q = conversion probability (which is the probability that an impression results in a sale)
• s = sales per buyer
• r = daily sales rate

Obviously the basic relationship is:

r = i(n) * q(n) * s(n)

with the brackets indicating a dependence of the quantities on the number of books.

1) Let’s start with s(n) = sales per buyer. Suppose there’s a probability p that a buyer, who has purchased an author’s book, will go on to buy yet another book of said author. To visualize this, think of the books as some kind of mirrors: each ray (sale) will either go through the book (no further sales from this buyer) or be reflected on another book of the author. In the latter case, the process repeats. Using this “reflective model”, the number of sales per buyer is:

s(n) = 1 + p + p² + … + pⁿ = (1 – pⁿ) / (1 – p)

For example, if the probability of a reader buying another book from the same author is p = 15 % = 0.15 and the author has n = 3 books available, we get:

s(3) = (1 – 0.15³) / (1 – 0.15) = 1.17 sales per buyer

So the number of sales per buyer increases with the number of books. However, it quickly reaches a limiting value. Letting n go to infinity results in:

s(∞) = 1 / (1 – p)

Hence, this effect is a source for overproportional growth only for the first few books. After that it turns into a constant factor.

2) Let’s turn to q(n) = conversion probability. Why should there be a dependence on number of books at all for this quantity? Studies show that the probability of making a sale grows with the choice offered. That’s why ridiculously large malls work. When an author offers a large number of books, he is able to provide list impression (featuring all his / her books) additionally to the common single impressions (featuring only one book). With more choice, the conversion probability on list impressions will be higher than that on single impressions.

• q_s = single impression conversion probability
• p_s = percentage of impressions that are single impressions
• q_l = list impression conversion probability
• p_l = percentage of impressions that are list impressions

with p_s + p_l = 1. The overall conversion probability will be:

q(n) = q_s(n) * p_s(n) + q_l(n)* p_l(n)

With q_l(n) and p_l(n) obviously growing with the number of books and p_s(n) decreasing accordingly, we get an increase in the overall conversion probability.

3) Finally let’s look at i(n) = impressions per day. Denoting with i₁, i₂, … the number of daily impressions by book number 1, book number 2, … , the average number of impressions per day and book are:

i_b = 1/n * ∑[k] i_k

with ∑[k] meaning the sum over all k. The overall impressions per day are:

i(n) = i_b(n) * n

Assuming all books generate the same number of daily impressions, this is a linear growth. However, there might be an overproportional factor at work here. As an author keeps publishing, his experience in writing, editing and marketing will grow. Especially for initially inexperienced authors the quality of the books and the marketing approach will improve with each book. Translated in numbers, this means that later books will generate more impressions per day:

i_k+1 > i_k

which leads to an overproportional (instead of just linear) growth in overall impressions per day with the number of books. Note that more experience should also translate into a higher single impression conversion probability:

q_s(n+1) > q_s(n)

4) As a final treat, let’s look at how these effects impact the marketing R/C. The marketing R/C is the ratio of revenues that result from an ad divided by the costs of the ad:

R/C = Revenues / Costs

For an ad to be of worth to an author, this value should be greater than 1. Assume an ad generates the number of i_ad single impressions in total. For one book we get the revenues:

R = i_ad * q_s(1)

If more than one book is available, this number changes to:

R = i_ad * q_s(n) * (1 – pⁿ) / (1 – p)

So if the R/C in the case of one book is (R/C)₁, the corrected R/C for a larger number of books is:

R/C = (R/C)₁ * q_s(n) / q_s(1) * (1 – pⁿ) / (1 – p)

In short: ads, that aren’t profitable, can become profitable as the author offers more books.

For more mathematical modeling check out: Mathematics of Blog Traffic: Model and Tips for High Traffic.

Released Today: More Great Formulas Explained (Ebook for Kindle)

I’m happy to announce that today I’ve released the second volume of the series “Great Formulas Explained”. The aim of the series is to gently explain the greatest formulas the fields of physics, mathematics and economics have brought forth. It is suitable for high-school students, freshmen and anyone else with a keen interest in science. I had a lot of fun writing the series and edited both volumes thoroughly, including double-checking all sources and calculations.

Here are the contents of More Great Formulas Explained:

• Part I: Physics

Law Of The Lever
Sliding and Overturning
Maximum Car Speed
Range Continued
Escape Velocity
Cooling and Wind-Chill
Adiabatic Processes
Draining a Tank
Open-Channel Flow
Wind-Driven Waves
Sailing
Heat Radiation
Main Sequence Stars
Electrical Resistance
Strings and Sound

• Part II: Mathematics

Cylinders
Arbitrary Triangles
Summation
Standard Deviation and Error
Zipf Distribution

• Part III: Appendix

Unit Conversion
Unit Prefixes
References
Copyright and Disclaimer
Request to the Reader

I will post exerpts in the days to come. If you are interested, click the cover to get to the Amazon product page. Since I’m enrolled in the KDP Select program, the book is exclusively available through Amazon for a constant price of $ 2.99, I will not be offering it through any other retailers in the near future.

Remember what Benjamin Franklin once said: “Knowledge pays the best interest”. An investment in education (be that time or money) can never be wrong. Knowledge is a powerful tool to make you free and independent. I hope I can contribute to bringing knowledge to people all over the world. In the spirit of this, I have permanently discounted this book, as well as volume I, in India.

The Ebook Market in Numbers

Over the years the ebook market has grown from a relatively obscure niche to a thrilling billion-dollar mass market. The total ebook revenues went from 64 million $ in 2008 to about 3 billion $ in 2012. That’s a increase by a factor of close to 50 in just a few years.

The number of units sold also increased by the same factor (from 10 million units in 2008 to 457 million in 2012).

(Source)

However, many experts believe that the ebook market has reached a plateau and the numbers for the first half of 2013 seem to confirm that.

From the revenues and units sold we can also extract the development of the average price for sold ebooks. It strongly increased from 6.4 $ in 2008 to about 8 $ in 2009. After that, it quickly went back down to 7 $ in 2010 and 6.7 $ in 2012. So ebooks have gotten cheaper in the last few years, but are still more expensive than in 2008.

As of 2012, ebooks make up 20 % of the general book market.

21 % of American adults have read an ebook / magazine / newspaper on an e-reader in 2012. This is up from 17 % in the previous year.

A survey, again from 2012, shows that most e-book consumers prefer Amazon’s Kindle Fire (17 %, up from no use) , followed by Apple’s iPad (10 %, same as previous year) and Barnes & Noble’s Nook (7 %, up from 2 %).

Amazon Plans to Use Drones to Deliver Packages

Usually I don’t post news in my blog, but this sounds like a fantastic idea. Amazon is testing drones that could deliver up to 5 pounds per flight (which covers 86 % of all Amazon sales). The service, called Prime Air, could be available within five years if the ongoing series of tests is successful and the necessary FAA permissions are obtained. As an ebook author, I wonder though what impact this will have on the ebook market. Will people go back to print?

Amazon: “Amazon customer service, how may we help you?”

Customer: “Your damned drone put my package on the roof again!”

Here’s a picture of Amazon’s “Octocopter”:

(Taken from regmedia.co.uk)

You can find more info on BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25180906

The Emerging World Of Ebooks

As we all know, the Internet changed everything. The Net and the Web have brought the world closer together. Many older means of communication have either been replaced or changed so as to co-exist with, and complement, electronic communication. Email, for example, has replaced almost all business and a lot of personal letter writing, though our mailboxes remain filled with lots of mail, most unwanted. A lot of printed newspapers and magazines still exist, but their content is now also available on websites, and the websites are timelier and often offer more detailed information. Printed media is not dead by any means, as millions of people still prefer to curl up with a good book or grab a paper on their way to work. There have been many efforts to popularize ebooks, downloadable books in digital form, but their acceptance remains in its infancy.

But that won’t stay that way. Ebooks make sense. Since books are almost all text, an ebook download is very fast and hundreds of ebooks can fit onto a small storage card. Ebooks do not contribute to cutting down forests, they do not need to be trucked across the country, they do not produce waste, and they are usually a lot less expensive than printed books. Ebooks also have many other advantages. Depending on your ebook reader software, an ebook can be annotated, bookmarked and searched. The latter is especially useful; I often want to go back to a certain quote or paragraph in a book, and electronic search is so much easier than leafing through a printed book.

One of the problems ebooks face is that people do not know how to use them. They are confused by the many different ebook formats or think they need a particular piece of hardware to read them. In fact, the formats are not really a problem. Most computers can read popular ebook formats and ebook reader software is freely available. Hardware is a bit more of an issue. Hardcovers and paperbacks are awfully convenient and they don’t need batteries, so a lot of people shy away from reading on a computer screen or spending the money for a dedicated ebook reader.

This is really too bad as ebooks are clearly the way of the future. They just make too much sense. Those who dismiss ebooks are missing out on a great and increasingly attractive alternative to the printed page. Those who are willing to give ebooks a chance are rewarded with lower costs and the ability to carry an entire library on a device of their choice, be that a notebook computer, a Tablet PC, a dedicated ebook reader, a PDA or even a smartphone. And they have access to a potentially much larger variety of books. That’s because ebooks make self-publishing easy and lots of authors who don’t have a chance of getting picked up by traditional print publishing houses can distribute their books electronically. Best of all, there is no waste and there will never be unsold books that end up on a bargain table or in a landfill.

My advice is to give ebooks a chance. Download a free ebook. Look for sites dedicated to ebooks, especially those with a website design that is appealing. See what format you prefer, and what device you like to read on. But be warned: you may get hooked. Once you get into them, downloading and reading ebooks can become a passion.

Intensity: How Much Power Will Burst Your Eardrums?

Under ideal circumstances, sound or light waves emitted from a point source propagate in a spherical fashion from the source. As the distance to the source grows, the energy of the waves is spread over a larger area and thus the perceived intensity decreases. We’ll take a look at the formula that allows us to compute the intensity at any distance from a source.

First of all, what do we mean by intensity? The intensity I tells us how much energy we receive from the source per second and per square meter. Accordingly, it is measured in the unit J per s and m² or simply W/m². To calculate it properly we need the power of the source P (in W) and the distance r (in m) to it.

I = P / (4 · π · r²)

This is one of these formulas that can quickly get you hooked on physics. It’s simple and extremely useful. In a later section you will meet the denominator again. It is the expression for the surface area of a sphere with radius r.

Before we go to the examples, let’s take a look at a special intensity scale that is often used in acoustics. Instead of expressing the sound intensity in the common physical unit W/m², we convert it to its decibel value dB using this formula:

dB ≈ 120 + 4.34 · ln(I)

with ln being the natural logarithm. For example, a sound intensity of I = 0.00001 W/m² (busy traffic) translates into 70 dB. This conversion is done to avoid dealing with very small or large numbers. Here are some typical values to keep in mind:

0 dB → Threshold of Hearing
20 dB → Whispering
60 dB → Normal Conversation
80 dB → Vacuum Cleaner
110 dB → Front Row at Rock Concert
130 dB → Threshold of Pain
160 dB → Bursting Eardrums

No onto the examples.

———————-

We just bought a P = 300 W speaker and want to try it out at maximal power. To get the full dose, we sit at a distance of only r = 1 m. Is that a bad idea? To find out, let’s calculate the intensity at this distance and the matching decibel value.

I = 300 W / (4 · π · (1 m)²) ≈ 23.9 W/m²

dB ≈ 120 + 4.34 · ln(23.9) ≈ 134 dB

This is already past the threshold of pain, so yes, it is a bad idea. But on the bright side, there’s no danger of the eardrums bursting. So it shouldn’t be dangerous to your health as long as you’re not exposed to this intensity for a longer period of time.

As a side note: the speaker is of course no point source, so all these values are just estimates founded on the idea that as long as you’re not too close to a source, it can be regarded as a point source in good approximation. The more the source resembles a point source and the farther you’re from it, the better the estimates computed using the formula will be.

———————-

Let’s reverse the situation from the previous example. Again we assume a distance of r = 1 m from the speaker. At what power P would our eardrums burst? Have a guess before reading on.

As we can see from the table, this happens at 160 dB. To be able to use the intensity formula, we need to know the corresponding intensity in the common physical quantity W/m². We can find that out using this equation:

160 ≈ 120 + 4.34 · ln(I)

We’ll subtract 120 from both sides and divide by 4.34:

40 ≈ 4.34 · ln(I)   

9.22 ≈ ln(I)

The inverse of the natural logarithm ln is Euler’s number e. In other words: e to the power of ln(I) is just I. So in order to get rid of the natural logarithm in this equation, we’ll just use Euler’s number as the basis on both sides:

e^9.22 ≈ e^ln(I)

10,100 ≈ I

Thus, 160 dB correspond to I = 10,100 W/m². At this intensity eardrums will burst. Now we can answer the question of which amount of power P will do that, given that we are only r = 1 m from the sound source. We insert the values into the intensity formula and solve for P:

10,100 = P / (4 · π · 1²)

10,100 = 0.08 · P

P ≈ 126,000 W

So don’t worry about ever bursting your eardrums with a speaker or a set of speakers. Not even the powerful sound systems at rock concerts could accomplish this.

———————-

This was an excerpt from the ebook “Great Formulas Explained – Physics, Mathematics, Economics”, released yesterday and available here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G807Y00.

The Mach Cone

When an object moves faster than the speed of sound, it will go past an observer before the sound waves emitted by object do. The waves are compressed so strongly that a shock front forms. So instead of the sound gradually building up to a maximum as it is usually the case, the observer will hear nothing until the shock front arrives with a sudden and explosion-like noise.

Geometrically, the shock front forms a cone around the object, which under certain circumstances can even be visible to the naked eye (see image below). The great formula that is featured in this section deals with the opening angle of said cone. This angle, symbolized by the Greek letter θ, is also indicated in the image.

All we need to compute the mach angle θ is the velocity of the object v (in m/s) and speed of sound c (in m/s):

sin θ = c / v

Let’s turn to an example.

———————-

A jet fighter flies with a speed of v = 500 m/s toward its destination. It flies close to the ground, so the speed of sound is approximately c = 340 m/s. This leads to:

sin θ = 340 / 500 = 0.68

θ = arcsin(0.68) ≈ 43°

———————-

In the picture above the angle is approximately 62°. How fast was the jet going at the time when the picture was taken? We’ll set the speed of sound to c = 340 m/s and insert all the given data into the formula:

sin 62° = 340 / v

0.88 = 340 / v

Obviously we need to solve for v. To do that, we first multiply both sides by v. This leads to:

0.88 · v = 340

Dividing both sides by 0.88 results in the answer:

v = 340 / 0.88 ≈ 385 m/s ≈ 1390 km/h ≈ 860 mph

———————-

This was an excerpt from the ebook “Great Formulas Explained – Physics, Mathematics, Economics”, released yesterday and available here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G807Y00.

Computing and Tracking the Amazon Sales Rank

The webpage http://www.novelrank.com/ provides a very neat simple way to track the sales rank of any book on Amazon. This service is completely free.

The sales rank is computed from the sales rate. The more a book sells per day, the lower the rank will be.  Here’s an approximate formula, taken from: http://www.edwardwrobertson.com/2013/02/a-quick-way-to-calculate-amazon-sales.html.

100,000 / rank = sales per day

So if a book is on rank 50,000, it sells about twice a day. As far as I know, a borrow counts as a sale and a free download as one third of a sale.

I use novelrank to track my ebooks. This is what the output looks like (launch of “Great Formulas Explained”):

Indeed a neat tool to see how a book is performing. Note that the tracking starts on the day you add it, dates before that are not shown.

As you can see, during the period when no sale is made the sales rank increases more or less linearly at about # 50,000 per day. The average rank during this time can be calculated by the formula: final minus initial rank divided by 2. When a sale is made, the rank makes a discontinuous jump to a lower value.

Quantitative Analysis of Top 60 Kindle Romance Novels

I did a quantitative analysis of the current Top 60 Kindle Romance ebooks. Here are the results. First I’ll take a look at all price related data and conclusions.

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• Price over rank:

There seems to be no relation between price and rank. A linear fit confirmed this. The average price was 3.70 $ with a standard deviation of 2.70 $.

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• Price frequency count:

(Note that prices have been rounded up) About one third of all romance novels in the top 60 are offered for 1 $. Roughly another third for 3 $ or 4 $.

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• Price per 100 pages over rank:

Again, no relation here. The average price per 100 pages was 1.24 $ with a standard deviation of 0.86 $.

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• Price per 100 pages frequency count:

About half of all novels in the top 60 have a price per 100 pages lower than 1.20 $. Another third lies between 1.20 $ and 1.60 $.

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• Price per 100 pages over number of pages:

As I expected, the bigger the novel, the less you pay per page. Romance novels of about 200 pages cost 1.50 $ per 100 pages, while at 400 pages the price drops to about 1 $ per 100 pages. The decline is statistically significant, however there’s a lot of variation.

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• Review count:

A little less than one half of the top novels have less than 50 reviews. About 40 % have between 50 and 150 reviews. Note that some of the remaining 10 % more than 600 reviews (not included in the graph).

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• Rating over rank:

There’s practically no dependence of rank on rating among the top 60 novels. However, all have a rating of 3.5 stars or higher, most of them (95 %) 4 stars or higher.

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• Pages over ranking:

There’s no relation between number of pages and rank. A linear fit confirmed this. The average number of pages was 316 with a standard deviation of 107.

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• Pages count:

About 70 % of the analyzed novels have between 200 and 400 pages. 12 % are below and 18 % above this range.

Mathematics of Explosions

When a strong explosion takes place, a shock wave forms that propagates in a spherical manner away from the source of the explosion. The shock front separates the air mass that is heated and compressed due to the explosion from the undisturbed air. In the picture below you can see the shock sphere that resulted from the explosion of Trinity, the first atomic bomb ever detonated.

Using the concept of similarity solutions, the physicists Taylor and Sedov derived a simple formula that describes how the radius r (in m) of such a shock sphere grows with time t (in s). To apply it, we need to know two additional quantities: the energy of the explosion E (in J) and the density of the surrounding air D (in kg/m³). Here’s the formula:

r = 0.93 · (E / D)^0.2 · t^0.4

Let’s apply this formula for the Trinity blast.

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In the explosion of the Trinity the amount of energy that was released was about 20 kilotons of TNT or:

E = 84 TJ = 84,000,000,000,000 J

Just to put that into perspective: in 2007 all of the households in Canada combined used about 1.4 TJ in energy. If you were able to convert the energy released in the Trinity explosion one-to-one into useable energy, you could power Canada for 60 years.

But back to the formula. The density of air at sea-level and lower heights is about D = 1.25 kg/m³. So the radius of the sphere approximately followed this law:

r = 542 · t^0.4

After one second (t = 1), the shock front traveled 542 m. So the initial velocity was 542 m/s ≈ 1950 km/h ≈ 1210 mph. After ten seconds (t = 10), the shock front already covered a distance of about 1360 m ≈ 0.85 miles.

How long did it take the shock front to reach people two miles from the detonation? Two miles are approximately 3200 m. So we can set up this equation:

3200 = 542 · t^0.4

We divide by 542:

5.90 ≈ t^0.4

Then take both sides to the power of 2.5:

t ≈ 85 s ≈ 1 and 1/2 minutes

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Let’s look at how the different parameters in the formula impact the radius of the shock sphere:

• If you increase the time sixfold, the radius of the sphere doubles. So if it reached 0.85 miles after ten seconds, it will have reached 1.7 miles after 60 seconds. Note that this means that the speed of the shock front continuously decreases.

For the other two parameters, it will be more informative to look at the initial speed v (in m/s) rather the radius of the sphere at a certain time. As you noticed in the example, we get the initial speed by setting t = 1, leading to this formula:

v = 0.93 · (E / D)^0.2

• If you increase the energy of the detonation 35-fold, the initial speed of the shock front doubles. So for an atomic blast of 20 kt · 35 = 700 kt, the initial speed would be approximately 542 m /s · 2 = 1084 m/s.

• The density behaves in the exact opposite way. If you increase it 35-fold, the initial speed halves. So if the test were conducted at an altitude of about 20 miles (where the density is only one thirty-fifth of its value on the ground), the shock wave would propagate at 1084 m/s

Another field in which the Taylor-Sedov formula is commonly applied is astrophysics, where it is used to model Supernova explosions. Since the energy released in such explosions dwarfs all atomic blasts and the surrounding density in space is very low, the initial expansion rate is extremely high.

This was an excerpt from the ebook “Great Formulas Explained – Physics, Mathematics, Economics”, released yesterday and available here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G807Y00. You can take another quick look at the physics of shock waves here: Mach Cone.

Physics (And The Formula That Got Me Hooked)

A long time ago, in my teen years, this was the formula that got me hooked on physics. Why? I can’t say for sure. I guess I was very surprised that you could calculate something like this so easily. So with some nostalgia, I present another great formula from the field of physics. It will be a continuation of and a last section on energy.

To heat something, you need a certain amount of energy E (in J). How much exactly? To compute this we require three inputs: the mass m (in kg) of the object we want to heat, the temperature difference T (in °C) between initial and final state and the so called specific heat c (in J per kg °C) of the material that is heated. The relationship is quite simple:

E = c · m · T

If you double any of the input quantities, the energy required for heating will double as well. A very helpful addition to problems involving heating is this formula:

E = P · t

with P (in watt = W = J/s) being the power of the device that delivers heat and t (in s) the duration of the heat delivery.

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The specific heat of water is c = 4200 J per kg °C. How much energy do you need to heat m = 1 kg of water from room temperature (20 °C) to its boiling point (100 °C)? Note that the temperature difference between initial and final state is T = 80 °C. So we have all the quantities we need.

E = 4200 · 1 · 80 = 336,000 J

Additional question: How long will it take a water heater with an output of 2000 W to accomplish this? Let’s set up an equation for this using the second formula:

336,000 = 2000 · t

t ≈ 168 s ≈ 3 minutes

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We put m = 1 kg of water (c = 4200 J per kg °C) in one container and m = 1 kg of sand (c = 290 J per kg °C) in another next to it. This will serve as an artificial beach. Using a heater we add 10,000 J of heat to each container. By what temperature will the water and the sand be raised?

Let’s turn to the water. From the given data and the great formula we can set up this equation:

10,000 = 4200 · 1 · T

T ≈ 2.4 °C

So the water temperature will be raised by 2.4 °C. What about the sand? It also receives 10,000 J.

10,000 = 290 · 1 · T

T ≈ 34.5 °C

So sand (or any ground in general) will heat up much stronger than water. In other words: the temperature of ground reacts quite strongly to changes in energy input while water is rather sluggish. This explains why the climate near oceans is milder than inland, that is, why the summers are less hot and the winters less cold. The water efficiently dampens the changes in temperature.

It also explains the land-sea-breeze phenomenon (seen in the image below). During the day, the sun’s energy will cause the ground to be hotter than the water. The air above the ground rises, leading to cooler air flowing from the ocean to the land. At night, due to the lack of the sun’s power, the situation reverses. The ground cools off quickly and now it’s the air above the water that rises.

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I hope this formula got you hooked as well. It’s simple, useful and can explain quite a lot of physics at the same time. It doesn’t get any better than this. Now it’s time to leave the concept of energy and turn to other topics.

This was an excerpt from my Kindle ebook: Great Formulas Explained – Physics, Mathematics, Economics. For another interesting physics quicky, check out: Intensity (or: How Much Power Will Burst Your Eardrums?).

Physics: Free Fall and Terminal Velocity

After a while of free fall, any object will reach and maintain a terminal velocity. To calculate it, we need a lot of inputs.

The necessary quantities are: the mass of the object (in kg), the gravitational acceleration (in m/s²), the density of air D (in kg/m³), the projected area of the object A (in m²) and the drag coefficient c (dimensionless). The latter two quantities need some explaining.

The projected area is the largest cross-section in the direction of fall. You can think of it as the shadow of the object on the ground when the sun’s rays hit the ground at a ninety degree angle. For example, if the falling object is a sphere, the projected area will be a circle with the same radius.

The drag coefficient is a dimensionless number that depends in a very complex way on the geometry of the object. There’s no simple way to compute it, usually it is determined in a wind tunnel. However, you can find the drag coefficients for common shapes in the picture below.

Now that we know all the inputs, let’s look at the formula for the terminal velocity v (in m/s). It will be valid for objects dropped from such a great heights that they manage to reach this limiting value, which is basically a result of the air resistance canceling out gravity.

v = sq root (2 * m * g / (c * D * A) )

Let’s do an example.

Skydivers are in free fall after leaving the plane, but soon reach the terminal velocity. We will set the mass to m = 75 kg, g = 9.81 (as usual) and D = 1.2 kg/m³. In a head-first position the skydiver has a drag coefficient of c = 0.8 and a projected area A = 0.3 m². What is the terminal velocity of the skydiver?

v = sq root (2 * 75 * 9.81 / (0.8 * 1.2 * 0.3) )

v ≈ 70 m/s ≈ 260 km/h ≈ 160 mph

Let’s take a look how changing the inputs varies the terminal velocity. Two bullet points will be sufficient here:

• If you quadruple the mass (or the gravitational acceleration), the terminal velocity doubles. So a very heavy skydiver or a regular skydiver on a massive planet would fall much faster.

• If you quadruple the drag coefficient (or the density or the projected area), the terminal velocity halves. This is why parachutes work. They have a higher drag coefficient and larger area, thus effectively reducing the terminal velocity.

This was an excerpt from the Kindle ebook: Great Formulas Explained – Physics. Mathematics, Economics. Check out my BEST OF for more interesting physics articles.

Typical Per-Page-Prices for Ebooks

I did a little analysis of ebook prices per 100 pages for different categories in the Amazon Kindle store. In each category I looked at the top 12 paid books. This data can help readers to judge prices and authors to set them. Here are the results in increasing order:

Erotica: 1.7 $ per 100 pages (ranging from 1.0 – 3.1 $ per 100 pages)
Sci-Fi and Fantasy: 1.8 $ per 100 pages (ranging from 0.8 – 4.4 $ per 100 pages)
Short Stories: 2.0 $ per 100 pages (ranging from 0.5 – 4.2 $ per 100 pages)
Self-Help: 3.6 $ per 100 pages (ranging from 1.3 – 6.7 $ per 100 pages)
Applied Math: 4.0 $ per 100 pages (ranging from 0.9 – 7.9 $ per 100 pages)
Economy / Business: 7.2 $ per 100 pages (ranging from 3.3 – 17.2 $ per 100 pages)

Typical (and in my opinion fair) prices seem to be 2 $ per 100 pages for fiction and 4 $ per 100 pages for non-fiction. In the special case of business books, prices of 7 $ per 100 pages seem common.