If you don’t do much in the way of recording, then most information about microphones will whiz over your head. Those who are in the audio world love the finer points of microphone quality and getting to play with various sound spaces. It’s not until you really start to delve into what all can affect your recordings that you learn what you can do, or what new equipment you can get to change the quality of the sound.

While there are different mics that can provide you with different effects and tackle various audio issues, the Sphere L22 is looking like it’s going to be the only mic you’ll need. This is a microphone system with a high-precision side-address large diaphragm condenser with the Sphere DSP plug-in that will let you accurately model the response of a wide range of mics. You’ll be able to change the mic type, polar pattern, and other characteristics after you’ve already done tracking.

This uses a 3D approach to tackle spatial nuances, proximity effect, and off-axis frequency response. When used with Universal Audio Apollo, it achieves extremely low latency (approx. 1.6 ms round trip at 96 kHz) for guaranteed real-time performance. Also supports native AAX, VST and AU. You’ll be able to record in stereo, and even use different mic models with the Sphere plug-in. There is a lot more information to dive into, but that is only going to apply to people who don’t mind spending $1300 on a new microphone.

Available for crowdfunding on Indiegogo
[ The Sphere L22 Precision Microphone Modeling System copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

When you were a teenager, now looking back, what did you wish your father would have told you? originally appeared on Quora – the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answer by James Ballantyne on Quora:

Five things I wish my father would’ve told me…

1. Having a good sense of humor is better than having an expensive house, car, or watch. Having one makes people want to hang out with you, the other makes you look like a jerk. Buying stuff really doesn’t make you happy anyway.

2. Some people will consider you weird, and that’s okay (as long as you’re not harming others). You might have some strange hobbies, like learning Klingon, or being obsessive about hygiene, or knowing the words to every Kanye West song, or competing in air guitar contests, or saving coupons, or choreographing elaborate dance routines that will never be performed in public, or whatever. If you’re not into anything strange, you’re missing out. Don’t cave into pressure to conform to some abstract notion of normality.

3. You are annoying, and you should try to be less annoying. You don’t necessarily realize it, but sometimes you annoy other people. That’s normal, but it’s not really okay. Maybe you leave dirty dishes/coffee cups/beer mugs lying around. Maybe you play music that others can hear, but don’t want to. Maybe you talk too loudly in public. Maybe you like the sound of your own voice too much. Maybe you’re unnecessarily (and perhaps unwittingly) rude to people. Maybe you get in people’s way when walking down the street. Maybe you interrupt people too much. Figure out what you’re doing that annoys others and just stop doing it. People will be nicer to you.

4. Sex and love are not the mysteries they seem when you’re young. Most (but not all) people want sex and love in their lives. You will meet a lot of people who want one or both with you. To discover who those people are, you need to a) talk to them, b) listen to them and c) be aware of their body language. Don’t be a creep, though. Be nice and polite, and reasonably open. Smile. Laugh. Suggest hanging out. Tell them you like them if it seems appropriate. Don’t be creepy. See how they respond. They will want to be friends, lovers, casual sex partners, or none of the above. Practice guessing which. You’ll learn to figure it out pretty fast. Whichever it is, don’t try to change their mind; it probably won’t work, and you’ll probably annoy them if you try. If they equivocate, back away, or make excuses, then the chances are they’re not interested. Leave them be. Make sure you have explicit and enthusiastic consent before trying to have sex with anyone.

5. You will meet a lot of really great, interesting people in life. Don’t be disappointed when they do stupid things. Everyone does. We all do stupid things. Many of us, at some point in our lives, get drunk and do stuff we regret. Many of us suffer from depression or anger or anxiety at some point, and we will act strangely when we do. Bad stuff will happen to all of us, and when it happens to your friend, colleague, or neighbor you might not realize it. They might do annoying or weird or stupid things around you. Don’t be surprised. Hold on to the people that you have a connection with and stick with them even when they do stupid things. But don’t put up with abusive or toxic friendships or relationships. There are limits.

This question originally appeared on Quora. – the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

More questions:​

• Parenting: What are the most important things I can teach my child?
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• Twins: How do parents tell identical twin babies apart?

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Former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros is challenging the network executives mentioned in an explosive sexual harassment lawsuit she brought forth last week to take a lie detector test.

Her lawyer, Judd Burstein, wrote an email to The Huffington Post calling out Fox News for ignoring Tantaros’ claims and detailing the questions he’d like the executives to answer.  

“In the time since Andrea Tantaros filed her complaint, no one from Fox News has come forward to deny that she was sexually harassed by, among others, [ex-network chairman] Roger Ailes,” Burstein wrote. 

At least seven other women have publicly accused Ailes of sexual harassment. Tantaros’ suit is the second aimed at him but the first to name the network and current executives as co-defendants. Ailes resigned from the network in late July.

“The silence from Fox has been deafening,” Burstein added. “The time has come, therefore, either to let this case play out in the courtroom or to conduct an even-handed trial in the court of public opinion.”

He suggested that everyone named in the suit take a lie detector test. It would be administered by an agreed-upon polygrapher formerly employed by the FBI or the CIA, he said, and the responses would be made public. 

Tantaros has said she is willing to take a lie detector test and answer questions from Fox News.

Ten questions on the potential test are for Bill Shine, the network’s newly appointed co-president. They mainly focus on how Shine may have reacted to Tantaros’ complaints about Ailes and other executives.

Tantaros’ team has similar questions for Dianne Brandi, Fox News’ executive vice president for business and legal affairs.

Questions for Irena Briganti, the head of the network’s public relations department, focus on whether she angled to disgrace Tantaros’ public image. 

Lastly, questions for Fox News host Bill O’Reilly center around whether he made sexual advances toward Tantaros. 

Fox News did not immediately respond to requests to comment.

“An innocent person would jump at the chance for this kind of vindication, and if Ms. Tantaros were not telling the truth, she would not risk offering this proposal,” Burstein wrote.

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1. We’ve created enough concrete to make a full-scale replica of Earth 2mm thick.

2. We’ve manufactured enough plastic to wrap Earth in a layer of clingfilm. On current trends, there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish by 2050. These and other manmade materials are creating “technofossils“.

3. We use an area the size of South America to grow our crops and an area bigger than Africa for our livestock. Humans and our livestock make up over 90% of all mammals on Earth by weight*.

4. We are at the start of the 6th mass extinction. Species are going extinct at mass extinction rates – we’ve only had 5 mass extinctions on Earth and the last ended the reign of the dinosaurs.

5. We move more sediment and rock than all natural processes.

6. The nitrogen cycle hasn’t changed this much in 2.5 billion years – and we are the cause – we’ve doubled the amount of reactive nitrogen in circulation. And we are radically altering the carbon and water cycles causing the climate to change.

7. We’re making Earth wobble a little. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting because of climate change caused by humans. This is changing Earth’s wobble – Earth’s spin axis drifts slowly around the poles – GPS signals are inaccurate if this is not included in the calculations.

8. Our first radio and television broadcasts have now reached 115 light years from Earth zooming past stars we now know have planets orbiting them, perhaps like our own. The signals will be too weak to detect, which is just as well because the first live television broadcast was the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games presided over by Adolf Hitler.

9. All recorded history – from agriculture to our global civilization – happened in the Holocene. This is what geologists call the last 11,700 years since the end of the ice age. The Holocene’s climate has been remarkably stable, going up or down no more than about 1°C. In 2000, Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen looked at the evidence (the Great Acceleration) and declared Earth is no longer in the Holocene. He was at a loss for words for what we were in before deducing the “Anthropocene“. (The link is to Crutzen’s first article on the idea.)

10. As a scientific concept, the Anthropocene is as significant as Copernicus’ discovery that Earth orbits the sun and Darwin’s evolution.

11. In 2014, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) included the word “Anthropocene” for the first time. Other notable additions that year included “hashtag” and “wardrobe malfunction”. But geologists aren’t as wildly impulsive as the OED. The decision rests with the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is the largest and oldest bit of the International Union of Geological Sciences created in 1961. In 2009, the commission set up an Anthropocene Working Group to investigate whether the evidence warrants a new epoch. The group has met a few times, published some papers in academic journals and now they’ve taken a vote and, yes, according to them, we are in the Anthropocene.

12. Enough with the “We”. Who is this “We” anyway? Good point. Some are driving this change more than others. Historically, we cannot disentangle this enormous growth from the European empires, slavery, resource exploitation, globalization and inequality. “Our” most significant impacts, known as the Great Acceleration, occurred in the last half of the 20th Century – driven by wealthy nations. Some say the Anthropocene really the Capitalocene? It has also been called the Eurocene, the Manthropocene, the Misanthropocene or even the Obscene.

13. The precise moment Earth entered the Anthropocene, according to some, may be determined with pinpoint accuracy: 16 July 1945 05:29:45 am (local time) – when first atomic bomb was detonated in a remote corner on the Alamagordo Bombing Range known as the Jornada del Muerto, or “Journey of Death,” 340 kilometres south of Los Alamos in New Mexico, United States. This detonation released radioactive material into the atmosphere that will leave traces in rocks for millions of years. Anyone born after this date will never have lived in the Holocene. This seems a reasonable marker for future geologists and the Anthropocene Working Group is making the case that the 1950s mark a turning point in the trajectory of the Earth system. But not everyone agrees – some think 1964 makes more sense, just after the atmospheric test ban on nuclear weapons when atmospheric radiation levels peaked. And yet others say the dawn of agriculture marks the start, or maybe even 1610 when the collision between old world and new reached its most destructive height. Whichever date is picked, it will be politically, economically and culturally loaded.

14. Can we navigate the Anthropocene? There’s room for optimism: we’ve reached peak child – birthrate is no longer rising, the ozone hole has stabilised and looks likely to recover, and in 2015 emissions growth of greenhouse gases seems to have stalled. Now we have the Paris Agreement on climate change to stabilise the climate well below 2°C. We have about 30 years, or one generation, to go from peak emissions of greenhouse gases to more or less zero. And the rest: we need to protect forests, halt biodiversity, use fertilisers more effectively and protect our oceans, ice sheets, atmosphere, land and diversity of life.

15. The remaining carbon budget for humanity to reduce risk of very dangerous climate change will run out in couple of decades. This is not a budget for the next few decades or centuries. It is the budget for humanity’s remaining time on Earth. Subsidies to the fossil fuel industry are essentially crowd-sourcing catastrophe.

Members of the Anthropocene Working Group discussed their conclusions at the 35th International Geological Congress in Cape Town 27-4 September 2016.

Check out Anthropocene.info

Or, The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: the Great Acceleration (2015)

*South America: 18 million square kilometres
Permanent crops: 14 million square kilometres
Africa: 30 million square kilometres
Pastures: 33.5 million square kilometers

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There are plenty of strategies that get thrown around in fantasy football war rooms, with terms like “zero-RB” or “late-round QB” becoming household phrases over the past few seasons.

What do those mean, though? And what should they mean to you entering the 2016 season? Let’s find out.

Late-Round Quarterback

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: “you’re a fool if you take a quarterback early!”

 
Okay, well I’m not actually going to stop, but the point remains. Waiting on a quarterback has become the thing to do, and with good reason. Taking a QB early means you’re passing up on a top RB/WR, which can end up burning you down the road more-so than a late QB can do.

While Cam Newton did have a stellar season, scoring nearly 50 points more than QB2 Tom Brady according to FantasyPros Leaders, there were only 60 points between Brady and the 12^th-best QB in Philip Rivers. So waiting on a QB is sound then yes? Sure, but that doesn’t invalidate other approaches, nor does it make it the best approach.

Let’s dig into some ADPs and compare 2015 to 2016. Andrew Luck was the first QB taken in 2015, with his standard-league ADP had him at 11.4 overall according to FFToday’s data from last season. This season, the first quarterback is Newton with an average ADP of 20 according to RotoBaller as of Aug. 24. That’s pretty dramatic.

People will push that streaming quarterbacks is viable due to targeting bottom-half defenses, but the landscape has changed a bit here due to the overreaction to early-QB under-performance last season. Andrew Luck’s injury burned many. People hitting on late picks of Blake Bortles, Kirk Cousins and Ryan Fitzpatrick types have encouraged waiting as reactionary trends are made clear.

So what to do? Waiting on QBs is certainly still strong with the state of the NFL right now. Passing is up across the board, with guys like Derek Carr, Andy Dalton and Tyrod Taylor being available outside of the top-12 QBs. Ask many owners and they’d be just fine with starting them. But now let’s wrap our heads around something.

Remember Luck’s 11.4 average ADP from 2015? It’s way down to 42.9 this season. He’s healthy, so what changed? He isn’t old, he has a young Donte Moncrief trending up and losing Coby Fleener definitely doesn’t result in a 30-pick drop. This makes for a great profit margin.

In the end, the obvious caveat that hangs over everything is “know your league”. If you have an aggressive bunch with QB then there’s great value in waiting on a guy like Eli Manning and Philip Rivers. If everyone waits, then taking Andrew Luck in the fourth round could prove to be a league winner.

Zero Running Back

Talk about reactionary waves. The “Zero-RB” strategy is one that preaches waiting on taking a running back until the middle rounds, loading up on WRs alongside a potential top QB or TE before selecting an RB.

 
One just has to glance at how running backs and wide receivers taken early from last season fared to see why favoring WRs early is popular. Last season the first four picks were RBs. Le’Veon Bell, Eddie Lacy, Marshawn Lynch, Jamaal Charles, C.J. Anderson, Jeremy Hill and DeMarco Murray were all selected within the top-14 picks in standard formats last season. Whether it was through injury or ineffectiveness, they all failed to score as RB1s in 12-team formats (Hill fared best, checking in at RB14).

That’s going to leave a mark. So after RBs made up nine of last season’s first 14 picks (including the first four), they are now outside of the top three entirely and you won’t find the ninth RB until pick 20. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a large change this early in drafts. Say you are picking at the back-end of a 12-team standard league. You now have a great chance at selecting Lamar Miller in the first round, an Allen Robinson or Brandon Marshall type of WR in the second round, and then a LeSean McCoy or C.J Anderson in the third before anyone else even has a running back.

You now have a stud RB1 that can anchor your team, except you didn’t need to pick within the top three just to lock him up. You also have a great WR1 and an RB2 that is leaps and bounds ahead of the pack, allowing you to snag some insurance or a legit RB later as a FLEX play when others are scrambling to slot in Matt Jones as a reliable week-in, week-out starter. That sounds pretty good.

Conclusion

Austin Powers said it best: “Whoopty doo. What does it all mean, Basil?”

 
Going zero-RB or late-round QB can certainly work, but it would appear that these buzzy strategies have become so deeply ingrained now that there’s ample margin for profit to be had for the savvy owner. This is not meant to sell you on being contrarian, just to keep an open mind with some context for your 2016 fantasy football draft.

Drafting with a rigid plan tends to be a bad idea. You may have tested your respective strategy in multiple mock drafts, your league-mates may have told you who they’re “dead set” on picking, you could have RotoBaller’s stellar draft rankings memorized, but anything can happen. It’s one thing to put a certain player on your “do not draft” list, it’s another thing entirely to blacklist a position. Keep an open mind, set RotoBaller’s NFL News Desk as your home page, and you may just find some gold in the shadows as everyone runs to the spotlight.

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