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passive_fist comments on Stupid Questions, December 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: polymathwannabe 01 December 2015 10:40PM

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Comment author: passive_fist 03 December 2015 01:16:16AM *  0 points [-]

That's a somewhat crude way of putting it; when studying a resonator it's better to look at the q factor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_factor

Lower q factor means a higher spread of frequencies can trigger them. Mammalian hair cells have q factors of 5-10. Q=10 is pretty high for a biological resonator, but pretty low compared to, say, even crude electronic equipment. A typical LC oscillator has Q of 100 or more.