Signal Processing, an Analogy to Identity
EE edition
Signal processing, the attempt to extract any relevant information from a squiggle in time, is paramount to the development of any electrical engineering device.
EKGs give us the classic PQRST spike that we frequently use to characterize the nature of our hearts. And sensors on autonomous rovers in space pull in noisy data that we must fix, modify, and adapt to.
Signal processing is a critical part of how we react to the external world. Without it, there wouldn’t be any harmonious transition between what we take in and what we create.
Noise
Noise is a common challenge within signal processing.
Much like how the commotion of a chaotic cafe may hinder our productivity, noise sheds a fog over our signal. This makes it difficult to see the relevant information contained within our signal.
Filters are some examples of the methods that remove noise. By permitting only those frequencies that sit below a certain threshold to pass, the noisy signals at high frequencies persisting above this threshold are removed.
The compromise being that removing noise at a certain frequency will also remove the parts of the original signal existing at that same frequency.
What’s fascinating about this, is that it is not so unlike how we exist in this world. Social media, ads, other people’s opinions and expectations exist as this noise that adds to and distorts the fundamental signal of who we truly are.
Too often, we allow other’s ambitions define the goals that we strive for, achievements become a ToDo list that we try to match, and perceptions cloud our own introspections.
We become robbed of our liberty to designate our own highs and lows, greatest potential and most severe limitations.
Although we may fail, we should fail by our own set of impossibilities that we have created for ourselves, not those spun from the storyline of others.
If we should succeed, it should be done from deliberate attempt to amplify what, we and, only we, are made of.
And so, if we applied a filter of the same concept to remove this noise, what will we be left with? Will we be left with our raw self, or rather a compromise between how that noise has changed us and who we could have been?
Why We Are the Fourier Series
The Fourier Series is a pretty major concept that finds itself incorporated across a wide range of applications.
Essentially, the Fourier Series is a sum of many things to approximate one big thing.
This plays a huge role in Signal Processing, because a lot of the times we just need a good estimate of a certain signal. It need not even be exact.
The reason we are willing to tradeoff accuracy when dealing with the Fourier series, is because the individual sinusoids that we have decomposed the original signal into, are much easier to work with.
It is a lot easier to throw math on pure cosines and sines than on one big, unknown conglomeration.
Much like how a signal is the total sum of many individual sines and cosines, we are the compositions of our experiences, aspirations, and lessons.
We are an everchanging approximation of many things.
And we are dynamic in that, at any moment, we can represent any variation from the set of different combinations of who we are.
Everyday, we can choose to be an extrovert, relentlessly cheerful and hungry for knowledge, or a quiet and contemplative wanderer who is simply riding the passing tides of life.
We can be the dark, melancholy physicist or the mathematician that questions anything and everything a physicist proposes. Today, I am the cheerleader for my high school’s football team, but tomorrow I will cheer for science and the hopes of a another medical discovery.
By reaching in and selecting those parts of ourselves that we want to either illuminate or suppress, we can create different representations of who are.
We are a Fourier series and we can be anything we want to be.
