“CDs are one bit of modernity that I love.”
Not so modern any more but there’s a lot of drama going on inside the DVD player. It picks the music out of the grooves with a laser focused with a lens. The disk is not entirely flat so the laser follows the groove which goes up and down. The hole in the CD is not exactly in the center so the laser follows the sashaying groove. Also, since the hole is not exactly in the center and for other mechanical reasons the bits don’t come off the disk at an constant rate. So the raw bit stream is buffered and pulled out of the buffer and a constant rate. If bits are coming off the disk too fast, which would overflow the buffer, the rotation is slowed down. If the player is jostled and the laser jumps off the track, that is detected and the laser is moved to the correct track with the buffering allowing the user to not know about the track-jumping.
My car,like many recent models,has a feature which allows me to display on my screen the *exact* location of my vehicle...meaning GPS coordinate (e.g., +042 00 10,-072 23 55) and also the city and state/province. Two weeks ago my better half wanted to go to Niagara Falls,*Canada*...so,of course,we went. Crossing the Rainbow Bridge (a very impressive experience) you see,about half way across,a US flag and Canadian flag within a few feet of each other. Half way between them is the actual border. At that exact point my display changed from "NY" to "ON".
I don't know about you but that *astounds* me!