"fell through the roof"; I'm not sure whether that's high and went low or low and went high. From the context I'm assuming that means its gotten very cheap?
I kind of skimmed the article, but it did remind me of another one I read about babies. Once a baby gets to the point they express emotions, they will look at their parents and fill with so much joy, their sub-conscious forces them to look away so they can calm down and don't hurt themselves.
FFT's were very difficult for me to understand (and still are). The graphic at the top is actually a very good way to show what a practical FFT does. I wish I had it back when I first started trying to understand them.
Bit of a plug here. But I used this library in a small side project (C++ publisher-subscriber library) and it worked like a charm. There are a few things you can customize with mmapping but most use cases will do fine with this. Great work.