Archive
New (Old) Headphones
I used to have an old set of Koss K6/ALC headphones when I was a teenager. They were big, loud, and suprisingly good. I used to have a 15 foot extension cord for them, and I’d listen to them in my recliner in my room, playing Pink Floyd and Beethoven, which A Clockwork Orange hooked me on.
I recently was browsing around and discovered that the higher end Koss headphones made at that time, the Pro4AA, are still made, are available new. While I was buying something else on Amazon.ca, these popped up on sale, because Amazon is insidious and prompts you to buy stuff after you’ve looked at it, so I ordered a pair.
They arrived today. Here’s the old-school packaging.
The box weighed a tonne. When I opened it, here’s what I found. Nothing but the headphones and one piece of slim paper with the lifetime warranty on it.
I plugged them into my recently acquired FiiO E09K headphone amplifier, and settled them on my noggin. They really only weigh half a tonne. I’ve been listening to Pink Floyd all afternoon, with a little Vangelis thrown in for variety, and these things are as awesome as I remember my old ones from the ’80s being.
They’re also built like a tank. I expect that lifetime warranty is not as hard to live up to for Koss as one might think.
It was a good purchase. Plus, they’re the best sounding headphones you can get for under $200, and they can be had for $60 if you find a sale.
Raspberry Pi Unboxing
I recently received my Raspberry Pi computer after months of excited waiting. It arrived in this nondescript package.
In the tradition of people buying and opening beautifully packaged new Apple devices, I thought I’d produce an Unboxing blog entry.
Inside the envelope, there was a page of compliance testing statements for numerous countries, a packing list, and the elaborately packaged Raspberry Pi. I must say that the Canadian emissions compliance statement is the most concise and reasonable of the nations represented.
After opening the small box, I had to take back the “elaborately packaged” comment. The packaging consists of an anti-static bag in a box that’s about as robust as one for playing cards.
Here’s the Pi in all it’s minimalistic glory. It’s even smaller than I expected, despite the designers taking up a couple of square centimetres for the Raspberry Pi Foundation logo.
Here it is compared to my moderately large hand for a size comparison. These things are tiny!
Whiskey Stones Cooling Effectiveness
Somebody asked me about this on Twitter, so here you go:
Some whiskey drinkers love the purity of the flavour of their whiskey. They may want it chilled, but they might not want the pure beverage to be diluted by melting ice. A company has tried to come up with a solution to this problem with a product called Whiskey Stones. They are small ice-cube sized cubes of soapstone, that a whiskey drinker chills in the freezer, and then puts in his glass of whiskey to chill it. It’s a neat idea, but how effective are the stones at chilling the drink compared to regular ice cubes?
Presuming that we take a standard two ounce shot of 80 proof whiskey, which is about 55 grams, from a bottle at room temperature (19 deg C), and then use a standard freezer at -15 deg C to prepare both ice and the Whiskey Stones, what is the difference in cooling of the beverage? I will use the same volume of Whiskey Stones (which are 11 mL each, so I’ll use 3) and ice cubes in my two scenarios. 33 mL of Whiskey Stones are about 96 grams, and 33 mL of ice cubes are about 33 grams.
When you take two things with different temperatures, and put them together, energy will flow from the warmer thing to the colder thing, until both things are the same temperature. This is one of the implications of the second law of thermodynamics. If you have a perfectly-insulated glass, all the energy that comes out of the whiskey as it chills is transferred to the ice as it warms up and melts, or to the stones as they warm up, until a temperature equilibrium is reached.
The amount of energy it takes to warm something up depends on the material it is made of. For ice, it takes 2.11 joules (J) of energy to warm up 1 gram (g) by 1 degree C. For water, it takes 4.18 J. For whiskey, which is a mixture of alcohol and water, it takes about 3.4 J. Conversely, as something cools, it gives up energy according to the same figures. Water gives off 4.18 joules per gram as it cools one degree.
Additionally, as a solid melts into a liquid, it also absorbs energy, without changing temperature. It takes 334 J of energy to change 1 g of ice into 1 g of water at 0 deg C.
Any energy that comes out of the whiskey goes into the ice, water or stones.
To see how much energy is absorbed by the ice, I will calculate how much energy it takes to warm ice at -15 degrees up to zero, and then melt it all into water.
First, assuming 33 mL of ice starting at -15, it takes 15 x 33 x 2.11 = 1044 J to warm it up to zero degrees. Next, to melt that ice into water, it takes 334 x 33 = 11022 J. That means that to convert all the ice to water, it takes 12066 joules of energy.
How cold does the whiskey get if we remove 12066 joules of energy by transferring it into the ice? The change in temperature is equal to the energy transferred, divided by the specific heat of whiskey times the mass of the whiskey. T = 12066 / (55 x 3.4) = 64 degrees of temperature change. If we started at 19 degrees, the whiskey can’t drop all 64 degrees, because the second law of thermodynamics says that energy will flow from a hot thing to a cold thing until the two things are the same temperature. That means that the whiskey will reach 0 deg C before all the ice melts, and then it will stay at that temperature.
For the stones, I have to take a different approach. I know that any energy that comes from the whiskey as it cools, goes into the stones as they warm up. If the final temperature is called F, I know that 19 deg -F = the change in energy of the whiskey, divided by the whiskey’s specific heat multiplied by the mass of the whiskey. I also know that 15 deg + F = the change in energy of the stones, divided by the stones’ specific heat multiplied by the mass of the stones. In both equations, the change in energy is equal but opposite, so that allows me to solve both equations for F, which turns out to be 7.6 degrees C.
That means the coolest the whiskey can get using the three stones is 7.6 degrees, but with the ice, it’s zero degrees C.
First Experience with Riverbed Steelhead
We are currently evaluating some Riverbed Steelhead WAN accelerators for our network. I arranged to get two larger ones and one smaller one, for three of our offices. I went on a road trip to install two of them today.
My experience so far is that 1/3 of them were DOA. Of course, that’s working with a sample size of 3, so it’s not statistically significant. The other thing I found out is that Riverbed’s technical support is extremely responsive (at least in the pre-sales phase, but I have no reason to suspect it’s different after you buy them). They can also deliver a replacement under an RMA for a dead unit in less than 24 hours to our offices. That’s pretty impressive.
RIM Playbook Impressions
brought it to me to look at yesterday. It’s a surprisingly nice little
device. It felt solid, and the user interface was pretty responsive.
The email program connected to her Blackberry smartphone, and
apparently the email only supports working through a
bluetooth-connected Blackberry, so that’s a severe limitation. There was a web browser that could be used to get online through the
connected Blacberry as well, but the included Gmail, Yahoo Mail and
Hotmail icons didn’t work that way. Those apps can only connect via
Wi-Fi. That seems to be another very stupid limitation. It came with Documents to Go, which provides Word, Excel and
Powerpoint, and it also has an Adobe Reader app, so you can access
your office documents. Plugging it into a computer makes it show up as
a USB hard drive, so you can just copy your files onto it. For
business use, that makes it superior to the iTunes-centric philosophy
of the iPad, in terms of files. The Adobe Reader app seems to have a
foolish limitation that renders it almost useless: It can’t search
within a PDF file. If you open a 500 page PDF, you can’t search for a
word and jump to that page. For big engineering contract documents,
that severely limits it’s utility. I think the future models that have integrated 3G will be more
compelling. Either that, or they could make the bluetooth internet
connection through the Blackberry smartphone more fully featured so
that apps that work over WiFi also work over the Blackberry
connection. She’s going to use it for work for a while and then
hopefully I can talk to her again about how it’s going. We need to figure out some kind of a strategy for tablets. More users
are starting to ask about them.
Who else had a dad who was this awesome?
My mom has this photo posted up in her walk-in closet, of all places. I saw it when I was checking all the windows in her house while she was away in Palm Springs. I’m about 3 and my sister is about six months old here.
Edmonton Needs Help With Its Premiere Aquatic Facility Plans
In Edmonton, the best aquatic sports facility we have is the Kinsmen Sports Center. It was built in 1968, and played host to the aquatic sports during the 1978 Commonwealth Games. It used to be the home to the most powerful swim club and some of the best swimmers in the country.
It has been a sad slow progression over the past thirty years from the Kinsmen being a premiere high-performance sport facility to one that the City prefers to be used as a public swimming pool for kids and families. The Kinsmen is the only facility in Edmonton suitable for hosting high-performance swimming competitions, and it is the best training facility for aquatic sport clubs in Alberta. The city has a dismal record in recent years of servicing those groups, however, and instead caters preferentially to recreational use. Edmonton has a history of producing world-class swimmers, divers and synchronized swimmers, but that legacy will remain history if the city does not take a more active role in servicing competitive sporting organizations.
The Kinsmen is the only facility we have that is designed for competitive aquatic sports. Let the city’s high-performance clubs use it for that, and encourage the pubic to make use of the city’s other pools for recreation, or build a dedicated recreational pool along side of the Kinsmen.
The city should also give more time to swim clubs at the new Terwillegar pool, and stop preventing swim club access to that facility with the misguided intent of preventing clubs from competing with the city’s swimming lesson programs.
The only alternative is to kiss Edmonton’s storied history of national champion and Olympic swimmers and divers goodbye.
You can weigh in on the City’s plans for the Kinsmen on the Transforming Edmonton website. They have a survey open from February 16 -25 that you can fill out as well. Details of the City of Edmonton’s Master Planning process for the Kinsmen are available here.
Canadians need to speak out on Copyright Reform
The Canadian Copyright reform bill, Bill C-32, is getting close to the end of the legislative process. There is one final opportunity for Canadians to speak their minds on the bill by sending email to the Bill C-32 Legislative Committee at CC32@parl.gc.ca before the end of January.
This bill is important for culture, education, and consumer rights in Canada, so if you have an opinion on the bill, please send an email expressing your views to the committee.
Law Professor Dr. Michael Geist from the University of Ottawa has some good resources explaining the issues around the bill on his website. Go there to understand the bill and the discussion around it.
Here’s what I sent to the committee.
To the Bill C-32 Legislative Committee:
While I appreciate legislative reform for Canada’s copyright law is necessary, I oppose the digital locks provisions in the proposed Bill C-32 as written. It must not be an infringement for citizens to circumvent or remove digital locks for the purposes of fair dealing. By including such a provision, fair dealing in the Bill is trumped by the desires of the content publishers. The digital lock provisions in the final Bill should be clarified so that circumvention of a digital lock is only an infringement if it is for the express purpose of copyright infringement. This protects publishers and businesses that depend on revenue from content publication, but does not allow those businesses to jeopardize education, culture, and consumer rights by restricting fair dealing.
Thank you for your work in this matter and for your consideration of the best interests of all Canadians.
Another Blow to Anti-vaccine Nuts
It’s time for another update about anti-vaccine kooks. Happily this will be the first positive one I get to write.
Last year, the father of the Anti-vaccine nut-brigade, Andrew Wakefield, a former doctor from the UK, who wrote the deeply flawed paper that claimed a link between vaccines and autism, had his paper retracted as unethical and erroneous by the journal Lancet, which originally published it. He had his medical license revoked in the UK for incompetence, unethical research, and conflicts of interest related to the paper.
In 2011, after a thorough investigation, he is being accused of deliberate fraud in fabricating the link between vaccines and autism. The investigations have shown that first, he had created his own, competitive vaccine for MMR that he wanted to have supplant the widely used one at the time, and second, he was paid upwards of a million dollars by predatory lawyers to “find” a danger in the vaccine to provide an opportunity for major lawsuits.
According to the investigators, it appears that his paper was deliberately fabricated to create fear and distrust of the MMR vaccine for his own financial gain. This should be the last nail in the coffin of the credibility of Andrew Wakefield, and hopefully also for the misguided belief a lot of people have in the anti-vax movement. Wakefield still has a chance to be a hero, take the fall for his alleged unethical behaviour, admit he lied, and completely discredit the anti-vax movement, but I predict he won’t show that much character.
As a result of the recent events, if you know all this, and you still haven’t gotten your kids vaccinated, I think you are behaving dangerously negligently, and you are not just endangering the lives of your kids, but everyone they come into contact with. Get it done. There’s no reason not to and every reason to do it. Stop listening to idiot b-list celebrity anti-vaxxers, and start listening to real medical professionals.
