Month: August 2006

Hooray for recalls: two new iBook batteries for me

Battery Exchange Program iBook G4 and PowerBook G4:

Apple has determined that certain lithium-ion batteries containing cells manufactured by Sony Corporation of Japan pose a safety risk that may result in overheating under rare circumstances.

The affected batteries were sold worldwide from October 2003 through August 2006 for use with the following notebook computers: 12-inch iBook G4, 12-inch PowerBook G4 and 15-inch PowerBook G4.

Apple is voluntarily recalling the affected batteries and has initiated a worldwide exchange program to provide eligible customers with a new replacement battery, free of charge. This program is being conducted in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and other international safety authorities.

Both the original battery — at last use, down to 1/2 an hour of charge — and its replacement are subject to recall and replacement. Very nice, in a cheapskate sorta way.

Check your gear to see if you’re similarly protected.

calling them as I see them

Anthony Mantova Embarrasses President Bush:

Paul Beard of Seattle got the top spot in the Eureka Reporter’s Letters to the Editor today:

Dear Editor,

Patrick Bell complains that a recent column, written by a former paratrooper, was “unhinged” in its criticism of a young war supporter who refuses to serve in a war he supports. Bell suggests Mr. Ash “should put his life on the line to support his view — and volunteer to be a human shield in Iraq, Iran or North Korea.” What Bell fails to realize is that Mr. Ash has been a human shield — for all of us here at home. He has been in harm’s way and understandably hopes that others who value a strong America would follow his example.

It’s easy to cheer for a war that someone else will fight: for someone who works for something called the Leadership Institute to refuse to lead by example tells me what kind of leader or soldier they would make. Perhaps that’s why Anthony Mantova and his fellow cheerleaders are steering clear of the recruiter’s office; they realize they don’t have what it takes. But I think they should give it a try, basic training might be the making of them.

I don’t support this poorly-planned and miserably-managed war, but unlike those who do, I’m not going to attack former or active duty troops. That seems to be one of the key differences: love the war, disparage and short-change the troops vs oppose the war but support improved armor/equipment and medical services for them.

more audio noodling

After watching this shredding, I wondered what on earth I was doing with my lo-fi noise.

Not that I let it stop me.

I decided to try some stuff to see if I can get GarageBand to behave. I created a garageband user account with no applications running (no browser, no mail, nuttin’). It worked OK for a while but I still found that any attempts to record or even play along on a second track didn’t work. The audio effects would just drop out. Recording continues but you can’t hear what you’re doing. Takes some of the fun out of it.
Continue reading “more audio noodling”

every hair on the bearskin rug

rambling post on the virtual world’s appeal over the physical, for some. This passage — RTWT for context — brought Brave New World to mind. Add in Xeni Jardin’s regular updates on teledildonics and we’re all going to be in little boxes pushing levers like monkeys or rats, but with more direct results than a couple of M&Ms can provide.

Partners are so 20th century:

I wonder what will happen when true virtual sex becomes available. Imagine a world where people can slap on some VR goggles and slip into a suit that simulates on one’s body everything experienced digitally. If watching/controlling some character alone is this popular, adding yourself into the mix with actual physical stimulation should become the most popular hobby on the planet, no?

as we are imperfect, art is also

One of the more prolific posters at f295 has a blog, and posted a long piece, from which I excerpt below.

Unmediating the Media:

Photographs are proxy-holders. They possess an Orwellian Newthink duality whereby the viewer simultaneously holds two diametrically opposing views to be equally true: that, on the one hand, the photograph possesses the power to be equated with the subject represented; and second, that the photograph is a mere representation, an abstraction, of a disparate subject matter.

This duality defines the chasm between what we now know as art versus craft. Art suspends disbelief long enough for us to know that the picture of a mountain is, in fact, a mountain; craft suspends the suspension of disbelief for us to know that this is, in fact, a picture of a mountain, and not the mountain itself. The focus of craft upon the materials and techniques at hand helps to break the spell of Orwellian Newthink that possesses contemporary media.

Artifacts. Art + i + fact. Artifacts, we were told, are unwanted byproducts of the imperfect medium through which information must be conveyed. Ghost images. Graininess. Distortions of various kinds. We were told things were getting better, that the new media would contain fewer artifacts, would be able to convey The Truth without distortion. Implicit to this propagandizing is the promise that, with the arrival of the new hi-definition media, Truth would at last be laid bare, for all to see, brought to you by our sponsors.

Not sure I agree with this 100%. Are the artifacts always unwanted? I think for people who just want a good picture of their kid, they may be, but for those of us kooks who like taking pictures with flawed cameras, with old film, even getting them processed in the wrong chemistry, the limitations are part of the fun. Is the picture the scene photographed? No more than the map is the territory.

found treasure




boy

Originally uploaded by paulbeard.

I found a roll of undeveloped film a few months back. This, along with a bunch of others of my son and heir at the same drooly age, was what I found.

Seemed a good image to play with Flickr’s new geo-tagging feature. I actually know where it was taken: in the front room of the house located on the map.

Prices at the Pump

Brad Delong cites Hal Varian on why gas prices rise on the news of a potential oil supply contraint:

To spell out the argument, imagine that you own a storage tank full of gasoline that is currently worth $2 a gallon at wholesale prices. It is widely believed, however, that the price of gasoline will be $2.10 next week. You would be crazy to sell your gasoline now: just wait a few days and the higher price will be yours. But if everyone waits a few days, there is no gasoline to be sold now and the resulting shortage pushes the price of gasoline up. How high does it have to go? The answer is $2.10 a gallon. That is the price necessary to induce those who have gasoline to sell it now rather than to wait till next week.

This argument does not depend on whether you think the gasoline market is a paragon of perfect competition or an evil oligopoly. All it requires is that you believe that people who own gasoline, like just about everybody with something to sell, prefer to receive a higher price rather than a lower price. Even if the price of gasoline were set by a perfectly benevolent conservationist, we would expect to see the same pattern of price movements. If oil will be scarcer in the future because of the BP pipeline shutdown, we would want to conserve the already-produced gasoline that we have now. That means that the price of gasoline has to rise right away to prevent hoarding and to encourage conservation.

When the US went to war in Gulf War I, prices spiked immediately. Reading the Wall Street Journal at the time, the well-fed pundits on their editorial pages proclaimed that the reason was replacement cost: if you sell a gallon of gas for $1 today and you will need $1.50 to replace it, you need to charge that much today.

/me scratches head and wonders where the risk in capitalism enters into this equation: it’s not like I am reserving or putting on layaway a gallon of $1.50 gasoline. In the WSJ scenario, I pay whatever you think the goods are likely to cost next week for goods I consume today, in effect subsidizing or removing any risk from your business.

Professor Varian’s explanation makes a lot more sense. And the idiots on the WSJ editorial pages were clueless even then.

additive technologies

So take this fascinating improvement:
Wired News: New Engine Combusts Old Ideas:

If your next car gets twice the gas mileage of your current vehicle, and belches out only a fraction of the pollution, you may have Carmelo Scuderi to thank.

Scuderi, a Massachusetts engineer and inventor, started tinkering with the fundamentals of the internal combustion engine when he retired in the mid-1990s. The result was a radical new design that could make engines for anything from gas-powered lawn mowers to diesel locomotives lighter, far more efficient, and a whole lot easier on the environment.

and incorporate it into the Golden Eagle Bike Engine:

One tank of ordinary pump gas gets me 22 to 25 miles, urban riding. The tank on this model is just about 11 ounces, so that equates to somewhere approaching 250 miles per gallon! Cooltools Archives Vrobin

and think of the improvements. Sure, not everyone will want to ride a bike, no matter how much easier it gets, and I’m not sure you could fit the Scuderi design into that small a package. But perhaps we can fight this war on two fronts — make low-impact vehicles more palatable and make high-impact vehicles less damaging. I suspect if you could wave you magic wand and drop a Scuderi-type powerplant into the fleets of cars in Atlanta or Houston, you would see a big improvement in air quality and climate almost immediately.