Have you been trying to find the best bluetooth headset to deal with wind noise, especially while driving in a convertible? If so, then you've undoubtedly read all about how the best noise-cancelling headsets can't do much of anything about wind noise. Holding out hope? Don't. When it comes to even relatively mild wind noise, bluetooth headsets suck. I tried three of the allegedly most wind-and-noise resistant -- the Plantronics 510, the Blue Ant Z9 and the much-touted Aliph Jawbone. The Jawbone was the best of the three, and also the most expensive -- but it still isn't half as good as the regular old handset, with no bluetooth headset at all, when driving in a convertible with the top down and the windows up.
What I did NOT find was very many sites with audio recordings of how the headsets performed in wind -- and the manufacturers' own promotional recordings aren't to be trusted. There's one excellent site that I did find: a thorough comparison, with postings, by Dan Craft at SiezeTruth.com. Since Dan didn't include any recordings of the Jawbone, I've included one below. While the Jawbone was the best of the lot, its outgoing audio in a convertible with the top down at anything much over 40 mph is peppered with spikes of wind noise every few seconds, and much more unpleasant for your listener than if you use no headset at all. Dan concludes that the best bluetooth headset for driving in a convertible with the top down is no headset at all, and I concur.
The solution? We might have to hold out until either the makers of The Boom come out with a bluetooth version, or until Motorola releases (what was) the Invisio Q7, a true bone-conduction headset which, unlike the Jawbone, uses no external microphone at all, but instead digitally reconstructs your voice from vibrations in your ear bones. Nextlink (the original developer of the Q7) released a few pre-production models before selling it recently to Motorola, which will release it who-knows-when. Early reports from these pre-pro Q7s were that they suffered from tinny sound, but that wind didn't affect them at all.
Until then, take a fashion hint from The Royal Tenenbaums' Baumer and strap your cellphone to the side of your head with a tennis headband.
(2007 Miata convertible, top down, windows up, 60-70 mph, backdraft windscreen, not much engine noise, very little cockpit wind)
Sunday, April 27, 2008
The Jawbone bluetooth headset and wind noise in a convertible
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
The efficiency of free markets.
"Of course, imitation and adulteration are the essence of competition—they are but another form of the phrase 'to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest.' A government official has stated that the nation suffers a loss of a billion and a quarter dollars a year through adulterated foods; which means, of course, not only materials wasted that might have been useful outside of the human stomach, but doctors and nurses for people who would otherwise have been well, and undertakers for the whole human race ten or twenty years before the proper time. Then again, consider the waste of time and energy required to sell these things in a dozen stores, where one would do. There are a million or two of business firms in the country, and five or ten times as many clerks; and consider the handling and rehandling, the accounting and reaccounting, the planning and worrying, the balancing of petty profit and loss. Consider the whole machinery of the civil law made necessary by these processes; the libraries of ponderous tomes, the courts and juries to interpret them, the lawyers studying to circumvent them, the pettifogging and chicanery, the hatreds and lies! Consider the wastes incidental to the blind and haphazard production of commodities—the factories closed, the workers idle, the goods spoiling in storage; consider the activities of the stock manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the overstimulation of others, for speculative purposes; the assignments and bank failures, the crises and panics, the deserted towns and the starving populations! Consider the energies wasted in the seeking of markets, the sterile trades, such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster, advertising agent. Consider the wastes incidental to the crowding into cities, made necessary by competition and by monopoly railroad rates; consider the slums, the bad air, the disease and the waste of vital energies; consider the office buildings, the waste of time and material in the piling of story upon story, and the burrowing underground! Then take the whole business of insurance, the enormous mass of administrative and clerical labor it involves, and all utter waste ..."
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair, 1906
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Poetry and poverty.
"It is a kind of anguish that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into the vocabulary of poets—the details of it cannot be told in polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one expect to excite sympathy among lovers of good literature by telling how a family found their home alive with vermin, and of all the suffering and inconvenience and humiliation they were put to, and the hard-earned money they spent, in efforts to get rid of them? After long hesitation and uncertainty they paid twenty-five cents for a big package of insect powder—a patent preparation which chanced to be ninety-five per cent gypsum, a harmless earth which had cost about two cents to prepare. Of course it had not the least effect, except upon a few roaches which had the misfortune to drink water after eating it, and so got their inwards set in a coating of plaster of Paris. The family, having no idea of this, and no more money to throw away, had nothing to do but give up and submit to one more misery for the rest of their days."
- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Friday, March 21, 2008
Letter to a young secularist (pace Rilke)
More specifically, Letter to a young secularist (raised in and having rejected radical Christian Evangelism) having a depression/existential crisis:
______________
> Everything is okay for the most part. I'm just terribly unhappy,
> to the point where I've lost motivation for everything. Maybe
> I'm just having an existential crisis. Maybe I need Jesus. ;-)
Dear X:
For what it's worth, here's my take on depression/misery and its causes. Since you mentioned existential crises, I focus maninly on (3). (3) is also, ultimately, the bottom line.
1. Depression caused by external stressors. A chronic single or a couple of simultaneous big misfortunes overwhelm someone's normal emotional resources. If there's a chronic stressor, it's important to end it. May often require meds to break the cycle and get back to (3). See below.
2. Purely physiological. May very well require meds and therapy to break and resume (3).
3. Normal. Happiness isn't a given. It's not a default setting. Unfortunately. It's necessary to construct structures in one's life -- goals, activities, call 'em myths if you like -- and to work on them in order to give oneself a sense of accomplishment, progress, meaning. That's the primary engine of day-to-day happiness. Triage measures -- meds and therapy -- don't and can't replace that meaning-structure / happiness-engine; they're designed merely to free up a person so that they can get out of bed and back to the business of creating those goals/activities and plugging away at them.
(3) is precisely what "Jesus" -- religion -- is: a created structure of goals, activities and rewards. The reason that religion is a popular meaning-structure/happiness-engine is that so much of it is arbitrary: effortless actions (speaking magic spells) can produce infinite rewards (eternal bliss). (3) is also easier for religionists because religion is a widely- and strongly-enforced myth structure. Crises of faith are strongly discouraged. It's very easy to go from day to day with utter certainty that the religious meaning-structure you're committed to and working on is Right, not just a hamster wheel: everyone around you is utterly insistent that it's so.
(3) is more difficult for secularists. You've seen through the Big Meaning-Structure, i.e. that it's just a hamster wheel, just a tool for generating self-satisfaction somewhat arbitrarily. That calls all other meaning-structures into question. Help others? Do good work? Write or paint? Teach? Make friends? Influence people? Why? Aren't they all just hamster wheels? To a scary extent, yes -- and voila, that realization is what we call an "existential crisis." If a secularist wants to be happy, he has to "re-enchant" himself. He picks a structure (goal/activity) that he sort-of believes might be worthwhile, and that he has at least some interest in and capacity to do, and he persuades himself, like the religionist does, that it really is worthwhile. And it's not pure delusion: it's worthwhile to be happy. It's perfectly fine to answer, when asked "Why do you do X?" that "You've got to do SOMETHING." Of course, the more you can persuade yourself that X has value, the easier it is to do it.
(3) is the most difficult for FORMER religionists. Growing up in a religious environment is like being conditioned to live on pure sugar: the meaning-structure requires minimal input for maximal reward and is universally acclaimed as True. Self-enchantment for former religionists is difficult: non-religious meaning-structures a) require harder work-input, b) offer less fabulous reward-outputs, and c) are far less universally acclaimed. It's an obstacle, but it's soluble; you have to a) lower your expectations and b) make an additional effort to form a little mini-religion, as it were, around yourself: a religion of fellow artists, fellow teachers, fellow writers, fellow freaks, fellow gamers, fellow serial killers, whatever the hell your meaning-structure is.
"To be is to do." Sartre. If true, then non-doing = non-being, and non-being doesn't sound like it'd feel very nice. So all the above boiled down to a one-word injunction, would be: "Do."
There's an important flip-side. The above is all, obviously, totally un-Zen. If Zen were reduced to a one-word injunction, it'd be "Don't": don't strive, don't desire, don't self-enchant, don't do anything at all. But this is just a tool of Zen -- what you do in brief periods of meditation -- not the goal of Zen. The tool is designed to clear your mind of everything customary and habitual, of all the crap you've been TOLD to want. With a mind cleared of other people's crap, it's easier to sense what YOU actually enjoy, value, want to do. Then you get up from your meditation and go out and do it. That's the goal of Zen. Zen is really just a programmatic method of disenchanting yourself from crap and re-enchanting yourself with something better and more reliable. There's a wonderful little book called "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki that's available everywhere. Suzuki was the cat who brought Zen the US in the early 20c. Check it out. Also, if you don't have Kahlil Gibran's little book "The Prophet," get it. Two little books that are worth as much as a truckload of Wellbutrin.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Spengler, Obama, dissent and distribution.
Re: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html
What an excellent essay. Extremely well-written. And a very interesting fellow, this Spengler:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spengler_%28Columnist%29
I'm not surprised that journalists are turning to Obama's familial background to try to get some insight into his character. Spengler's right: we hardly know the guy.
I loved Spengler's acidic characterization of anthropologists as "the curators of soon-to-be-extinct cultures," and of how Bush "squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world."
But I take exception to one of the fundamental premises of his argument: that the sort of dissent he attributes to Obama (via his mother and wife) equals "hatred of America" or presages “handouts.” Neither equation is necessarily the case.
Dissenters usually see themselves as patriots, not traitors. This isn’t an unreasonable assumption on their part. One needn’t make any unweidldy value-judgements about whether a culture’s headed in a “good” or “bad” direction at a given time in order to characterize its dissenters as more patriotic than treacherous; one must merely assume that mainstream thought -- received wisdom -- usually deserves critique and can stand improvement. A reasonable assumption. And if true, dissenting critique might be wise or foolish, but its motivations are constructive. And if we WERE to venture into “unweildy value-judgements,” there are a lot of very bright and patriotic folks today, of both political persuasions, who make cogent arguments that America has drifted alarmingly far from its founding principles.
As for handouts, Spengler oversimplifies. The sort of dissent he alludes to is socialist, ergo obviously top-down redistributive. What’s NOT obvious is whether that sort top-down redistribution is more expensive, or is worse for the economy, than the sort of bottom-up redistribution we’ve seen a resurgence of since 1980. Again, one needn’t come down on either side of the (eternal?) debate between supply- and demand-siders; but one SHOULD acknowledge that it’s not cut-and-dried, and that both sides can legitimately critique each other’s (re)distribution policy.
There’s a deeper premise lurking behind Spengler’s position: the fool’s errand of libertarianism. All societies redistribute. The very nature of social living -- mere law -- IS distributive. What constitutes “fair” social interaction isn’t given; it’s precisely what law (social agreement) stipulates. Every society -- every group living impacting each other -- has to muddle through who gets what of how much there is to go around. Some societies choose to distribute wealth narrowly, others widely -- but it’s all (re)distribution, and its nature is according to values that we choose, not values that alight on us from an alien planet.
Monday, February 11, 2008
A Mighty Fortress
"There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or
hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and
ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or
hundreds of millions of "true believers"; each damns all the others, with
more or less heartiness -- and each is a mighty fortress of Graft."
- Upton Sinclair, The Profits of Religion, 1927
Friday, December 21, 2007
Acceptable absurdity.
''Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities'' - Voltaire
Monday, December 10, 2007
Friday, December 07, 2007
Monday, December 03, 2007
"Whosoever
wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his Reason."
- Martin Luther
I'm sorry, was that not clear?
"Reason should be destroyed in all Christians."
- Martin Luther
Right then. Go to.
Monday, November 19, 2007
The Amazon Kindle: dog, dog, double-dog!
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Also, Nancy Pelosi loves Hitler.
The em that spurred today's rant isn't worth reprinting. It's accessible
through the Snopes.com link below. Suffice it to say that it's ...
"False.
As in: false. As in: someone is, yet again, forwarding internet chain mail
without bothering to do even LESS reasearch (i.e. Googling "pelosi windfall
tax") than any high-school student is expected to do.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/pelosi.asp
Hey, did you hear that Bill Gates is paying $.01 for every e-mail that you
send? No? Maybe you heard about that poor child with cancer who's
collecting e-mail pen-pals?
We Americans are taken in and outraged by fakeries and, when presented with
points backed by evidence, are bored by or hostile to it. Evidentiary
reason is the only support of a democratic union.
Every day I teach the kids of the so-called Millenium Generation. They're
the first generation to be rasied without any notion of, much less respect
for, evidentiary reason. You don't want to live in the world they'll
govern. But no worries: you won't -- because they won't. Because
ultimately, power is truth and stupidos flip burgers. The torch of reason
(ergo power) has long passed beyond our borders. Either we reclaim it or
we're the next Former Empire, e.g. Iran.
Bye America! Bye "Great Experiment," and thanks for the rules by which to
govern every democracy on Earth save ours! Don't forget, America, to
mindlessly mouthe "Jesus" and, if you're really sophisticated, "values"
before you stick your head in that wood-chipper! Bye now!
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Celebrating tyranny.
What is this fucking nonsense? Un-American, unpatriotic, undemocratic, selectively quoted (academic dishonesty -- instant F) and illiterate. That's what.
History lesson. By 380 AD, the politically contentious and religiously tolerant Roman Republic/Empire (after which our Founding Fathers modeled American government) had prospered for about 800 years. In 380, to unify the empire, Christianity was made the official state religion. Within a century Rome was dead.
