Category: Uncategorized

I was reading through some ingredients today, this time on a can of Sparkling Black Cherry Fresca. I came across one called “brominated vegetable oil”. Concerned after my last experience, I went to Google to find a Wikipedia article about it. Although it is apparently banned in some countries, it doesn’t seem harmful except in their example where a man drank eight liters of Ruby Red Squirt (containing “bvo”) a day and came down with a case of bromoderma which turned his skin red. Given that many servings of Squirt, it seems lucky that’s all he came down with.

Fresca is an amazing witch’s brew of other funky ingredients. Sure there are the regulars: potassium citrate, potassium benzoate, and EDTA, but it also has carob bean gum, glycerol ester of wood rosin, and acacia, though I imagine most soft drinks refer to these only as “natural and artificial flavors”.

This past weekend, Susan and I saw Walk the Line, the movie about Johnny Cash (it got a good review from me). As such things do, it got me doing some research about Johnny Cash. I had been kind of disappointed with the greatest hits CD I had gotten several years ago. It had “Ring of Fire” and “Boy Named Sue” (which I don’t even like, though it’s a good story), but seemed lacking. A lot of the songs in the movie were from his earliest days at Sun records and were more appealing to me. So I went off looking for some of that music and bought a few songs from iTunes, plus a good duet with June Carter they played at the end of the movie. Then I decided to make a virtual CD in iTunes of the new stuff from iTunes and the good stuff from my CD, filtering out songs I wasn’t crazy about. I was trying to figure out what would be good from my old CD and in the liner notes saw that one of the later songs was by Nick Lowe with Nick Lowe on guitar. I don’t know if I’d never made it that far on the CD, but I’d never noticed it before and it was a pretty good song (“Without Love,” the CD also has Cash doing a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman” which Jeb would probably like, but didn’t make my cut). I’d seen Nick Lowe’s name come up a lot before and I just had to figure out who he was.

Continue reading “Nick Lowe”

My review of my new headphones on Amazon.

Four stars

I read the reviews here, and decided to get these headphones anyway. Essentially they are pretty good: they are comfortable and sound good. I hoped for more though.

The sound can be good just by itself, but on the iPod I have to crank it up to about 80% for it to sound its best. While I disagree with people who said the buds have no bass (they must not have the fit worked out), I do agree that especially with rock music the sound can be tinny. Using the iPod equalizer setting called Treble Reducer seems to help, but then if you play the iPod over a car or home stereo you have to remember to turn the equalizer off again or the iPod sounds muddy.

The buds are very comfortable, but they do go pretty far in your ear. They block out a lot of noise (I couldn’t hear my cell ringing until I got to a silent part between songs), but not everything. I’m not sure the ear hooks are even necessary since the buds fit in the ear pretty snugly. Plus the hooks tangle like crazy, catching on every cord they come across. I didn’t like the asymetric cords until I realized the longer cord was supposed to go behind your neck instead of under your chin. That way if you need to talk to someone you can take the earbuds out and they hang around your neck. That’s a nice feature.

I can’t strongly recommend these, but I don’t know that I would recommend avoiding them either. And they are certainly better than a lot of things you will find out there.

At first my Sony MDR-EX81 headphones didn’t seem to get that loud. I thought maybe I needed to get an amplifier. When I built my Band Aids battery pack for the iPod, there were already people putting battery packs in Altoids tins. I soon found out that some people were also building amplifiers in Altoids tins. They have a line in from the iPod and a line out to the headphones and make the sound much louder in headphones that require more oomph than the typical ear buds (or for people who just want their music really loud). Susan even told me that her nephew made some of these Altoids amplifiers. So I started researching them around the Christmas holidays.

Continue reading “Op amps”

Today I was reading articles from space.com on my Palm. One article concerned the Stardust space probe which is due to come back to Earth on January 15th carrying, what else, stardust that it has collected in space.

The mission is similar to the Genesis probe which also collected space dust and returned to earth. The idea was it would re-enter the atmosphere, deploy a parachute, and then be intercepted gently by a helicopter on the way down to avoid breaking the fragile collection plates sealed inside the probe. Well, the parachutes never deployed, the helicopters couldn’t catch it, and Genesis crashed into the ground at high speed in September 2004, ruining a $264 million science experiment.

Other than “the parachutes failed to open” I had never heard what caused the accident. But they did investigate. There were switches inside the spacecraft that would trigger the release of the parachute by detecting g-forces. At three g’s (as the spacecraft first hit the atmosphere) the switch would engage but not release the parachute until the g forces rose to 30 g’s and then came back down below 3 g’s again when it would be safe for the parachutes to deploy. But the designer at Lockheed put the gravity switch in upside down so the switch saw g’s in the wrong direction and never engaged. But they’re not complete idiots: there was a backup switch. It was upside down too. No one ever caught the mistakes. It would be like putting airbags in your headrest instead of the steering wheel.

Stardust was designed by Lockheed too. Watch out for falling spacecraft on the 15th.