BeigeJournal

Well, it’s nearly Thanksgiving here in the USA and someone in a lab near my office at the Medical College has a radio cranked up playing “I’m Dreaming of A White Christmas.” At least it is late November. The Christmas displays went up in the stores before Halloween. I can hardly wait to hear “Jingle Bell Rock” a few thousand times next month. I do highly recomend Tom Flynn’s The Trouble With Christmas.

In the Dan’s Data tradition, but at a smaller scale, here is my LED flashlight review.

Original CMG Infinity

I own an old-style CMG Infinity single-AA powered single-LED light. The new style is brighter. Though not very bright it is bright enough to be very useful. It is great for use in a tent, for just a bit of light to find things by. It is a small cylindrical object, which you have to hold somehow. Headlights tend to be easier to use for many applications, so I purchased a head strap for it, but it is much harder to aim than a proper headlamp. The AA-size cell rattles a bit when the light is turned off. Battery life is excellent, as you’d expect from a low power light.

Black Diamond Ion

The Black Diamond Ion is a very tiny headlamp with twin LEDs. It is powered by a 6-volt silver-oxide battery that you are probably not going to find easily. REI sells them for $5. Claimed battery life is under two hours. I received mine as a gift and though I carry it with me always I’m still on the original battery after a year. It gets very intermittent use but it is very handy to have around. It is quite bright for its size, roughly the equal of the Princeton Tec Matrix. It has a single strap and the angle can be adjusted up and down. I was skeptical of the tiny, expensive, not-readily-available battery, but the small size is very convenient and the battery life with intermittent—a minute here, a few seconds there—use is quite good. It is probably not a good choice for extensive use as opposed to extensive keeping with you just in case.

Princeton Tec Matrix

The 2 AA-cell powered Princeton Tec Matrix headlamp (not to be confused with the new and much brighter Matrix 2) is my favorite. One strap goes around your head, another over, with the battery compartment and lamp assembly all one piece on the front, with the angle adjustable up and down. It has three white LEDs powered through a DC-DC converter that provides stable power for the LEDs whether supplied by fresh lithium cells (1.7V each) or nearly dead alkalines down below one volt per cell. You can swap back and forth with no visible difference in the light output. There are those who claim that declining output as the battery dies is a useful indicator of battery life. The people claiming this are too cheap to do it right. Since humans have very poor ability to determine absolute light intensity, you can only really tell if your light is getting dim if either it is so dim that you finally realize that you can’t see a thing or else if you swap in fresh batteries and notice the sudden increase in light output. That is not a convenient battery charge-state indicator in my book. I’d much rather have steady, full-output light until the cells are truly dead. Princeton Tec claims 40 hours on alkaline cells and over 100 hours on lithium cells. The availability of lithium AA cells is an advantage for AA-powered lamps, particularly for cold-weather use. After loading two alkaline cells that I pulled out of the trash (the incandescent lamp they were powering was getting quite dim), I spent two days trying to run them down. I got around 20 hours of service. Out of dead batteries. The end of life behavior is interesting: fading rapidly to no light once the input voltage drops too far, then, after the cells recover a bit, turning back on and running at full output again for a while until again the voltage drops too far, and the cycle repeats.

The lamp also comes with an incandescent module that can be swapped in for times when you need brighter light and much shorter battery life. I suppose uses for this can be imagined, since the reflector and bulb assembly is much smaller and lighter than a complete second headlamp, but it is also a lot more effort to exchange parts than to just use a second lamp, or to turn on the incandescent bulb in those lamps with both incandescent and LED sources built in.

This is not an especially bright light, with three LEDs apparently driven gently. It is suitable for reading, though possibly just a bit bright for that. A bit of diffusing material held over the light with a rubber band helps even out the light and dim it slightly. It is quite good for close-up work. I find it useful even in my brightly-lit apartment as supplemental light for fine work that can’t be taken to the workbench. It is bright enough for walking outdoors at night. What I wanted when I bought this light was something I could really put a lot of hours on without going through lots of fiddly little hard-to-find expensive batteries. I have found it. This is a light you can strap on, turn on, and leave on, without worrying about the battery. You have days of non-stop use right there on your forehead.

SlashNOT - Satire for nerds.

Scoring SCO’s legal games. I can’t say I like the article much, or even can make sense out of much of it, but it does include this:

With SCO spraying out threats of legal action like a tomcat on diuretics, this latest piece of territorial widdle might seem like an attempt to put the legal frighteners on a competitor rather than a justifiable defense of SCO’s core business—unless SCO’s core business now is taking people to court. The company is handing over hunks of shares to its lawyers: this can’t be ruled out.

At least here in Wisconsin we’ve been hearing a lot about opposition to proposed California small-engine emissions rules by Briggs and Stratton. Since Briggs has facilities in Wisconsin this there is a local angle to the issue. What I haven’t heard is anything from the other manufacturers of small engines. From what I can find on the web, the other manufacturers don’t seem to have the problem with the regulations that Briggs has. Maybe they figure that they have better engineers than Briggs and Stratton does and so tighter limits are to their advantage. Honda seems to regard emissions controls as a chance to show off their engineering talent.

I’ve been enjoying the Discovery Channel’s show Dirty Jobs. Whether it involves bat guano, dead animals, live animals, or septic tanks, host Mike Rowe is there to try his hand at the task and report on the smell (generally awful) for those of us in the TV audience who, fortunately for the ratings, can’t smell it. The show is actually informative at times and not quite as disgusting as it sounds. Who knew that there is special mud packaged and sold to be smeared on baseballs so that the pitcher can grip them better? Ever wonder what they do with the parts of the fish that don’t go to the grocery store? What do they do with the, um, stuff, they suck into the septic tank pumping truck?

Sometimes we just learn about American TV. Stallion penises are pixelated out, but close-ups of a mare’s vulva are perfectly OK, with or without a human arm and various bits of tubing inserted into one or another opening. I keep thinking that if I watch enough television programming about reproduction, human or otherwise, eventually a rationally-explainable pattern to what is and what isn’t shown will emerge, but of course I am always disappointed. It is foolish to imagine that any rational process is at work.

Following up on my own idea, here is an extremely brief guide the the Perl CPAN module, for people like me who can never remember exactly what to type to get it to go.

The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network is a set of mirror sites for Perl and Perl modules. If you already have Perl running and need to install a module that you just discovered you need, you can use the CPAN module, which you probably already have, to automagically download and install it.

If you know that you need Net::DNS, you could run

to install it. You’ll probably want to run it as root. If you are not sure exactly what the name of the module you are looking for is,

will start the interactive shell, from which you could try

which will show you everything available with “dns” in the name. You can then type

from the shell to install it. exit or control-D and probably several other things will exit the interactive shell.

If you need to do anything more complex, read the real documentation. At some point CPAN will be replaced by CPANPLUS, which at this time (2003-11-20) appears to be at version 0.047. I don’t know anything about it.

I don’t use it that often, which means I have to spend a few minutes fumbling with different commands and eventually looking for documentation at cpan.org, but Perl’s CPAN script is the coolest, most amazing thing. It is just a joy to behold. Find, download, unpack, configure, compile, test, and install a Perl package, cleanup after itself, and by the way, we can update the CPAN package itself while we’re at it if you like. What cpan.org needs is a link right on the front page that says something like, “CPAN module quickstart: install modules automagically with the two or three commands documented here that are really easy to use but which you can never remember when you need them.”

I saw the Discovery Channel’s Under the Sea House episode of Monster House last night. I’m not a really insane fan of the show, but I do tend to watch it. This was the first episode I can recall where the entire team was competent, hard-working, and able to work together as a team. Normally they seem to have at least one crew member who is just a total waste of oxygen, leading to arguments, psychodramas, and near-disaster. I guess that’s good TV. Monster Garage build crews may have plenty of arguments, but they don’t seem to have completely inept members at anything like the rate Monster House does. I don’t know if that says something about the ideas the producers of the two shows have about how to put together good TV or if it says something about the home construction industry.

I spent much of the weekend working on my blog. Not actually adding new content, which would be potentially useful, but dinking with the blog itself. I make zillions of tiny, almost-imperceptible, changes to the stylesheet, made a new favicon, fussed over the bettertitle plugin, made tiny changes to the html outline that the data is plugged into, and otherwise demonstrated that software can absorb all available free time without any meaningful return. But it’s fun. Kind of. At least when you are not going through one of those “why did it stop working?!” phases. I’ll see if I can put up some more book reviews eventually.

There is a nice article on MSNBC about the Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters, entitled “Dumb Stunts, Smart Show: Cable’s ‘Mythbusters’ = ‘Jackass’ + ‘Nova’,” which I think is a nifty description of the show. The show draws about a million viewers, so I guess I’m not the only person who likes it.

The general geekiness of the hosts and their vast collection of geek toys—Machine tools! Ballistic gelatin! High speed cameras! A battered crash-test dummy! A big pile of junk! (as Thomas Edison supposedly said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk”)—is certainly a draw to geeky types. (Actually, the junk seems to be organized in hundreds of neatly labeled boxes.) Certainly the scene in the airline toilet suction myth show where they admire the fine, aerospace-quality welds on the borrowed airliner toilet is a wonderful example of their somewhat unusual take on life. “Wow, look at those welds!” “After we finished admiring the toilet….”

I certainly enjoy watching them blow stuff up. If the myth test doesn’t blow it up, they’ll put in the extra effort to make it go boom. A few extra pound of gunpowder is sure to work.

Anything resembling critical thinking on TV is always welcome. If you pick goofy topics you can make entertaining TV out of it.

You can search BeigeJournal for more Mythbusters entries.

You need to see Matrix XP. This spoof trailer is probably the most hilarious thing I’ve seen in a while. I’ve only seen the first Matrix movie, which, from what I’ve heard, is a good thing. (As I recall, I saw it with some college friends at one of our traditional occasional outings to see a violent movie.)

Dasher is a very clever text input system for use with mice, eye-trackers, or any other two-axis input device. Great for people with fewer than two hands or devices where a full keyboard won’t fit. They have Unix-X11, Windows, MacOS X, and Pocket PC software available for download, all licensed under GPL.

The user is presented with a window with the alphabet at the right. Move the pointer right of center and the letters move left toward it and zoom larger. The clever bit is that the space devoted to each letter is not fixed but depends on the probability of that being the next letter in the current context. Sometimes whole words practically spell themselves out. It’s actually kind of fun, which is much more than I can say for most input gadgets.

On the 10th of November, I read in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel newspaper about an article in the November issue of Esquire magazine, “the issue whose cover features Britney Spears not wearing pants.” Besides the appeal of a pants-less Britney, the article, about a trip to Africa with Al Sharpton, Cornel West, some members of the Nation of Islam, and “His Eminence Franzo W. King, D.D., archbishop and lead sax player of the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church,” for the purpose of attempting to mediate an end to the civil war in Liberia, sounded interesting. On the evening of the 10th, then, I set out to buy a copy of Esquire. Unfortunately, it turns out that November is long since passed in the magazine industry. It is already December, in the magazine industry. It hadn’t occurred to me, on the morning of the 10th, that the month was already over, but, alas, it is. Well, if they don’t want my money, they won’t get it. I bought whatever “month’s” issue of The Atlantic was on the shelf (oddly, I think it’s actually November), which is probably more interesting anyway. There is an article on the Columbia investigation by William Langewiesche (whose book Inside The Sky I enjoyed a great deal), and much on college admissions, as Philip Greenspun has noted. No Britney, but, really, I find my lover without pants more interesting than Britney without pants.

Not wanting to disappoint my readers (either of you), I’ll add an answer to a Google query that turned up in the logs. I have a Fellowes PS80C-2 paper shredder. It turns up to about eight pages at a time into confetti about 4 by 20 millimeters in size. It seems pretty sturdy, perhaps mild overkill for home use, but the cheaper ones are mostly pretty awful. It has been trouble-free, and has plenty of capacity for home use. The motor reverses for easy unjamming when overloaded. It will eat the occasional staple easily. The overall level of spilled confetti in normal use is reasonably small.

It is fun to shred the junk that comes in the mail, especially when the toy was new. I think that’s what happened to Ollie North: he had Guy With A New Shredder Disease, and had to shred everything that came to hand. Eventually the novelty wears off a bit, but it still gets plenty of use.

I went to Wisconsin’s Pike Lake State Park on Saturday, where among other things I walked the Astronomy Trail, which is a scale-model of the solar system. That the outer solar system is big is the lesson one learns on the 930 meter hike. The scale is 1:6.3 billion. The inner solar system is cozy. Mercury, at 0.4 AU, is 9 meters from the sun, a 5 second walk at 1.7 m/s (6.25 km/h). Venus is another 8 meters and around five seconds, then Earth at 7 meters and four seconds, and Mars, 12 meters and about 8 seconds. Then we enter the outer solar system. The asteroid belt appears 30 meters from mars, 17 seconds of walking. Jupiter, 5.2 AU from the sun, is 35 seconds of walking from the asteroids. A minute to walk 100 meters brings us to Saturn. 2:10 and 230 meters to Uranus. 2:28 and 250 meters to Neptune. 2:04 and 220 more meters brings us to Pluto, the end of the trail, 930 meters and 8:56 from the sun. At this scale Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years from Earth, is 6300 km away, approximately the distance from Milwaukee to the Canary Islands. The Andromeda galaxy, at around 2.4 million light years, would be 240 astronomical units, six times the distance to Pluto. Using 15 billion light years as the edge of the observable universe puts that at 2.3 light years, almost half way to Proxima Centauri.

Pluto is 5.4 light hours from the sun. I walked the distance in just under nine minutes on the trail, which would be just over 36 times the speed of light in a naive calculation. If I’ve done my time dilation calculations correctly, traveling at 99.963% of the speed of light would produce enough time-dilation to make the elapsed “ship time” nine minutes. Going that fast inside a solar system full of dust and debris would be…problematic.

Interfilk did OVFF attendees a wonderful service by bringing Blake Hodgetts to us. He is a most skillful keyboard player and singer and writes amazing songs. After hearing him at OVFF I bought his CD Blindsight from him. I highly recommend the CD, available directly from him or from finer filk dealers. He has lyrics and MP3 samples on the CD page plus more lyrics and a few scores, chords, and MIDI files on the songs page.

Blake’s songs often have a bit of scientific or technical content inserted where you least expect it. He has some very interesting ideas. “Hot Point, Warm Heart” is a love song—from your refrigerator. “A Habitrail Named Klein” explores the hazards of twisted hypertoric subspace-crossing hamster housing. “The Little Blue Man” is just special, even compared to those. He’s not all silliness. “Boundless?” is downright haunting.

I do hope we see Blake out here in the Midwest again. And Chicago is in the Midwest. The East Coast is at least a thousand kilometers, er, to the east. A thousand km here, a thousand there, next thing you know, you’re all the way across the continent. Atlanta I’m willing to call East Coast, but not Chicago.

There are a raft of Enron books out currently. I’ve read two, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, by Robert Bryce and Molly Ivins; and Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, by Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins. Though I think they are both good, Pipe Dreams seemed to contain a lot more detail. I’m not entirely sure how that is, given that they both cover more-or-less the same events and are approximately the same length, but that is how I remember it. If you only have time for one and like stories of bone-headed management decisions, I’d say of the two Pipe Dreams is your better option. There are at least three other Enron books I haven’t read, though, so who knows. Enron is starting to fill serious shelf space in the library.

Drunken biker hermit crabs would be a great name for a band. I had a dear friend once who kept hermit crabs as pets. She claimed that they were very good at helping her relax and slow down because they are nervous creatures and if they see you moving, they hide. So if you want to see them, you have to sit still. She was not really the sitting still type. Indeed, she was so busy she hardly had time to see me and I never did get to meet the crabs.

The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide. Have they advanced RPS strategy? Yes they do. Actually qualifies as a useful site for those of us who’s childhoods were sufficiently odd that we never even learned the basics of the game.

The ARC (bicycle mounted) and ARC Cabeza (helmet mounted, as the name implies) lights from Light and Motion use a 13.5 watt Welch Allyn Solarc metal halide arc lamp and either a NiMH battery or a 280 gram lighter Li-Ion battery. As I write this the NiMH version is selling for around $410 and the Li-Ion for around $500. I have owned a NiMH-equipped ARC Cabeza since last fall.

Miniature HID lamps are a difficult and correspondingly expensive technology, but are substantially more efficient than incandescent lamps. At best incandescent lamps give little more than 20 lumens per watt, while the small Solarc HID lamps manage 45 (perhaps more) lumens per watt. When watts are cheap it may be hard to justify the breathtaking price of the HID lamp, but when power comes from a battery strapped to your body or your bicycle and carried under human power, the improvement in efficiency is important.

This thing is bright. Not just compared to the 4-AA mini-lights but even compared to most of the big and expensive halogen bicycle lights. I never realized how much retroreflective material was out there until I strapped a powerful light to my head. With the high output and the small distance between lamp and eyes to maximize the efficiency of retroreflectors, it seems the whole world is retroreflective. The fact that many of these retroreflective surfaces went unnoticed by me until I bought this light should be a warning about the limits of reflectors.

The light pattern is a very wide, very even circle with a smaller, also very even, much brighter central spot. The circular pattern wastes light upward but does simplify the optics and ensures that the light is clearly visible to others even if aimed downward. The wide pattern both makes the user very visible to other road users and, in unlighted areas, provides surprisingly useful peripheral light. It avoids the tiny patch of light in a tunnel of darkness effect, and makes it possible to see potential hazards that are off to the side. The shear quantity of photons coming out of the lamp means that it is not necessary to focus the beam tightly. There is plenty of light to go around. The bright central spot seems to me to be just about perfectly sized. This light really makes night riding routine. I have ridden unfamiliar, unlighted roads at upward of 35 km/h and felt reasonably safe doing so. That would seem absurdly reckless to me with lesser lights. People see me, as well. Indeed, sometimes I can almost see the question marks hovering over the cars as motorists wonder just what that brightly lit object is.

Whenever HID bicycle lights are discussed some people always wonder if the lights are dangerously bright, dazzling other road users. If only the designers and operators of motor vehicles, with their far more powerful lights powered by engine-driven electrical systems, were as worried about blinding other people. Imagine how nice the roads would be at night. This thing is less powerful than a single car headlight. It is a very bright compared to the average bicycle light (as far as I can tell, the typical bicycle light is no light at all), but it is not really that bright compared to anything not powered by a little battery pack. Certainly, if you walk up to someone and aim the brightest part of the beam directly into that person’s eyes, you will annoy that person. So don’t do that. In traffic, the other people are farther away. The dim part of the beam, even at close range, is not unreasonably bright. At across-the-intersection distances, even the bright part of the beam, while very bright, is not going to set anyone’s retinas on fire. I don’t recommend routinely flashing the brightest part of the beam at people—the dimmer part should be plenty noticeable—but if you do so by accident, or to get a particularly inattentive person’s attention, no harm should come. No one is really dark-adapted when driving in the first place, except possibly in desolate areas. All urban/suburban/rural-but-near-the-suburbs road users are frequently flashed by the brightest part of car headlight beams, even with properly adjusted lights, as dips, bumps, and hills shine the lights into people’s eyes, and there are always the mis-aimed lights and the people using the high beams inappropriately. I think the risk of dazzling other people is greatly exaggerated. I find the helmet-mounted light easy to control, with only trifling attention required to keep the light pointed where I want it and out of people’s eyes.

The system has the appearance of sturdy, high-quality equipment. The company also makes underwater camera housings and dive lights, so one hopes they understand water resistance, though I have not used it in the rain (yet). The ballast electronics are integrated into the lamp assembly, with the power cable permanently attached to the lamp. The HID arc tube has a claimed median life of 1000 hours and is not user replaceable. The battery connector has pins that while fragile-looking have not caused me any trouble. The connector appears waterproof and sturdy once connected. I added some markings to the connectors with a white marking pen to aid alignment since the molded arrows are very hard to see. The lamp is controlled by a single push button on the back. A LED behind the button blinks to indicate low power mode and blinks more rapidly as a low battery warning. Double-click to turn it on, a single click switches between full brightness and a slightly dimmer setting, and holding the button down will shut the lamp off. All discharge lamps take time to warm up and are difficult to restart when hot. This lamp takes several seconds to warm up enough to produce significant light and perhaps 10–20 seconds to produced full output. After shutdown it cools enough to restrike quite quickly, less than 30 seconds. Part of the complexity and expense of automotive HID lights stems from the legal requirement to produce high light output almost instantly and to reliably restrike from full operating temperature. The ARC’s performance is perfectly adequate for a bicycle light. Battery life is claimed to be three hours at full power and 3.5 hours at low power. In informal testing this seemed approximately correct. Light and Motion warn that the lamp is designed to be cooled by the airflow of cycling and should not be operated for more than 15 minutes without airflow over the unit.

There is no quick release between the lamp and the helmet mount, so the Velcro-covered strap must be threaded through the helmet with each use. Fortunately this is reasonably easy. A quick release would be preferable, provided it was sturdy, easy to use, and light, which might be a somewhat difficult combination to achieve. I think the current arrangement is acceptable. The usual possibilities for carrying the battery (jersey pocket, backpack) don’t work so well on a recumbent. I have one of those orange reflective vests with pockets and keep the battery secured in a pocket with elastic straps.

The standard charger shipped with the NiMH ARCs is excellent. It is a proper NiMH charger, with dT/dt end-of-charge detection and, as far as I can tell, a suitably low trickle charge rate once full charge is reached. It can fully charge a fully discharged battery in 3.5 hours. A short lead connects the charger to the battery, and a standard IEC connector of the type found on computer gear connects the charger to 100–250 volts AC via the included cord. It’s really the minimum we should expect for anything with NiMH batteries, especially relatively expensive equipment, but good chargers are rare. Apparently most manufacturers view selling replacements for batteries destroyed by bad chargers a means to boost profits.

There are a great variety of bicycle lights of many types available. Different cyclists have different needs and the very bright, very expensive, battery powered lights are not suitable for all cyclists. If you feel that very bright, very expensive is what you want, the Light and Motion ARC series appears to be an excellent choice. I’m very happy with mine.

For more information on lights and reflectors, as well as safe cycling in general, I recommend John Allen’s web site, which has a bicycle reflectors and lights section, and John Forester’s site, which also has a nighttime equipment section.

Why Do People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion? Richard E. Wentz, 87 pages, Mercer University Press, 1987.

I found this book very disappointing. The disappointment started early, when religiousness is redefined to include all human activity not directly related to remaining alive, including examples like camping or a sports fan watching televised football. At this point it is already clear that the title does not mean what you thought it meant. One idea raised somewhat briefly that seems perfectly reasonable is that our activities will harm people when the activity itself is thought of as more important than the people. I can’t argue with that. The possibility that different religious practices may make it easier or harder to keep attention on people’s welfare is not raised.

He claims that religions exist because people do bad things, even good people who did not intend harm, and the religion, if it is successful, should help us understand the inevitable evil. He’s rather vague on how this should happen. One might think that The Problem of Evil would come up here, but it is left to be dismissed later. Essentially, people do bad things in the name of religion because people do bad things, and no matter what their background and beliefs some people will do evil in the name of whatever is important to them. Religion having been redefined to include everything people do besides breathing, I suppose this is all we can expect.

He then divides religious practice into the ways of the masses and the ways of the disciple. It seems to me that this becomes a sort of lengthy way of saying that while many of the believers may think their religion justifies violence, while even apparently devout people who are elected to leadership positions in their religion may espouse violence and intolerance, the real religion, and the real believers, those following the path of the disciple, are pacifists deeply concerned about human welfare and completely aware of their own limitations and uncertainties. He emphasizes his belief that all religions are founded by this sort, even if their followers are not, though he offers no evidence. As usual, Heisenberg is mentioned, in the usually incoherent way.

Very little is made of the differences in the content of different beliefs. Apparently everyone is pursuing the same thing in their own equally valid way. Having defined Paul Kurtz and the Ayatollah Khomeini to be in the same business perhaps makes this inevitable.

As a religious studies professor, Richard Wentz feels misunderstood by his academic colleagues in other disciplines. It is entirely likely that most of them have never read any of his writings, but I doubt that this book would much increase their respect for him.