In LA

I just received the famed “black olive” foam earbud sleeves that I’ll be using with the Shure earbuds I mentioned in a previous post. It would appear that the smallest box Best Buy uses to ship items is 8″x12″x9″. So I received a box full of cushiony air pockets, with the tiny earbud sleeve package pressed right up against the top of the box. What a waste. The earbuds likely could have survived the trip just in their original packaging, or wrapped in a single strip of bubble wrap.

I didn’t realize that these earbud sleeves do not fit the i2c’s without modification (their inner tube is too narrow), but they fit my Future Sonics Atrios perfectly. I tore out the tubes and stuck a couple of ‘em on the i2c’s, and the sound is much improved over the stock silicon sleeves. When I wear this pair out, I’ll try using a small needlenose pliers to enlarge the tubes in the next pair rather than performing that more-damaging tube-ectomy.

Fuel consumption during my 20-minute drive to work this morning along the semi-clogged 101 freeway. The y-axis at right is miles-per-gallon. After years of wasteful, 28mpg LA driving, it’s refreshing to do wasteful, 50mpg LA driving.

Technorati Tags: auto-eroticism, driving, environment, environmentalism, fuel economy, graphs, infographics, my miles-per-gallon is bigger than your miles-per-gallon, petroleum, prius, commuting

A busy intersection in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. 5/2006

Yesterday I walked to lunch along a busy street in Hollywood, having a very difficult time hearing my friend on my cell phone as busses and trucks rattled past. I marveled at the amazing amount of noise I encounter on a daily basis, and thought of how peaceful the aural landscape of the future city will be if one day all internal combustion engines are replaced by electric equivalents.

There are a ton of Toyota Prios¹ zooming around the streets of LA fairly quietly using their electric motors, the first wave of the new sound of transportation. Sounds like progress to me.

So I’m hoping that a new piece of legislation introduced in the US House of Representatives, the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2008, doesn’t result in a mandatory minimum noise level for all vehicles. Here are the details on the Act, courtesy of its supporters at the National Federation of the Blind (NFB):

The bill requires the Secretary of Transportation, within ninety days of its enactment, to commence a two-year study to determine the best means to provide the blind and other pedestrians with information about the location, motion, speed, and direction of vehicles. Upon completion of the study, the Secretary will report the findings of the study to Congress and, within ninety days, establish a minimum vehicle safety standard for all new vehicles sold in the United States. Automobile manufacturers will have two years to comply with the vehicle safety standard.

Some folk over at treehugger.com wonder if such concern is overkill, asking How Many Blind People Have Been Hit By A Prius? One answer can be found in an LA times article on the bill, “While the organization is not aware of people being struck by cars they couldn’t hear, NFB President Marc Maurer has said he fears it’s only a matter of time.”

I’d like to think that the desire for a quiet environment and the desire for blind people to be able to freely and safely navigate the streets don’t have to be at odds. Hopefully if the bill passes, the required study will show that tire and electric engine noise alone will suffice to warn pedestrians (especially given that as more and more hybrids take to the streets the total level of road noise will go down, so that the sound of approaching electric vehicles will be less masked by the din). Or maybe someone can develop a wristwatch for the vision-impaired which would use sonar or transponders built into every car to notify them of approaching traffic?

I’d prefer any solution to one that results in a future of roads filled with chirping, whistling, or beeping cars.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, ambient sound, Legislature, safety, sound pollution

1. the plural of Prius if treated as a 2nd declension Latin noun [↩]

I shot a few portraits of Angus against the smoky sunset background. I like this one, but it needs a little bit of photoshop work to really make it sing. There’s somedetail in the shadows I can bring up to further separate him from the background, make him look less like he’s popping out of the horizon, and make it less of a complete silhouette.

Another photo from last night’s sunset. The smoke from Malibu was very heavy.

Today is one of those days. I’ve got a slightly sore throat, irritated nasal passageways, and a bit of a cough. If I felt like this in the US I’d know I was coming down with a cold, but here in China I know this is more likely a reaction to the higher-than-normal amount of pollutants spewed into the air today by the local battery factories, magnet factories, and sulfur processing plants.

I’ll just be over here, playing the ancient Chinese guessing game, “disease, or just choking”?

I’ve been hard at work lately on several projects: A website, some film-related I.T. work, and have started preproduction planning on a music video I’ll be directing. As often happens when I’m engaged in other pursuits, musical themes intrude into my head and I have to go buy them and listen repeatedly . This time it’s the nihilist pop of Ladytron, with a track by Martin Gore on heavy rotation as well:

Song	Album	Artist
Evil	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Seventeen	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Destroy Everything You Touch	Witching Hour	Ladytron
Playgirl	Commodore Rock	Ladytron
The Reason Why	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Discotraxx	604	Ladytron
Compulsion	Counterfeit [EP]	Martin Gore

If you think these tracks are easy to find in Beijing, you should by rights be wrong. However, almost as quickly as the songs popped into my head, I ran into people who had all of these albums.

This playlist could be entitled “music for not smiling”. Despite the inhumanly mechanical musical textures, this kind of music often broadcasts more emotional content to me than songs with more inflected and showy vocal and instrumental stylings. These and other musical artists of today should be commended for confusing the historian bots of the future, who will likely one day uncover these albums and have huge debates lasting milliseconds over whether or not the tracks were released before or after all humans died out and were replaced by robots.

Last week a huge portion of Seattle was without power due to a big storm. Highest winds on record, most rain on record, etc. Over a million people fell off the electrical grid, at least 7 or so people dead, another 100 admitted to hospitals with carbon monoxide poisoning after they brought barbecues or generators indoors for the heat, and at least one server (this one) without power for several days.

But now at least this server is back online. Yay.

♫ So long and thanks for all the shipping traffic ♬

Lipotes vexilifier is the first species of cetacean – whales, dolphins and porpoises – to disappear from our globe in modern times…the first large mammal to go extinct as a result of man’s destruction of their natural habitat and ressources.

A team of researchers searched a 1000-mile stretch of the Yangtze river hoping to sight a Baiji (white dolphin) and found nothing. They guess that the Baiji is effectively extinct, and blame human activity — fishing and shipping traffic on the river did them in. Because there is so much sediment in the river, the Baiji have evolved to navigate and find food using echolocation (and are nearly blind). The researchers think that the sound of boat engines along the heavily-trafficked river disrupts the dolphin’s sonar so that they can’t find food.

The researches also tried to estimate the size of the dwindling Yangtze finless porpoise population, and only counted 400. They’ll likely be next to go. There’s a photo of that porpoise on cnn’s site, it’s either insanely cute or the winner of the H.R. Giger’s Alien look-alike contest.

Looking on the bright side, the white dolphin was an obvious impediment to China’s booming economy, as once was the city of Beijing’s overly-clean air. Many people were even concerned that the completion of the massive Three Gorges Dam project would result in the extinction of the Baiji. Now that both of these problems have been overcome (and Baiji dealt with ahead of schedule!), the Chinese economy can continue its rapid growth unabated. Investors take note.

Note: If you took these photos please let me know if you’d like a credit, a link, or would like them to be taken down.