Hell, it's a freaking 13/14h flight from Sydney to LA or ~12 from Aukland to LA (which is odd as it's ~3h from Sydney to Aukland and they're on a similar latitude).
Not odd at all. Remember, you are talking about arcs over the surface of a sphere, not straight lines on a flat plane. You need to think about non-Euclidean geometry/trigonometry. The shortest path between two points is along a "great circle", not the line you'd draw on any wall map.
Then there's the fact that the 3-hour local flight is spending a greater percentage of it's time in establishing and coming down from cruising altitude.
Active Noise Cancellation (or Reduction) is the thing you want. The local environmental noise is sampled, and the unit generates an inverse of the noise in order to cancel it out in real time. This works best close to the noise source, because of the radiative propagation of sound, otherwise you get awful moire' like interference patterns, where spots are silent right next to spots where the noise is twice as loud. In cases where ANC cannot be co-located with the noise source, it can still be effective in areas where the noise is channeled between the source and the listener. Like in the exhaust system for a car, or at the ear canals for a particular listener.
And that's where these headphones come in.
The box attached to them does the sampling/generation. And it pipes the inverted sounds up to the earphones. They are a touch on the expensive side, but they should do a great job at flitering out outside distractions. They'll do better in situations where the noise is more droning and monotonous than your case with the jabbering cow orker next door. It looks like the microphones are located just above the ear pieces, which is a good thing. You want the sampled sounds to come from as close to the cancellation point as possible.
The earphones themselves look fairly well insulated, almost as much as the big 70's-style ones shown elsewhere on that page. You can run just the ANC, or you can use them as headphones for your stereo and add your instro/classical fare to insure that you have "corporate accounts, this is Nina speaking, just a moment" next door drowned out completely.
If it really is about the PHB's wanting calendars (for one another), could you limit your risks by moving JUST them to a single Exchange Server?
They'd get what they want, without forcing it on everyone else. Plus, you'll be able to show a live comparison/contrast each time Exchange locks up, goes down, passes a virus, etc. and the everyone else on the Unix server is still ticking along with no problems.
Flex Time is an important reason why rush hour traffic in the Washington DC area, as bad as it is, is not 10 times worse.
The US Federal Gov't is one of the largest examples of employers who use Flex Time. You pick an 8-hour day in blocks that vary by regular intervals. (My dad worked 7:15-3:45, including a half hour lunch)
Traffic has been lighter over greater lengths of the morning/afternoon than it would be if it were bunched into gotta-get-there-by-9 and bird's-tail-pulled-yabba-dabba-doo-it's-5 clumps.
The regular blocks of official hours made it very easy for folks to take transit instead of their own vehicle. They could easily choose a bus/rail combo that got them to work in time for their shifted-shift and one for the home trip where they didn't have to wait around long at a stop in the cold.
As bad as DC traffic is, I can only imagine how much worse it would be now without the gov't (and so many gov't contractors) having adopted flex time.
I did a bit of a botch job of re-editing my words.
I meant that the priesthood was decended from Moses' brother Aaron, and that the Y-chromosome markers just don't show up as freqently in the general Jewish population, and that it is very rare in non-Jewish populations.
In more ways that we are just beginning to know about.
Y-Chromosome research is proving to be much more illuminating than mitochondrial DNA that threw science for a loop in the late 80's, suggesting that we all have a single female ancestor from Africa 200,000 years ago.
Cohen or Kohen as a Jewish surname comes from "priest", as the priesthood from Moses was inherited father-to-son. Research has shown that Cohens typically have Y-chromosome markers that just don't show up in members of the Jewish population at large.
But here's the kicker.
The Lemba in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa have long maintained that they were descended from Northern ancestors, priests and tradeworkers, who sailed South through the Indian Ocean. Most of the world had not believed them, but DNA tests of their Y-chromosomes show them to contain the same markers as Cohens!
On the opposite site of the globe...
I wonder what researchers are currently making out of deCODE's Book of Icelanders. I understand that access is free for locals. Being an island without much immigration, they must have a small, but very interesting gene pool.
The big difficulty I had with a chording keyboard was less to do with memorizing the proper chords for particular character sequences and more a problem of independently moving my pinkie and ring fingers.
Open your hand with all fingers extended, as if to sign "stop" or indicate the number 5. Bend *just* your pinkie in to touch your palm. Do the same with your ring finger. Now try it with the other hand. Notice how much your other fingers bend along with the one you are trying to isolate? My left hand is far worse than my right.
That lack of completely independent movement kept giving me innacurate chords with my left hand. Lots of practice marginally improved the situation, but not enough to make sticking with the new keyboard worthwhile.
Who knows, a different configuration of chording keyboard (not so much finger curl?) might have been workable.
Steve Jackson Games got a court settlement from the Secret Service over their unlawful asset seisure and parlayed it into an ISP business. More about that here.
They've had their rights wrongly abridged by the government before, so they've been extra vigilant ever since.
I use them for shell-only access from a different part of the US. I get my dial-up (not springing for better bandwidth until it gets cheaper) from someone local. But they have services to suit most any need.
The EXIT signs for most buildings these days have a handful of red LEDs inside for illuminating the letters.
This is an even better example because they are more ubiquitous than even stoplights, and you'd only notice they are burned out when the power goes out.
They have a system where the bulb and the ballast are separate, unlike most compact flourescents. That's a good thing, because the ballast has a longer life than the bulb portion in most flourescent configurations. With typical CF bulbs, you throw away a perfectly good ballast when the bulb goes. I originally bought Lights of America CFs for that reason.
The problem was that the bulb portion was crap!
It burned out almost as quickly as an incandescent. Some savings!
Go to the library and look at the Consumers Report issue where they rate CF bulbs. Lights of America regularly comes up at the bottom of the list.
Slashdot Mirror
Not odd at all. Remember, you are talking about arcs over the surface of a sphere, not straight lines on a flat plane. You need to think about non-Euclidean geometry/trigonometry. The shortest path between two points is along a "great circle", not the line you'd draw on any wall map.
Then there's the fact that the 3-hour local flight is spending a greater percentage of it's time in establishing and coming down from cruising altitude.
Active Noise Cancellation (or Reduction) is the thing you want. The local environmental noise is sampled, and the unit generates an inverse of the noise in order to cancel it out in real time. This works best close to the noise source, because of the radiative propagation of sound, otherwise you get awful moire' like interference patterns, where spots are silent right next to spots where the noise is twice as loud. In cases where ANC cannot be co-located with the noise source, it can still be effective in areas where the noise is channeled between the source and the listener. Like in the exhaust system for a car, or at the ear canals for a particular listener.
And that's where these headphones come in. The box attached to them does the sampling/generation. And it pipes the inverted sounds up to the earphones. They are a touch on the expensive side, but they should do a great job at flitering out outside distractions. They'll do better in situations where the noise is more droning and monotonous than your case with the jabbering cow orker next door. It looks like the microphones are located just above the ear pieces, which is a good thing. You want the sampled sounds to come from as close to the cancellation point as possible.
The earphones themselves look fairly well insulated, almost as much as the big 70's-style ones shown elsewhere on that page. You can run just the ANC, or you can use them as headphones for your stereo and add your instro/classical fare to insure that you have "corporate accounts, this is Nina speaking, just a moment" next door drowned out completely.
Okay, how about:
"from 100 Hz to 200 Hz, there are one hundred humanly perceivable discrete frequencies"
If it really is about the PHB's wanting calendars (for one another), could you limit your risks by moving JUST them to a single Exchange Server?
They'd get what they want, without forcing it on everyone else. Plus, you'll be able to show a live comparison/contrast each time Exchange locks up, goes down, passes a virus, etc. and the everyone else on the Unix server is still ticking along with no problems.
Heck, just plop it on a scanner if you have to.
Flex Time is an important reason why rush hour traffic in the Washington DC area, as bad as it is, is not 10 times worse.
The US Federal Gov't is one of the largest examples of employers who use Flex Time. You pick an 8-hour day in blocks that vary by regular intervals. (My dad worked 7:15-3:45, including a half hour lunch)
Traffic has been lighter over greater lengths of the morning/afternoon than it would be if it were bunched into gotta-get-there-by-9 and bird's-tail-pulled-yabba-dabba-doo-it's-5 clumps.
The regular blocks of official hours made it very easy for folks to take transit instead of their own vehicle. They could easily choose a bus/rail combo that got them to work in time for their shifted-shift and one for the home trip where they didn't have to wait around long at a stop in the cold.
As bad as DC traffic is, I can only imagine how much worse it would be now without the gov't (and so many gov't contractors) having adopted flex time.
Ahem.
I did a bit of a botch job of re-editing my words.
I meant that the priesthood was decended from Moses' brother Aaron, and that the Y-chromosome markers just don't show up as freqently in the general Jewish population, and that it is very rare in non-Jewish populations.
In more ways that we are just beginning to know about.
Y-Chromosome research is proving to be much more illuminating than mitochondrial DNA that threw science for a loop in the late 80's, suggesting that we all have a single female ancestor from Africa 200,000 years ago.
Cohen or Kohen as a Jewish surname comes from "priest", as the priesthood from Moses was inherited father-to-son. Research has shown that Cohens typically have Y-chromosome markers that just don't show up in members of the Jewish population at large.
But here's the kicker. The Lemba in Zimbabwe and Southern Africa have long maintained that they were descended from Northern ancestors, priests and tradeworkers, who sailed South through the Indian Ocean. Most of the world had not believed them, but DNA tests of their Y-chromosomes show them to contain the same markers as Cohens!
On the opposite site of the globe...
I wonder what researchers are currently making out of deCODE's Book of Icelanders. I understand that access is free for locals. Being an island without much immigration, they must have a small, but very interesting gene pool.
The big difficulty I had with a chording keyboard was less to do with memorizing the proper chords for particular character sequences and more a problem of independently moving my pinkie and ring fingers.
Open your hand with all fingers extended, as if to sign "stop" or indicate the number 5. Bend *just* your pinkie in to touch your palm. Do the same with your ring finger. Now try it with the other hand. Notice how much your other fingers bend along with the one you are trying to isolate? My left hand is far worse than my right.
That lack of completely independent movement kept giving me innacurate chords with my left hand. Lots of practice marginally improved the situation, but not enough to make sticking with the new keyboard worthwhile.
Who knows, a different configuration of chording keyboard (not so much finger curl?) might have been workable.
Shoot, just ROT-13 it. Then sue the pants off them under the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA!
In Austin Tx and surrounding areas, try io.com.
Steve Jackson Games got a court settlement from the Secret Service over their unlawful asset seisure and parlayed it into an ISP business. More about that here.
They've had their rights wrongly abridged by the government before, so they've been extra vigilant ever since.
I use them for shell-only access from a different part of the US. I get my dial-up (not springing for better bandwidth until it gets cheaper) from someone local. But they have services to suit most any need.
Traffic lights aren't the only application.
The EXIT signs for most buildings these days have a handful of red LEDs inside for illuminating the letters.
This is an even better example because they are more ubiquitous than even stoplights, and you'd only notice they are burned out when the power goes out.
Just stay away from the Lights of America brand.
They have a system where the bulb and the ballast are separate, unlike most compact flourescents. That's a good thing, because the ballast has a longer life than the bulb portion in most flourescent configurations. With typical CF bulbs, you throw away a perfectly good ballast when the bulb goes. I originally bought Lights of America CFs for that reason.
The problem was that the bulb portion was crap!
It burned out almost as quickly as an incandescent. Some savings!
Go to the library and look at the Consumers Report issue where they rate CF bulbs. Lights of America regularly comes up at the bottom of the list.
It's been some time since I've done theater lighting, but I have my $0.02 to throw in anyways.
Is this really a true "spot" light? It doesn't appear to be focusable. It is more of a directed fill, it seems to me.
And did they stick it in a traditional can because it was cheaper? I mean, does it really *need* the heat-sink fins around the outside?