Ron Paul’s supporters and a former Federal Election Commissioner are turning the operation of political speech inside out by turning individual donors into political organizations and the delivery vehicle (pun intended) into a for-profit universal-access media company. Bravo! Or as On the Media puts it:

…a campaign reform loophole as big as the Ron Paul blimp.

Expect ever tighter epicycles from the FEC to try to hold back the Internet and the innovative business processes that low transactions costs make available via personal computers and the Internet. They will nullify all limitations on free speech.

To the transistor, which will be sixty years old tomorrow.

It has to be in the top five all-time inventions.

Toshiba has come up with a lithium battery that can get to a 90% charge in five minutes. This is huge for electric cars, if it pans out. Anyone want to work out how much power/voltage/current that would be for the equivalent of a tank of gas?

Toshiba has come up with a lithium battery that can get to a 90% charge in five minutes. This is huge for electric cars, if it pans out. Anyone want to work out how much power/voltage/current that would be for the equivalent of a tank of gas?

Toshiba has come up with a lithium battery that can get to a 90% charge in five minutes. This is huge for electric cars, if it pans out. Anyone want to work out how much power/voltage/current that would be for the equivalent of a tank of gas?

This is kind of disturbing:

The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an “audio spotlight” from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium. The technology, ideal for museums and libraries or environments that require a quiet atmosphere for isolated audio slideshows, has rarely been used on such a scale before. For random passersby and residents who have to walk unwittingly through the area where the voice will penetrate their inner peace, it’s another story.

I predict a lawsuit at some point.

For that special geek in your life, here’s a list of Christmasholiday gift suggestions. And here’s a list of things to be sure not to get him or her–the ten worst gadgets of 2007.

This precise:

To tap the F1’s full accuracy, scientists have to know their precise relative position to the clock, and account for weather, altitude and other externalities. An optical cable that links the F1 to a lab at the University of Colorado, for example, can vary in length as much as 10 mm on a hot day — something that researchers need to continually track and take into account. At F1’s level of precision, even general relativity introduces problems; when technicians recently moved F1 from the third floor to the second, they had to re-tune the system to compensate for the 11-and-a-half foot drop in altitude.

Fred Kaplan makes the case. I hadn’t been aware of how much the quality of the sound was degraded to compress it into an MP3. Of course, I’ve never gotten into the MP3 thing, other than to listen to interviews and the like on my Treo. When I want to listen to music, I still go with CDs and vinyl.

And I don’t think that Teachout is going to persuade very many people to give up their high-end equipment. One would think that he, of all people, would remember the old dictum that there’s no accounting for taste.

From Amazon, who have been running a series.

The main reason I’m linking is to explain this, because it struck me that some might wonder why:

Unless you have a high-end receiver and speakers capable of generating a lot of bass, I recommend setting them to “small.” This will send their bass to your subwoofer.

Some might ask, “…but what about the stereo for the bass? I thought that stereo required separation. How can you get that if it’s all coming from a single speaker?”

Here’s the deal. The ability to discriminate the direction of sound is a function of its wavelength. The wavelength of notes in the bass frequency is substantially longer than the distance between your ears, so there’s no way for you to tell what direction the sound is coming from at those frequencies. Can you tell where thunder is from the sound? Yes, you can tell how far away it is, if you see the lightning and count the time until you hear it (about five seconds per mile), but absent visual clues, there’s no way to tell the direction purely from the sound.

That’s why you can not only get away with sending all bass to the subwoofer, but it doesn’t even matter where the subwoofer is. So you can place it where it’s convenient, or aesthetic (as long as it’s at least in the same room). It’s the high frequencies where speaker placement matters.