What the College-Admissions Scandal Reveals – The Atlantic

On By Paul HubbardIn PoliticsLeave a comment

But what accounted for the intensity of emotion these parents expressed, their sense of a profound loss, of rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs? They were experiencing the same response to a changing America that ultimately brought Donald Trump to office: white displacement and a revised social contract. The collapse of manufacturing jobs has been to poor whites what the elite college-admissions crunch has been to wealthy ones: a smaller and smaller slice of pie for people who were used to having the fattest piece of all.

What the College-Admissions Scandal Reveals – The Atlantic

An excellent and thought provoking read.

Quantified self

On By Paul HubbardIn Health, recommendations, UncategorizedLeave a comment

So I bought a heart rate sensor, the Polar OH1 Plus. (Based entirely on this epic review from DC Rainmaker.) I am curious about fitness and have been liking the 0.5Hz readings from the Motiv.

So this new one should provide better data. And it has a VO2 max fitness test, which of course I promptly took:

Yay me!

Sensor:

This week I’ll play more volleyball and see. I like that it’s cheap, accurate and works for all sports including swimming. And DCR like it too, and he’s a much better judge than I am, so consider the OH1+ recommended.

Get one from Amazon for $80 here.

OBD-II monitoring the Bolt

On By Paul HubbardIn EVlife, recommendationsLeave a comment
Three live readouts from my Bolt EV as seen in the EngineLink iOS app

Since I got the Bolt I’ve been looking for a way to view OBD-II data. For those who’ve not encountered it, OBD-II is a specification and connector; all vehicles since 1996 have it. (More at Wikipedia) The Bolt didn’t work with my copy of EngineLink, but… today it does!

The secret is this google docs spreadsheet.

It has the codes (secret decoder, literally) to let EngineLink understand what the numbers mean. So now I can create dashboards and monitors to my heart’s content.

You need hardware, mine is this one from Amazon, cost me $35:

Image credit: Amazon

More details on the spreadsheet, including how to do it on Android, links to other adapters and more. I love the internet sometimes!

The Turbowheel Dart 25 mph electric scooter is 1.2 kW worth of fun – Electrek

On By Paul HubbardIn EVlifeLeave a comment

Via Elektrek, now this is a proper scooter:

With a light show even!

I’ve tried the Bird scooters locally and they’re fun. They zip along well on level ground but with my mass (6’10” 240lbs), they can’t manage the hill that I live on. Those are 250W, most are the Xiomi M365. This beast is almost six times more (peak) power! And suspension and enough lighting to see and be seen.

Elektrek likes it:

It rides like a cloud, basically.


It’s a thousand bucks and 39lbs, but if I can find an excuse I am so wanting to buy one. It’d work for runs to the library and supermarket and such.

Buy one here: https://www.ewheels.com/product/new-turbowheel-dart-t9-500w-614wh/

Unmarked

On By Paul HubbardIn Music, PoliticsLeave a comment

In addition to being one of my favorite Yaz tunes:

I discovered today that it’s also a sociology term

Sociologists have a very useful concept: the unmarked category.  An unmarked category is present when the category is considered so normal or ordinary in a particular context that it goes unnoticed.  The category is the default setting in regard to social expectations, and it in a sense remains invisible precisely because it’s so dominant.  Being black in Boulder is a marked category, which means (white) people won’t see a man picking up trash, they’ll see a black man picking up trash.  They see something, so they say something.

For example, if you had asked a lawyer in 1960 to name three characteristics that every current Supreme Court justice shared, it’s very likely the lawyer would not have mentioned either race or gender.  In other words, we notice characteristics we don’t expect to see much more than characteristics we assume will be present.  (The typical NBA fan will probably not notice the race of the players on the court if they’re all black, but would be almost 100% certain to notice if all, or even a large majority, of the players were white).

What “identity politics,” so-called, has done is to slowly and painfully and partially transform being a white man in America into a marked category.  And makes a lot of the people who have become white men rather than members of society’s invisible default category very uncomfortable.  And when people get very uncomfortable, they often get mad at whoever they blame for making them feel that way.  And then they vote for Donald Trump.

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/03/marking-unmarked-category

(LGM is a superb blog and you should read it daily)

Trivial news

On By Paul HubbardIn Random1 Comment

Uncle Seiko makes decent straps.

My friend has a epic cool home hacking setup.

I got a Motiv fitbit ring… works well so far.

Here’s a beach volleyball game, middling effort:

Life goes on!

Lastly a two part scale for bad watches, from the WPAC 2019 thread.

A story in two posts

On By Paul HubbardIn Humor, WatchesLeave a comment

I adore a great rant and this one is right up there. Here’s the setup: WPAC, the Watch Purchasing Abstinence Club, is a group of watch addicts trying to help each other wasting money. One of the recurring conversations is that a member posts a prospective watch and the others ritually insult it. This is my favorite so far.

For context, a cyclops is a piece of watch crystal shaped to magnify the date. Rolex pioneered and still uses them, but many dislike a cyclops due to the distorting effects and occlusion of the dial.

Sometimes the bashing is good, and sometimes it’s this good.

Had to share. Thread is here… enjoy.

Progress in audio localization

On By Paul HubbardIn RandomLeave a comment

So years ago in grad school at UNM, I worked on audio localization. My work was on the idea of doing the convolution (applying the filter to the audio) in the wavelet domain, to extend the results from a phd student in the group. My results were poor, read about them on this page.

Then this week I saw this on Gear Patrol:

Via Gear Patrol

The reviews are mixed, but the really impressive part is less obvious – you use your phone camera and it uses photogrammetry to derive the geometry of your head and pinnae, and from that it creates a personal HRTF that it loads into the finger-sized gadget:

Image from https://us.sxfi.com

Damn. Deriving an HRTF from just a couple of pictures? As opposed to anechoic chambers and KEMAR heads?

NIST via howstuffworks

I’m sorely tempted to buy one just to see how well it works. At $160 is a bit much for an impulse buy though.

It’s really cool to see similar work, with a big chunk of progress plus some really new and clever ideas added. This version is USB, so Android/desktop, but they do have a Bluetooth version in the works that’d work with my phone.