Romeo and Juliet

I went to see SF Ballet's production of Romeo and Juliet on Friday night. This was a 'complete' experience with a fantastic score, expressive choreography and an elaborate set and costumes. The score, by Prokofiev, is rich enough to just listen to alone. I recall vividly the first time I heard a section of it. In a crackling super-low fidelity ShortWave radio broadcast from 'Radio Moscow'. It was rich and dramatic sounding, I had to learn more about this music which was bouncing off the ionosphere traversing continents to reach me. Michael Tilson Thomas arranged a suite and recorded it with the SF Symphony, highly recommended.

The choreography struck me as classical ballet with modern touches (usually in the form of allowing some torso bending here and there). At one point, to demonstrate shared excitement through gesture, 2 of the dancers jumped up in the air to give each other the 'high five' (very contemporary !).

The performance looked sold out. The only floor level seat that I could get was off on the side (see photo). I prefer floor level seating because it allows me the best view of the dancers use of elevation. The seats at higher levels give a better view of the choreography and better acoustics from the orchestra, but for me it's mostly about the individual dancers so floor level it is.

I wish I could have taken (non-flash) pictures of the actual performance. Which leads me back to my main peeve about the 'old arts establishment'. In my humble opinion, they ought to get with modern times or continue to die a self-strangled death as their patrons slowly fade away. So.... I cannot point you to any exciting and interesting pictures of the performance on a photo sharing site because it's not allowed.

Earlier in the day I heard a podcast interview with Principal Dancer Maria Kochetkova. At one point the interviewer brought up the fact that she is on Twitter. Every time he asked a question about her 'tweeting' habits he and the audience could not suppress laughter because it sounded so funny (i.e. foreign and unknown). I'll grant SFBallet that they now have stuff up on YouTube and that there's a company Blog and an official Twitter account. But I think the next step is to relax the tight control and to allow patrons themselves to capture and relate their excitement about the SFBallet scene with their own media taken from their own point of view.

Socially evolved or not, I'm really looking forward to their next season !

Donked

My sister from Minnesota visited recently and I asked her if people 'donk' their cars around where she lives. She had never heard of the term before and had not noticed any cars matching the general description that I gave her.

I was tooling around enjoying the return to bicycle errand running the other day and noticed this car in the first stages of getting donked. It's got oversized wheels and a raised suspension to match.

Sis, here you go....

This is Wrong

This last Sunday's New York Times Magazine contained a full page AmericanAirlines advertisement that lept out at me immediately. .

It's so WRONG !

You see, above the bold heading 'BEIJING' is a picture of Southern Chinese Lion Dancers. The Lion Dancers from BeiJing would be in a completely different style of costume whose appearance is dominated by long shiny silky golden hair. What were they (not) thinking, whoever put this ad together ?

A similar U.S. Folk Art mistranslation might be to consider an Appalachian Folk Singer to be interchangeable with a Mississippi Delta Blues Singer. Well, why not, they're both Singing Americans with Guitars, right ? WRONG !

I shouldn't be so difficult though. I'm sure that in some Chinese newspaper somewhere, there are Travel Advertisements beckoning the new moneyed classes to come visit Seattle and see the Mardi Gras :-)

Man Made Artificial Cloud

The other day, I caught sight of a Cloud created from atmospheric condensation released by a factory across the bay. Here's a snapshot !

Solar Powered Silence

I was shopping around for a pair of headphones to use at home and for no particular reason I decided to try 'active noise canceling' headphones. Headphones that have microphones to pick up external sounds and circuitry to invert these external waveforms and play them through the headphones in effect 'canceling' the outside noise.

I had no idea what to expect as far as how much external noise would be removed. I was disappointed at first to learn that not ALL of the external noise was eliminated, but it was clear that the deeper low frequency sounds were filtered out pretty well. At my office I'm located next to an air conditioned room full of hardware, the muffled sound from the well insulated room never really bothered me but after getting these headphones (Sennheiser PXC 450) I was amazed at how much of a difference the 'extra silence' could make. At home I've become aware of just how much noise my desktop computer fan puts out. Now that I've experienced the refreshing effects of auditory quiet, I can't go back.

Silence is Golden, but it comes at a price. The headphone's sound wave generating circuit is powered by a single AAA battery. I've been powering the headphones with rechargeable Nickle-Metal-Hydride batteries which keeps the cost down.
I'd recently noticed that with the prices of Solid State Solar Electricity Generating Cells coming down, that a small battery charger could be had for under $20. I decided to get one to use for charging the batteries that power the headphones.

I did some quick but very conservative calculations to get an idea of how long it would take to 'earn back' the cost of the charger when compared to using AAA alkaline batteries.

Here goes:

A Duracell AAA Alkaline battery has a listed capacity of 1150 mAh.

Cheap bulk AAA batteries can be had for about $0.50 each.

Assume that an AAA NiMH 700 mAh cell costs $2 and can be recharged 200 times.
That puts the cost of the NiMH battery at $0.01 per use.

That means that the savings per Alkaline cell is:
1 1150 mAH Alkaline @ $0.50 - 2 (700 mAH NiMH use @ $0.01) = $0.48

So we'll get back the cost of the charger in:
$20.00 charger price / $0.48 savings * 2 NiMH cells = 83 AAA NiMH cells

The charger charges 2 AAA cells at a time so it will take ~42 charging sessions to charge 83 cells

To charge a pair of NiMH cells conservatively will take about:
1600 mAh (some current wasted) / 120 mA (average charging current) / 6 hours sunlight =
2.2 days

Since not all days are sunny, we'll say that we can charge 2 sets = 4 batteries per week.

That makes the time to recoup the cost of the charger at:

83 cells / 4 cells per week = 21 weeks or 1/2 year.


1/2 year to pay back the cost of the charger.

Not too bad.

1st Day Back !

My long awaited return to Ballet class has finally come to pass to today.

How sweet it is to be back in (e)motion !

Naturally, I could only do the physically easier 1/2 of the class warmups and exercises and could only 'mark' (step through and not really dance) the dance portions, but it is great to be back into the swing of things.

"Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder"

Truth in Rechargeable Battery Advertising

Like most of us, I use a number of battery powered devices in daily life. When I started saving spent cells for proper disposal and saw how many of them were being tossed I became concerned. I wanted to cut down on the waste.

In the past I had used Nickle Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries with a cheap charger. As the charge cycle is not 100% chemically reversible the batteries age. Eventually a battery goes bad and perhaps 1 of 4 batteries is no longer chargeable, but which one ? The charger that I had was really cheap and would only charge in pairs or quadruples. This made trying to find the bad battery(s) in a batch very time consuming.

Time for a new charger. After a bit of investigation I settled on the 'Maha MH-C9000' Charger Analyzer. This device has 4 independent charging circuits so each battery essentially has its own individual charger.
The real usefulness of the device is that has more functions that just charging: Charge, Refresh, Breakin, Discharge.

Charge:
allows you to set the input current, you can do a high current fast charge or a more battery life friendly slow charge.

Refresh:
does a voltage based charge-discharge-charge cycle in which you get to choose the charge and discharge currents. When finished the total capacity of the battery found during discharge is reported so that you know how much energy the battery will hold at that point in it's life cycle.

Breakin:
does a very slow time based charge discharge charge cycle recommended for new uncharged batteries.

Discharge:
will drain the battery (I haven't had cause to use this yet).

So with the MH-C9000 there is no more guessing about the state of your batteries. Doing periodic Refresh cycles you can see what each battery's capacity is over time and watch its decline (I do a Refresh about every 10 recharges and the slower Breakin about every 30 recharge cycles). When a battery has ceased to be useful, this charger will refuse to charge it and will indicate to you that it has refused.

I decided to measure the capacity of each battery to compare against the capacity stated on the label by the manufacturer. I've done that for a number of new batteries and the results are interesting.
See the graph above (hand drawn, the old fashioned way).

For a given set of new batteries, I averaged the measured capacity and graphed the percentage deviation from the labeled capacity with negative percentage on the Y axis thus the higher the bar the WORSE the battery. I arbitrarily picked -10% as the GOOD/BAD cutoff point. The GOOD green bars are less than 10% below labelled capacity, the BAD red bars exceed that.

Based on this small sample size, one interesting trend is shown:

The 'Name' Brands tended to be truer to advertised claims than the less well known names.

Most notably, the Radio Shack 700 (the green battery on the left in the graph picture) showed an average capacity of 726mAh which is HIGHER than the 700mAh on its label.

The biggest joke was the visually screaming red and black 'CTA 1200' (the red battery on the right in the graph picture) which yielded an average 389mAh, that's a whopping -68% less than what its label says !

Radio Shack is not known for premium quality electronics but what it does have is warranty support and deep pockets (the U.S. is, after all, a place in which if you were to order a Coke but instead are served a Pepsi, the place that mis-served you is seriously liable).

The next place 'truth in advertising' runners up are both 'Imedion' batteries from Maha. As Maha is the manufacturer of the MH-C9000 it's fitting that their batteries have trustworthy labels !

The Good

AAA Radio Shack 700 actual 726 + 3.8 %
AAA Imedion 800 actual 800 0.0 %
AA Imedion 2100 actual 2070 - 1.4 %
AA Kodak 2100 actual 2038 - 3.0 %
AAA Sanyo 1000 actual 962 - 3.8 %
AA Kodak 2500 actual 2332 - 6.7 %


The Bad and Pretty

AA Nexcell 2700 actual 2291 -15 %
AA Accupower 2900 actual 2281 -21 %
AAA Nexcell 1000 actual 623 -38 %
AAA CTA 1200 actual 389 -68 %