If you're looking for some reading matter to ease you into loudspeaker design and construction, do not buy Vance Dickason's famous, though now out of print, Loudspeaker Design Cookbook. Even getting a pirated PDF of it is not a great idea. This is because the Design Cookbook is for people who already know what they're doing - its subtitle is "Everything you Need to Become a Better Speaker Designer", emphasis mine. You're going to have to learn about Thiele/Small parameters and some other technical stuff at some point if you're building most kinds of multi-driver and ported loudspeaker, but there are several kinds of speaker you can build without doing anything beyond basic arithmetic.
There are a ton of books about speaker design, most of which I've never read, so maybe I'm about to suggest you go in a non-optimal direction. But the best book I have read on the subject is V.A. Capel's An Introduction to Loudspeakers and Enclosure Design, which is also out of print but can still be had cheaply on Amazon and on eBay (there are local Australian and UK sellers!UK sellers!).
An Introduction to Loudspeakers and Enclosure Design does what it says on the tin, and includes detailed instructions for building one of those single-cheap-driver transmission-line speakers I'm so keen on. If you build it according to the instructions you'll end up with a folded transmission line with ceramic-tile reflectors on the corners; I'm pretty sure just making the reflectors out of wood wouldn't significantly hurt performance.
There's a whole subsection of the audiophile world - both the empirical and the woo-woo side - devoted to single-driver speakers, and such a speaker is a really good option for your first speaker project.
A solidly constructed box with a single cheap driver can sound remarkably good, especially if the speakers are close to the listener, even though the responseplot reports high treble and low bass are missing, presumed dead, and the midrange response looks like a Worms battlefield.
Loony-audiophile supply houses stand ready to relieve you of extraordinary amounts of money for Fostex or Tannoy drivers...
(Image source: Flickr user drosen7900. More about these speakers here.)
...but now that few people use CRT monitors and TVs, you can build your own computer or hi-fi/home-theatre speakers without even bothering to use magnetically shielded drivers. Any dirt-cheap paper-cone wideranges, or multi-driver round or oval car speakers (which are not strictly speaking single drivers, but can sound good just the same) will do.
And for your first project, all you need is a sealed box, the bigger the better, with one hole in the front that roughly fits a single driver. You will probably need to be able to solder, but not a lot of work is involved, and what work you do have to do can be quite sloppy and still give a perfectly functional result. (Think of it as the Roman Army knife of loudspeakers!)
Oh, and on the subject of very heavy speaker cabinets: What do you do if you've already got some speakers, but you want their cabinets to be less resonant?
A commenter on yesterday's post about glass-fibre speaker-box lagging lamented that he can't get loudspeaker kits in the States.
He is wrong. There are definitely speaker-kit sellers in the States. Probably quite a few of them, given the much larger market. (Australian population: 23 million. US population: 314 million.)
I think the biggest name in US speaker kits (do feel free to correct me in the comments) is Parts Express, mostly under their in-house "Dayton" brand. There was a Dayton driver...
Parts Express sell everything you need to make speakers of your own design, and have a reasonable selection of kits, too. Their speaker-kit listing is here; prices are quite good, especially given that most of the kits have enclosures that are veneered or otherwise nicely finished.
This super-cheap Parts Express kit comes with only bare plywood boxes, but it's two little 2-way speakers for $US128 with free US delivery! For some reason the kit lacks binding posts and wire, but you can get those for a few bucks more; if you're really pinching pennies, buy those parts on eBay from China.
(Oddly, absolutely nobody seems to sell speaker kits on eBay. I wonder if that's because of the awkwardness of shipping all that wood.)
Note that these little speakers aren't really "bookshelf" speakers, because they have a port on the back, and if you plug the port by pushing it up against a wall, your bass will go away. You certainly can put them on a bookshelf, but you can't push them all the way in like a book.
...and regrettably also out of stock, but how can you not want them!?
Back here in Australia, the inventively named "The Loud Speaker Kit", makers of all the kit speakers I've reviewed, is now out of business. I'm not an authority on other Australian speaker-kit places, but I know of a few.
Peninsula Home Theatre have some rather expensive options (their prices are per speaker, not per pair...), but the drivers are high-quality and the boxes are very nicely finished.
Danish Sound Technology have kits, but you have to contact them for prices, which is not a good sign.
The Fountek "Signature Series" kits look good for the money, though.
ER Audio has electrostatic-speaker kits, which are all very expensive, but that's because electrostatic loudspeakers are awesome. (They're hideously incompatible with cats and small children, though.)
VAF Research sell kit versions of at least some of their speakers, too, but they're very high-end so their kits cost thousands as well.
At one time or another I think all of the Australian chain electronics stores - Altronics, Dick Smith, Jaycar and possibly even Tandy (Radio Shack in the States, amalgamated with Dick Smith now in Australia) - have offered speaker kits. At the moment I think only Jaycar have them, and they've only got one.
...some very nice European-driver loudspeakers for $AU698 all up, which is quite good value.
You could save a little by only buying the electronics and building your own cabinets. Many "speaker kit" dealers work this way - they sell "short form" kits, giving you everything but the boxes. In Australia, people who sell these kinds of kits include Soundlabs Group and Stones Sound Studio, the latter dealer continuing the proud association between... untidy... Web-site design and audiophilewoo-woo. (They also sell the Fountek kits mentioned above.)
Making your own enclosures isn't actually all that hard, by the way; I did it when I was a teenager. If you're a DIYer without a table saw, you just go to a place that sells wood-sheet products and get them to cut some MDF to size for you. Note that they will probably only do cuts all the way across the sheet (or what remains of the sheet after previous cuts), so it can be a bit of a puzzle to get all the parts you want out of the minimum number of sheets. This lets you have unusual finishes on your speakers, though; any material you can use for a kitchen counter, for instance, you can use for a speaker.
Anyway, you get the panels made, then assemble the boxes at home with simple screws 'n' glue and ugly butt joints (proper woodworkers of course use mitre joints). You can jigsaw the holes for the drivers; it doesn't matter if the holes aren't perfectly round, because the driver surround will cover them.
(When I was about 15, I cut my own box panels freehand with a jigsaw from a sheet of super-cheap particle board, and then plugged the gaps where the wood didn't quite touch with Blu-Tack!)
Taking the further step of building your own speakers from scratch isn't that hard, either, especially if you build simple sealed boxes. Doing it entirely yourself is also the only way to get some unusual speaker designs, like corner-loaded horns and transmission lines, at an affordable price.
Transmission lines are one of my favourite loudspeaker types. You make a tall hollow square wooden tube, or reduce the size by folding the tube and putting periscope-type sound-reflecting angled pieces on the corners. The drivers go at the top in the front, there's a port at the bottom at the back, with lagging material all the way down the tube so very little sound actually makes it out of the back. Even if the driver you use is a paper-cone widerange from a junkyard car, the result will often be quite startlingly good, even though the frequency-response plot will look dreadful.
There's no good way to get low bass out of this design without making it really big, though - I once made some folded transmission lines with eight-inch whizzer-cone wideranges in them, and they still didn't have really low bass, but were serious pieces of furniture. So if that matters to you and you don't want the speakers to dominate the room a bit, you'll need a subwoofer as well.
Building your own cabinets also lets you massively over-build the cabinets, for near-zero panel resonance. The easiest way is to use super-thick wood and many braces inside, but you can also make a double-walled design filled with sand, cement or even lead shot, or line the panels with lead sheet. Many super-expensive speakers have cabinets like this, but retailers hate them; do-it-yourself lets you have super-cabinets with affordably-priced drivers in them.
I'm sure some readers know of other speaker-kit outfits; I only mentioned Parts Express in the States, but I'm sure there are more options there and in other countries. I invite people living elsewhere to comment.
And heck, we don't even have to be talking about only kit speakers. Do tell if you know of pre-built speakers that offer similar value for money, like those white-van speakers sold for fair prices on eBay I wrote about a while ago.
...and was very impressed with the information provided.
Is it true that glass fibre batts in speakers can cause mesothelioma? I noticed you linked to the Wikipedia mesothelioma page when discussing polyester and glass fibre batts with the word "carcinogenic".
Bailey
A ported speaker with glass-fibre wadding inside (it's there to dampen internal resonances) will spit little bits of fibreglass out of its ports in normal use. The cancer risk from these is essentially nil, mainly because the amount of glass emitted is very small. But even larger glass-fibre exposures are generally less dangerous than asbestos exposure, and there's some debate about why this is.
Fibreglass and asbestos are mechanically, and somewhat chemically, similar. Glass-fibre, like window glass, is about three-quarters silicon dioxide (quartz), with the rest being additives, chiefly oxides of light metals, to reduce the glass's melting point and improve its strength and/or chemical properties. All forms of asbestos are essentially silicate minerals too, but with different elements mixed in with the silicon and oxygen.
The most common form of asbestos is the white "serpentine" kind, which is magnesium silicate. Blue and brown "amphibole" asbestos are closer to window-glass, being complicated sodium, magnesium and iron silicate minerals.
Asbestos is so particularly nasty (and useful) because its fibres can be very, very fine, routinely below twenty micrometres (or microns) in diameter, and even down to small fractions of a micrometre, versus around 100 micrometres for a human hair. These ultra-fine fibres are too small to even see, and bits of them can float around in the air waiting to be inhaled. This is why they tent whole buildings and put workers in moon-suits to do asbestos abatement; building materials that contain asbestos can be safe to be near, but as soon as you start busting those materials up, they can produce dangerous and invisible dust.
Fibreglass, also known as glass wool, is made in a similar way to fairy floss ("cotton candy", in the USA); extrusion of the molten material through tiny nozzles. The nozzle size determines the thickness of the filaments, so glass fibres can quite easily be made down to single-digit-micron thickness. As is the case for many other "whisker" materials, most of the desirable physical qualities of the fibres increase as the thickness drops. (This is explored in some detail in J.E. Gordon's classic "The New Science of Strong Materials, or Why You Don't Fall through the Floor", a book that I may not have mentioned on this site for as much as eight or nine minutes.)
This electron micrograph of dust from the wreckage of the World Trade Center (via the USGS) shows a thin glass fibre and a bundle of much thinner asbestos fibres.
(Nobody performed full asbestos abatement on the WTC towers while they were standing, because it would have been very expensive, the asbestos was largely safely bound up in building materials, and nobody expected the buildings to fall down.)
Glass fibres down in the single-digit-micron diameter range are a cancer risk, like asbestos, but glass fibre in general seems to be rather less carcinogenic than asbestos fibres of similar dimensions. Nobody's exactly sure why. Glass fibres don't seem to get stuck in the lungs like asbestos fibres do; this could be purely because of the size difference, or because they don't have the same rough, almost barbed sides...
...as many asbestos fibres (that's another USGS picture).
Glass is also slightly soluble in water, and - it is theorised - fibres in the lungs can thus be slowly eliminated via blood or sputum. For macroscopic objects the water-solubility of glass is essentially zero; you can run water through a glass tube in a laboratory for years with no visible change, and you don't need to worry about rain wearing through your windows. But the thinner the fibres, the greater will be the surface area of those fibres relative to their volume. So even extremely slight solubility can, the theory goes, get rid of the fibres usefully quickly.
It's important to realise that we're not just talking about cancer, here. Most people with asbestos-related lung disease don't have mesothelioma; they've got "asbestosis", a non-cancerous inflammatory disease which can, nonetheless, very effectively destroy your quality of life and in extreme cases kill you. Again, it's the super-fine fibres of asbestos that make it particularly nasty here, but you can get similar syndromes by inhaling various other particulate substances that get stuck in your lungs, like coal dust, and also little bits of fibreglass.
Realistically, even someone who stuffs fibreglass into speaker boxes for a living, without so much as a face mask, isn't at a huge risk of lung disease - cancer, or "just" an asbestosis-like condition. Usually it's people like surfboard manufacturers or insulation installers who get sick, and then only if they don't use a respirator while they're sanding boards or stuffing insulation batts into unventilated roof or floor cavities.
So if you've got ported speakers with fibreglass in them, don't worry about it. Even if you open the speakers up to replace a blown crossover or something, you're in no real danger. (And if you've got un-ported, sealed "infinite baffle" speakers, there is of course even less risk.)
...as the normal low-cost anti-resonance speaker-lagging material...
...some time ago, but I think the change was mainly because these fibres are easier to cut and place, and not a prickly skin irritant, rather than for health reasons.
Incidentally, white asbestos and talc, as in talcum powder and...
..."French chalk", are chemically the same, both magnesium silicate. Asbestos can metamorphose into talc, though I'm not sure if talc can go the other way. In any case, industrial-grade talc can be expected to contain some asbestos-like filaments.
This fact caused a certain amount of panic among people who've applied talcum powder liberally to their baby, or discovered that standard children's wax crayons contained a small amount of talc, which in turn did or did not contain - depending on who you asked - a tiny amount of actual identifiable asbestos.
(Some people went so far as to allege that because they're chemically the same, talcum powder is asbestos. By this logic, it should be easy to drive nails with a Brillo pad. But have no fear, highly independent thinkers stand ready to help you remove asbestos from your spine with magnets!)
In response to this, more than a decade ago the big-brand crayon formulations were changed to contain no talc. How crayon-talc was supposed to get into kids' lungs in the first place, I'm not sure. Embedding asbestos in wax strikes me as an excellent way of rendering the stuff harmless, even when kids stick crayons up their noses. Perhaps some asbestos could lodge in the digestive tract if they ate it, but I think the normal regeneration of the gut lining would carry it away. Unless you actually lit a crayon fire, I doubt any significant exposure was even theoretically possible.
The asbestos-in-talcum-powder scare was more rational, because people unquestionably do inhale some talcum powder when they use the product in normal everyday ways. There's a difference between bulk industrial talc and the super-fine stuff used for talcum powder, though. Major talcum-powder companies hotly protested that there was no asbestos in their talc at all.
It's rational to take at least some care to prevent you or your baby from inhaling talcum powder, because, as discussed above, inhaling fine insoluble powders in general is a bad idea. But there doesn't seem to be any serious reason to boycott the product entirely.
(There's also a popular belief that laser-printer or photocopier toner is deadly poisonous if inhaled. Actually, toner is just yet another insoluble fine powder. So, once again, you should avoid inhaling it if you can, and wear an appropriate mask if you have chronic exposure to it. But there's no need to panic if you snort a little of the stuff by accident.)
I wondered whether yesterday's rant might win me some angry accusations of being anti-American. It hasn't really, yet. But do allow me to clarify just the same.
Which, clearly, is far from being what all Americans believe...
...but which, like certain other works, does exemplify what many of us foreigners find objectionable about the USA.
More specifically, I have a problem with many of the USA's domestic and foreign policies and actions, because they do a lot of harm to both American people and the rest of the world. These policies do not, of course, all grow out of the above-depicted conviction that the USA really is God's own country. A stronger factor is that the USA is powerful enough to do terrible things outside its borders, and the USA's government/corporate rulers are powerful enough to do terrible things inside its borders, which I'm sure any number of other countries would also do, given the chance.
The most important part of my objection, which is particularly brought to mind by that incredibly jingoistic movie, is based around the horrifying fact that an awful lot of the world's leaders - certainly not just the American ones - are clearly guilty of war crimes, most notably crimes against peace. Many of these leaders have gone on national television to boast of their war-making achievements, after previously going on TV to persuade the populace to support a new war in the time-honoured fashion.
Major war crimes, of which crimes against peace are the very worst, are the only offenses which I think actually should carry the death penalty. Preferably with those sentencing the offender to death putting their own lives on the line - if the offender turns out to have been innocent, the judge and/or jury are executed. (This'd pretty much solve the USA's own death-penalty problems, don't you think?)
Anybody who drapes a patriotic flag over war crimes is an enemy of humanity, and the higher you go in various nations' governments, the more this happens, and the less forgivably. Random yahoos who believe God sent George W. Bush are one thing; if you honestly think Saddam was responsible for 9/11 then you sadden me, but I don't think you should be punished for being ignorant and/or gullible. But people like Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara knew exactly what they were doing.
(It has long been my opinion that we should offer John Howard lifetime imprisonment instead of execution in exchange for his testimony against Cheney and Bush. I also find it difficult to argue against just assassinating a bunch of these guys. Everybody knows they're never going to see the inside of a courtroom, and they made speeches and published books proudly declaring their guilt, so I think it's pretty cut and dried, don't you?)
Movies about tankcrews and fighter pilots and Special Forces badasses can be horrifying and entertaining, both at the same time in the very best examples. But I find it unnerving that the USA now gets in wars so interminable that books, movies and video games about those wars exist while the war's still going on. We've now given up on waiting a few years after the end of the war before turning it into entertainment products, for the sake of common human decency. Nowadays the wars are on abstractconcepts or thingseverybodylikes, and there's no particular prospect of matters improving until all of the USA's arable land blows away into the ocean and the US dollar falls to about one jiao.
On a marginally happier note, here are some more good-war-movie recommendations, all about events that happened a decorously long time ago.
Clint Eastwood's siblingfilmsFlags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima are extraordinary. The second is a brutal war movie about the Japanese soldiers trying to hold Iwo Jima in 1945; the first is about the American side of the story, with a heavy emphasis on the patriotic-bullshit factory a few American Iwo Jima heroes find themselves working in.
If you haven't heard of it, that ought to give you the idea.
Act of Valor features elite US soldiers playing themselves, and has the whole-hearted backing of the US military. Who, with their usual deftness, have once again managed to create propaganda that causes foreign viewers to cheer whenever one of the Americans in the movie gets shot.
Us foreigners aren't the target market for this film, of course. Young American men are. The purpose of Act of Valor is to get kids to enlist, and join the Warrior Brotherhood That Always Does The Right Thing No Matter The Cost and if you think that sounds hokey then you're not going to enjoy this movie's script. The stuff in between the firefights is sufficiently painful to watch that I'm glad I didn't pay to see this movie. It might justify a two-dollar rental fee.
I'd heard about this film, so I was expecting jingoistic bullshit with awesome action scenes, and that's pretty much what I got. Spoilers follow, but the plot's so formulaic that it's almost impossible to spoil. The Expendables is a plot-twisting masterpiece compared with Act of Valor.
(The Expendables also has more laughs. It is impossible not to enjoy Terry Crews' shotgun as much as he does.)
The great problem you have if you're making a movie about how US Special Forces badasses keep Americans safe from terrible people is that US Special Forces badasses almost never actually do that. They may keep other soldiers safe, and they may do nifty headline stuff like finally allegedly killing Osama Bin Laden (it's weird to me that there's so little interest from the conspiracy-theory types about how no actual public evidence that they really killed Osama was ever presented...). But guys like this can only actually directly protect civilian Americans if someone comes to America to attack those civilians.
Which hasn't happened for rather a while.
The US national-security bureaucracy and its various allied "terrorism experts" insist that there are many terrible plots that they have thwarted, and would no doubt make thrilling movies, but they can't tell us about any of them for reasons of national security. After Obama promised the "most transparent" administration in history, he has continued, and expanded, the Bush policies of classifying every document in sight and refusing Freedom Of Information requests because they're asking for "state secrets" (or giving you a document with everythingredacted, or just lying and saying the requested document doesn't exist). The reason why you can't see the document, or learn about the many serious terror plots, is as secret as the documents and plots themselves. Even documents that are already public can now be retroactively re-secret-ised, which is a bit of an own goal as it lets the public see how innocuous classified documents now often are.
So sure, maybe a great and secret war is being waged against terrorists, or evil aliens, or demonic Nazisfrom the moon; who can say? I'd feel much happier if I could think that this is a good explanation of why the only thwarted plots that're ever made public are so totally lame.
You know the ones. FBI informant or agent encourages idiots to consider terrorist attack. FBI agent or informant provides plan. FBI agent provides fake explosive. FBI arrests freshly-minted "terrorists". Meanwhile, the TSA spends a lot of money and pisses off a lot of people and catchesno terrorists at all. But they've got a big old list of people who are so dangerous they shouldn't be allowed on a plane, and also so cunning that no evidence to justify their arrest can be found; clearly, this system is for your own good, citizen!
Back in the real world, as I've written before, if you actually have a domestic terrorism problem, you damn well know about it. The USA does not have such a problem. So it's a little difficult to come up with an enemy for the brave soldiers in Act of Valor to fight.
Worse yet for the poor scriptwriters, if the bad guys actually managed to get across the US border, then deploying Special Forces badasses to kill them is illegal, unless you declare martial law. If you want to make a movie about that then the enemy has to be aliens or North Korea, aliens of course being by far the more probable.
You can get away with deploying soldiers within the borders of your non-totalitarian country if those soldiers are building sandbag walls in a flood or protecting black children from racist idiots in 1954. But just whacking dudes in the street while the police stand there slack-jawed remains, for some reason, unacceptable, even if the dudes being whacked are Muslims.
If I were writing the film I'd just set it in Ficteeonistan and have our heroes striking terrorist training camps or something, but I suppose even 18-year-old American boys must by now have noticed that people trained in such places only ever go on to kill Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, not in Florida. So the poor Act of Valor scriptwriters had to come up with a threat that was almost at home. You know, not at home quite yet, but... heading in that direction.
So in Act of Valor, you've got these Filipino Muslim suicide bombers. (Total Muslim suicide bombings in the Philippines since 9/11, and possibly ever: One. Total Christian suicide bombings: Also one - possibly accidental. The Philippines have seen quite a lot of other bombs - generally used by Muslims against Christians - but no bomb-vests to speak of.)
Act of Valor has two main bad guys, one a cartoonishly evil hardcore Chechen jihadi and the other a wealthy, vaguely Bond-villain-ish international drug smuggler who, for no reason other than that they've known each other for a long time, is cooperating with this other guy who wants to blow up a bunch of Americans. Perhaps the drug smuggler reckons that having the US populace stuck at home terrified of going out and getting blown up will... increase demand for cocaine...?
Anyway, the drug dude decides to lie low for a while because he's discovered the CIA are after him, but he doesn't mind if his known associate goes on to become Public Enemy Number Minus Ten Million for the entire population of the USA, because how bad could that be?
Bang bang bang, blah blah blah, this soldier's wife's got a baby on the way, gee I hope he doesn't suffer a glorious and honourable death in the single most clichéd way any soldier can do that, and now the suicide bombers are going to be smuggled into the USA through tunnels created and controlled by Mexican drug smugglers. Who for some reason go along with the plan, too, because Catholic dope-dealers who want a lightly-guarded and porous US border have so much in common with Islamist terrorists who want to turn the USA into a full-blown police state.
Being charitable, one presumes the Mexicans don't know what the stuff being smuggled into the States through their tunnels is. If they did, then they'd be the ones killing all the jihadis, and the Special Forces badasses could stay at home.
The good guys go on to stop the bad guys in a series of really quite good action scenes that kind of look like a few rounds of Call of Duty 9. Along the way, various soldiers playing themselves have to read lines that would drop to the floor like lumps of lead even if Daniel Day-Lewis read them. And then the credits roll.
(The acting of the soldiers-playing-themselves really is dire. This script would always do a miserable job of establishing characters, but... is acting really that hard? They're playing themselves, not King Lear. But never mind; just fast-forward through the talking, definitely through any of the talking when they're wearing civilian clothes, and you'll miss nothing. I find that this technique also turns Revenge of the Sith into a pretty good movie.)
Act of Valor contains a strange mixture of what I presume is pretty authentic military equipment and procedures, and action-movie clichés. Explosions, for instance, tend toward the Hollywood ball-of-fire, and everybody who gets shot, except one dude at the end, dies instantly, unless they are American. And a digital SLR camera with a consumer zoom lens on it somehow takes useful pictures of people miles away, and, more importantly, makes that motor-film-wind noise when it does it, even though most of the target market of young men who want to kill people have never even touched a film camera.
There are also a lot of beepy computer noises and moving-box special effects involved with the use of drones and other high-tech cameras. And a Binocular Shot or two.
The thing that stood out most for me, though, was that nobody, goodie or baddie, ever seems to question the core of the head terrorist's plot, which is that a bunch of high-powered suicide vests blowing up in major American cities will somehow cripple the whole country.
So... you Americans are pussies compared with Englishmen, right?
Because Londoners were famously stoic even when a whole country was trying to bomb them flat every damn night. Or, for a more recent version, England didn't turn a hair when the IRA kept shooting people and blowing stuff up. But suicide-bomb the Mall of America and the Precious Moments Chapel and watch the US... economy... crash... for some reason.
But heck, maybe it would. An awful lot of Americans just sort of lost their minds on 9/11, and many still haven't come back, despite the fact that Americans have to invade countries on the other side of the world to find some more foreign terrorists with an interest in attacking them. Perhaps a bunch of suicide bombers would be just what's needed to finish off the freedom and justice that are supposed to be the USA's hallmarks.
It's a weird sort of... aggressive cowardice. The USA is now so afraid of any terrorist attack or shooting spree that anything with flashing lights on it is treated as a city-paralysing bomb, drawing a picture of a gun gets you suspended from school, and half the country will take your side if you work yourself up into a hysterical frenzy over sharing a plane with some foreigners.
I wonder if the absence of actual domestic terrorists has something to do with the USA's ongoing erosion of human rights. If you'll cut down every law in the land to get at the devil, but there's not actually a devil out there to catch, you'll keep cutting down laws, and making publically acknowledgedhitlists, and imprisoning people indefinitely without charges or trial... forever. There's no end-point.
What really blows my mind is that many of the people who're happy to trade any amount of freedom for alleged security against these un-detectable threats and abstractconcepts, and who want to add "except for Muslims" to a surprising number of laws, also say that the US firearms death toll is an acceptable trade-off for the right to bear arms.
Six Three thousand people died in the 9/11 attacks.
An easy ten thousand a year die in firearm homicides in the USA.
That's unfortunate, say firearms enthusiasts, but it's the price of that right.
Well, yeah.
And the price of not groping, X-raying and partially undressing people getting on a plane is that people will be able to get on a plane with a Swiss Army knife, or a steak knife, or even a gun. But, as has been demonstrated on the numerous occasions when the TSA have failed to prevent someone carrying a gun onto a plane, that doesn't matter at all unless that person actually decides to use the gun, which they almost certainly won't, because the USA does not actually have a domestic terrorism problem.
(Exactly how many weapons the TSA has failed to stop people carrying onto planes is of course unknown. What we do know is that nobody's hijacked any planes with them. We also know that nobody could, since the universal assumption now made of any plane hijackers is not that they just want the plane flown to Cuba, but that they intend to kill themselves and everyone else on board. It doesn't matter if they smuggle light machine guns onto the plane now; when the hijackers have to change ammo belts, the remaining half of the passengers will beat them to death with their bare hands.)
And yet, according to many of the people who say ten thousand homicides a year is just the price of firearms freedom, no imposition on people's rights in the name of the War on Terror (or Drugs) is too great. Because invisible Islamists are lurking everywhere. And you, yes YOU, could be one of the incredible badasses that are all that's standing between Us and Them!
God, listen to me rabbiting on. As a reward for making it this far, here are some movies you can watch that are sort of like this one, except good.
Jarhead; not much action, but that's actually very much the point of the film.
Generation Kill; bleak, funny, actually realistic, and featuring one Marine playing himself who can actually act.
The actual documentaryRestrepo, which has a fair bit of shootin' in it, and allows soldiers to be honest about why they're doing what they're doing, even if their answer is "fucked if I know!"
I watched Act of Valor yesterday. Today I watched The Godfather, because I'd never seen it.
The Godfather is about family, and honour, and power, and killing. So is Act of Valor, and I found the comparison instructive.
I have heard on the worksite (construction; I'm working through college as a part-time fetcher and carrier) that if a power line falls, or someone drives a crane into power lines...
...you should move away from the danger site by taking tiny little steps, or even jumps with your feet together.
But I have also heard that I need to go somewhere and ask for a bucket of compressed air, or a "long weight", or a box of right-handed pipe elbows, on account of we only got left-handed ones here.
Is the pogo away from the power line thing just another way to make people look stupid? Doesn't the electricity get grounded into the... ground?
Jay
Oddly enough, this is actually good advice. It may not be necessary in a particular situation, but better to look a bit of a dick and survive than stride away in manly fashion and die.
It's all about the voltage gradient. Connect a power line to ground by cutting it or leaning some metallic object against it and the electricity doesn't just magically vanish at the contact point. If the contact point were an actual earth stake driven deep into the ground then even a quite major power-line short pretty much would disappear right there, but if all you've got is some cable draped on the ground, or big voltages buzzing to earth in scary arcs from this and that part of the frame of a piece of construction equipment, then it's sort of like pouring water onto level ground. Some soaks in at the point where it hits, it spreads out and some more soaks in, it spreads out more and even more soaks in, et cetera.
In this analogy, voltage maps to the depth of water on the surface. The closer to the contact point(s) a given piece of ground is, the higher the electrical potential at that spot will be. This is where the analogy breaks down, though, because you will come to no harm if one of your feet is in two inches of water and the other is in one. If one of your feet is on a piece of ground charged to twenty thousand volts and the other is on a ten-thousand-volt spot, though, you'll have a ten-thousand-volt potential from foot to foot, and you'd better hope your shoes have thick rubber soles with no nails.
Here's an occupational-safety video, as cool and stylish as such videos tend to be, explaining this:
The best thing to do is stay in the vehicle and let the electricity pass around you; the metal frame of a truck is way more conductive than a human, and you're probably sitting on an insulating seat anyway.
...though, then hopping out of the vehicle so that you don't touch the vehicle and the ground at the same time, and then pogo-hopping away, is the best chance you have to avoid becoming a very crispy critter. (If you don't want to see the severely charred body of a fork-lift operator who lifted his fork into power lines, don't click here.)
Tiny mincing steps can work about as well as pogo-hops, and may be safer in construction-site terrain. The idea is to get away without falling on your face and enjoying the large potential difference that now exists between your knees and your nose.
Even an actual earth stake may become less and less effective as a current sink if a lot of power passes through it for long enough, because that'll heat the area and boil out the water that makes the ground usefully conductive. The same applies to vehicles that are shorting power lines to ground; as the arcing and burning progresses, the area under the vehicle gets drier and less conductive, and the danger zone expands. Usually the power's cut off pretty quickly, but not always.
(For this reason, dry sand and most kinds of desert-dry ground are a bad place to hammer in an earth stake. Since you'll find water just about anywhere if you dig deep enough - this is the Great Secret of Dowsing - you can get around this problem by using a really long earth stake, provided you have someway to pound it into the ground. Hammering in an ordinary earth stake and pouring water around it will work just fine... until the water drains or evaporates.)
Basically, if it's too hokey for a sideshow fortune-teller, or even a televangelist, to contemplate selling it, someone on eBay will put it up in Everything Else -> Metaphysical.
This has got to be a pretty sweet business to be in. Grab random rocks and sticks and charity-shop dolls, make up some incoherent blather about how the objects in question are imbued with the spirits of Nefertiti and Joan of Arc or the chakraenergy of a million sunspots, chuck 'em up on eBay and see who bites.
And people do seem to buy these things. I'm doubtful about whether any of the items that cost more than a house ever actually sell to anybody who isn't a shill of the seller seeking to pump up their feedback scores, but as I write this a "Completed listings" search for "haunted" and "doll" turns up plenty of green numbers indicating an apparent sale.
Now, though, eBay has banned the sale of "advice, spells, curses, hexing, conjuring, magic, prayers, blessing services, magic potions, [and] healing sessions".
This isn't as great as it might at first sound. The LA Times actually talked to eBay about it, and they said all they were doing was "discontinuing a small number of categories within the larger Metaphysical subcategory", their only stated reason for this being because purchases of magic spells and prayers and such "often result in issues that can be difficult to resolve". (You don't say.)
(A complete list of things prohibited on the US eBay site is here.)
I also don't know how much impact this policy change, which happened and was reported on only a few days ago, has yet had.
Most of the metaphysical claptrap isn't in the now-banned categories at all, for a start. So there are still a buggerload of magic tuning forks on offer, and the classic haunted dolls aren't banned, either. I think the haunted doll may actually be the gold standard for eBay paranormal crap; quite a lot of other allegedly magical items, like jewellery, now have "haunted" and "doll" in their description, to make sure anybody who's dumb enough to buy a haunted doll also has the opportunity to buy talismans and wands and who knows what else.
And spells are now supposed to be banned, but there still seem to be plenty of them on sale. These listings include services to help those who've been victimised by other spells; this seller will call upon the Archangel Michael to un-curse you!
(I saved a local copy of that auction here. It's too hilarious to allow it to pass from this world when the auction expires, or is taken down.)
And magic potions are supposed to be banned too - potions are the only physical objects on the new-prohibited-items list - but there are still plenty of them on sale, too.
Perhaps these spell and potion listings were created before the policy change. I also hope eBay's got humans in the auction-removal loop, to prevent auctions for Magic: The Gathering cards, Lego magic potions and other such non-paranormal items from being cancelled. If a human has to click something to kill each auction then it may take a while for the spell and potion merchants to be shut down.
(Having humans cancel listings would be practical, by the way. As I write this, the whole "Metaphysical" category on eBay.com, including international listings, has about 120,000 listings. That sounds like a lot, but it wouldn't take long for full-time workers to sort through. 25 people working seven hours per day and taking one minute per auction could sort through 12,600 auctions a day.)
A blanket ban on paranormal bullshit would probably be a big problem for eBay, because it would cover "mainstream" paranormal bullshit like...
...tefillin, any crucifix or Star of David necklace or ring or brooch or other knick-knack with colourful description text, and umpteen other religious collectibles. Which includes religious items of legitimate historical value, and religious items that people just buy for fun. Many people, for instance, enjoy collecting Catholickitsch, the cornier the better.
I also wouldn't want to be the guy who has to draw the line between Harry Potter movie memorabilia and magic wands that are actually meant to work, between collectible knives and magic ones, or between geological specimens and magic crystals.
Still, even this small change is an improvement over the previous anything-goes policy. People who want to blow their savings on mystic nonsense should at least get a nice flashy tarot reading or personal magic-trick presentation for their money, rather than just read a wall of poorly-written pink capital letters and then pay fifty dollars for a twenty-cent bottle with some discount-store lavender oil in it.
If, of course, you really are in possession of some paranormal object or magic spell, you could make money a lot faster by just demonstrating it to James Randi, and make a million dollars.
Since Randi's advancing age means he now looks like a particularly dangerous emeritus member of the faculty of Unseen Universityand like a little bald wrinkly smiling man, though. the Anti-Randi Marching Band probably find him even more frightening.
