Steaming Turd

Stormy: I’m blind!!
Debbie: You’re not blind!
Sparks: Isn’t it possible that he went blind independently of the power going out?
Stormy: Oh my god, I’m blind!!

So yesterday evening, I was sitting there watching some tube, when the lamp in the living room started flickering. I figured that the bulb was getting ready to blow, and just waited for the inevitable to happen.

Well, it wasn’t that at all. All the power flickered a couple times, and it settled down with the lamp lit dimly and all my electronic devices in various states of semi-on-ness.

Crap, a brownout. The last brownout I had happened a few years back, with the cause being a fire down the street in Little Italy. So, I grabbed my keys and headed out to walk around a bit and try to find what spectacle I could.

I never did find any spectacle. I told the CHiPs* who had arrived to direct traffic at the nearby stoplight (the only stoplight that was out, mind you) that it was a brownout, and they notified the power company, but near as I could tell, there were no fires, no car accidents, no downed lines, no nothing. And the area of effect was pretty limited too, essentially covering just my block (and possibly the cemetery as well - I didn’t check there). They were fine across the street, down the hill, and beyond that one stoplight.

After determining that there was nothing to see and/or report, I went back home. As I was standing there in the dimly-lit living room, I heard something weird. Voices, but it didn’t sound like it was coming from the neighbor’s apartment. That’s when I realized it was coming from my nearly 20-year-old clock radio. The radio was apparently on, despite the power problems and despite the clock display being off. It tuned okay, though perhaps the reception was a bit weak, and the stations I found came through loud and clear. But the really weird thing was that the radio switch was in the off position, and flipping it from off to on and to the alarm settings had no effect at all.

Had I been 25 years younger, this would have completely freaked me out. When I was little, I used to have nightmares about being electrocuted. They came in a variety of forms, and they all sucked. These dreams eventually developed into dreams where flipping a light switch would result in lights illuminating dimly or not at all. Eventually, I had enough of these dreams to where I would recognize this situation and know that it meant something bad was going to happen, and a few times, it also caused me to realize I was asleep. (I have since read that light switches rarely behave appropriately in dreams, so this weirdness isn’t specific to me.)

Fortunately, though, this wasn’t 25 years ago, and I was wide awake. Still… it did creep me out a little bit.

* CHiPs = Cleveland Heights Police. And yes, they do have motorcycles now. Cue the theme music!

I just rented the movie Primer from Netflix. Now, this is coming from the perspective of a science/engineering nerd, but this is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s an independent film (made for a whopping $7000) about the accidental discovery of a time travel device. It ends up being as sophisticated as Pi (though not as cinematically pretentious) while twisting around the way you think, the way Memento did*.

One thing that makes this movie good is the tremendously convoluted plot, as one might expect (but rarely actually gets, for some reason) when time travel comes into the picture. Another thing is that, like ogres, this movie has layers. To the casual viewer, it’s a convoluted time travel plot. A glistening accent of science-and-engineering-extravaganza sits on top of that, making it clear that the film was written and acted in part by people with a background in engineering. Beneath that is the question of what you would do if you could go back in time a few hours, and beneath that is the same question modulated by the intense and growing distrust that stems from having the human race’s greatest (and perhaps most powerful) discovery ever and not coming clean about it to your friends.

It won two awards from Sundance and an assortment of other nominations for lesser-known awards. Anyway, I don’t want to say more, because this movie is best seen before it’s explained

* Immediately after I saw Memento, I happened to watch an episode of Law and Order. Strangely, everything in L&O seemed screwed up, because over the past two hours I had gotten used to thinking about events happening in reverse order, as they did in Memento.

Normally, I don’t give two rat turds about celebrity nonsense. But this was just too good, not simply because everybody’s favorite Oscar-nominated millionaire clairvoyant is being charged with underage DUI, but because he flipped his 1995 Saturn station wagon in the process of getting himself caught.

Hezbollah claiming victory over the Israelis is a lot like Earth claiming victory over the Minbari.

I have a box fan that sucks. It’s several years old, and I’m not sure where I got it - possibly as a community purchase from previous living arrangements or otherwise inherited from a former roommate. So, I shouldn’t complain.

But I will anyway.

This box fan sucks. It blows, too, but that’s not the point. It emits this horrible OOOOO noise anytime it’s set on medium or high, and sometimes even on low. Wondering what was causing it, I did a spectrum analysis of the signal:

Peaks of significant height occur at 60, 70, 90 and 360 Hz. It’s the 360 Hz one that I’m hearing, which I’ve confirmed with a tone generator. I know for two reasons that this phenomenon is electrical in origin - one, because the frequency doesn’t change depending on the motor speed, and two, because the tone is an exact multiple of 60 Hz and is practically a sine wave (no significant harmonics). But why 360 Hz? Why a multiple of 6?

A Google search turns up a few examples of the sixth harmonic of the 60 Hz line frequency popping up:

1. Full wave rectification in the drive unit of a DC motor will create a 360 Hz component in its current draw.
2. Torque control of an AC motor through modulation of the incoming line voltage can create an audible 360 Hz hum if there is excessive harmonic distortion in the modulator.
3. Loose windings in a transformer can produce harmonics of the line frequency, including the sixth harmonic.
4. Fans can produce harmonics of 60 Hz depending on their power supply. Sadly, this reference, while quite relevant, was fairly cryptic as to the exact cause - they do mention, however, that a 360 Hz tone was “particularly prominent in this case and was the cause of complaints from workers in the lab” where the fan was installed.

Anyway, it’s likely that the only solution to this problem is to boot this fan to the curb and get one that doesn’t suck. Well, at least one that doesn’t suck from both sides.

On a side note, I discovered by using the tone generator and the spectrum analyzer that my speakers will generate a tone of significant amplitude all the way up toward about 20 kHz, which is out of range of my hearing (I can’t hear it past about 15 or 16 kHz). This means that I could probably annoy the neighbors’ dogs from the comfort of my own apartment

Phase 1. Watch this.

Phase 2. Do a Google search for the now obvious phrase.

Phase 3. Read the various hilarious weblog posts and articles that come up.

Phase 4. …

Phase 5. Profit!