Year Plus Check-In

I was updating my server and realized that it’s been a little over a year since I posted any content. Do I feel bad? Not at all. As I’ve always said, this blog is more for me than you. But I thought that I’d give a little update for the two people that added my blog to their RSS reader and forgot to remove it.

My biggest focus for the last year has been me. By that I mean I’ve been getting even more into physical fitness. I completed the first phase of my home gym project this year. It went from a small section in my unfinished utility room to a significantly larger section of that room. I have a complete set of kettlebells, which means I have pairs of every weight from 16 kg to 48 kg in 4 kg increments. I also bough a set of PowerBlock Elite EXP adjustable dumbbells (a great opportunity to abuse that free shipping Amazon Prime gives). Horse mats are the typical go-to for flooring options for home gyms, but I opted for Amorim sports flooring. It’s not a squishy as horse mats and doesn’t have the same room clearing stench when you first get them. You may notice no mention of a barbell and accompanying weights. Right now I’m getting the results I want from kettlebells. There’s also not enough space in my utility room for a power rack and barbell setup. When I get around to building a shed, I plan to have a space in it set aside for a barbell setup. Finally, I bought an elliptical, but that’s more for the wife than me. I used it when the weather isn’t conducive to walking or rucking.

I was running Pavel’s Rite of Passage kettlebell program towards the end of 2022 and through much of 2023. However, I changed programs when I finished my kettlebell set because I had doubles of every weight and wanted to take advantage of them (Rite of Passage is an excellent program and I highly recommend it). I ran Geoff Neupert’s Dry Fighting Weight program since it combines two of my favorite exercises: clean and presses and front squats. The only lift that was missing from my top three were snatches. Low and behold he released his new Maximorum program this year, which uses double clean and presses, double front squats, and one arm snatches. I’m beginning that program this afternoon.

On other fronts, I haven’t relapsed on social media. I haven’t logged into Facebook or Twitter (or X as it’s not called) for almost three years now. I still use Matrix and Signal, but neither of them are designed to suck as much time from your life as possible so I actually enjoy popping on and off of them. My wife and I (which is to say mostly my wife) expanded our garden. We have nine raised beds and a few small plots used for odds and ends.

If the two of you who forgot to remove my blog from your RSS read are still reading, I plan to add more content in the coming months. Expect to see a few articles related to physical fitness. I will likely write some posts related to guns since that is the reason I started this blog. Don’t expect to see any content related to the upcoming election since I don’t care about rigged games played by geriatrics.

Clock Time and Solar Time

The widespread availability of synchronized clocks only occurred very recently in human history. Before the widespread availability of synchronized clocks but after the regional availability (when a town may have a single clock) of clocks it was common for regions to have different clock times. This meant that 12:00 could occur at different points during the day in neighboring towns. Before the regional availability of clocks it was common for people to use solar time, which in most parts of the world varies throughout the year.

If you had a time machine and traveled back to Ancient Rome and told somebody that future humans will develop a habit of starting reoccurring events at the exact same point in a 24-hour period throughout the year, they would likely think you were crazy. However, modern humans seem to be incapable of comprehending anything else.

The debate between keeping the current biannual clock adjustments or settling on a single clock time throughout the year is once again raging. I admit that I’m biased towards using a single clock time throughout the year, but not strongly. My main interest in this debate is the arguments. Why? Because the arguments don’t actually address the issue they claim to address.

A big reason for the about-face? Whatever benefits might have been gleaned by giving people more sunlight in the evening during the winter, it also meant longer, darker mornings. Parents were suddenly sending their kids to school in the cold and the dark for months on end. As the Capital Weather Gang noted, such a change means the sun wouldn’t rise before 8 a.m. in Washington for more than two and a half months, between late November and mid-February. The morning darkness would linger even longer farther north.

This seems to be the predominant argument made by those in favor of keeping the biannual adjustment. My first observation is that having two annual one hour adjustments doesn’t fix this problem. I live in the Upper Midwest so I’m used to noticeably shorter days during the winter and longer days during the summer. Right before daylight savings time kicks in I’m beginning to wake up while the sun is rising. Just as I begin to adjust to seeing daylight when I wake up, I’m back to waking up before sunrise because of the adjustment to daylight savings time. It’s a minor annoyance, but school children in this area experience the same annoyance. Even though we adjust clock time twice a year children are still made to wake up and go to school in the cold and the dark.

There are solutions to this problem, but people seem largely unable to even comprehend them. One solution would be to implement more frequent smaller clock time adjustments throughout the year. For example, clock time could be adjusted by half hour increments four times a year or fifteen minute increments eight times a year. With enough granularity school children could always go to school after sunrise. Another solution is to adjust starting times to take sunrise into consideration. Instead of starting school at 08:00 every day, the starting time could be adjusted throughout the year. During one period school could start at 08:00, during another period it could start at 08:15, etc. Because sunrise doesn’t occur at the same time in every region, starting times would need to be region specific.

Let’s look at some other arguments in favor of maintaining the biannual clock time adjustments mentioned in this article and consider whether they actually solve the problem the claim to:

It puts clocks out of sync with Europe, which has standard time between late October and late March, creating problems in the trade and travel sectors.

Doing away with the biannual adjustments would put the United States out of sync with all of Europe. Except for Iceland, Belarus, Turkey, Georgia and Russia. Those European countries don’t observe daylight savings time (known as summer time in Europe). Moreover, no country in East Asia observes daylight savings time so when the United States changes its clocks, it’s out of sync with major trade partners and travel destinations such as China, South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

It makes it more difficult for various religions to practice rituals at home, such as sunrise prayers for Jews.

The mere act of living in areas where days shorten and lengthen throughout the year complicates observing such rituals. Jews living in the Barrow, Alaska would have to deal with 67 days of darkness between November 18 and January 23. Daylight savings time isn’t making the lives of Jews throughout the United States easier because daylight savings time doesn’t make sunrise uniform throughout the entire country.

It might actually increase gasoline consumption, given that people will have more time in the evening to go outside.

Quoting the same article:

A Department of Transportation study at the time concluded that the change actually had minimal impact on saving energy and might have actually increased gasoline consumption. As Michael Downing, the author of a book on daylight saving time, wrote in the New York Times in 2005:

This decision did not soften the blow of the OPEC oil embargo, but it did put schoolchildren on pitch-black streets every morning until the plan was scaled back. A Department of Transportation study concluded that Nixon’s experiment yielded no definitive fuel saving. It optimistically speculated, however, that daylight saving might one day help us conserve as many as 100,000 barrels of oil a day.

The same Michael Downing mentioned in the immediately above quote apparently also made the argument that abolishing daylight savings time might (which is the keyboard here because its inclusion ensures Downing doesn’t need to provide evidence in support of his argument) increase gasoline consumption. If he knows something that the Department of Transportation doesn’t about daylight savings time and its impact or lack thereof on gasoline consumption, it wasn’t provided in this article.

Despite the widespread belief that it’s meant to benefit farmers, they actually really dislike it and have consistently lobbied against it since World War I.

Just as “might” was the keyboard in the previous argument, “farmers” is the keyword in this argument because it’s used in such a nebulous way. Which specific farmers? My gut tells me that a farmer in Northern Minnesota may have a different opinion on the matter than a farmer in Southern Texas. I would also like to know the reasons given by “farmers” opposing the abolition of biannual clock time adjustments. Without those arguments it’s impossible to address whether biannual clock time adjustments address them.

If these argument don’t address the issues they claim to address, are the people making them stupid? No. If they’re guilty of anything, it’s being ignorant of the actual problem. Those arguing in favor of abolishing the biannual clock time adjustments also seem to be ignorant of the actual problem since they seldom mention it. The actual problem is that there is no connection between clock and solar time. Establishing such a connection would require either changing our habit of starting reoccurring events at the same point in a 24-hour period or making more frequent finer grained adjustments to clock time.

Social Media Services Assume You’re an Idiot

Last year I finally gave up entirely on social media (if you came here due to a Twitter link, those posts are automated and I haven’t logged into the account in some years). I won’t bore you with every reason, but I would like to take a moment to highlight one in particular.

I don’t care if somebody assumes I’m an idiot. I don’t care if somebody calls me an idiot. But if somebody assumes I’m an idiot or calls me one, I’m not going to contribute to their welfare. When you post content to a social media service, you contribute to its welfare. Without user generated content a social media service is a barren wastelands. It has nothing with which to entice people to sign up. Social media services by and large rely on having large numbers of users since user interactions are their product. No users, no user interactions. No user interactions, no income.

This brings me to the reason I want to highlight. Every mainstream social media service assumes that its users are idiots. Not only do they assume that their users are idiots, they call their users idiots. Every time a social media service “fact checks” a post or comment it’s saying that its users are too stupid and gullible to discern fact from fiction.

Rather than contribute to the welfare of services that assume I’m an idiot, I’m contributing to the welfare of services that don’t insult my intelligence.

Subzero Temperatures Are Fun

You have two options when living in the Upper Midwest: become friend with winter or at least come to terms with it. I fall into the latter category. Winter is my favorite season. Perhaps by necessity I have developed a fascination with cold weather and the effects it has on everyday thing.

Consider the electronics we take for granted every day. Do you know what the lowest temperature at which your mobile phone or laptop will function? Such information often doesn’t make it into consumer product specifications. I did some digging and it seems most laptops are designed to function in temperatures as low as 50 °F. That’s adequate for environments where the climate is usually controlled such as a home or office. It’s not adequate for the -30 °F temperature to which I work up yesterday morning.

This topic becomes much more interesting on a large scale. Take Texas for example. The state is experiencing a typical Upper Midwestern winter right now. That’s a problem because a typical Upper Midwestern winter there extremely rare so nothing is designed with such conditions in mind. Many people in the state are experiencing blackouts. A lot of people, myself included, have asked why the power grid was so severely impacted by this weather since the same power generation technology is used in environments that get just as cold. Why would a wind turbine in Texas freeze when one in Minnesota that regularly experiences even colder temperatures doesn’t? There are many possibilities. The first that comes to mind is lubricant. It’s quite possible that the lubricants being using in wind turbines in Texas turn into a gel at subzero temperatures. Since Texas so seldomly experiencing subzero temperatures nobody likely stopped to consider the possibility.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) event notification report for today notes that a nuclear reactor in Texas was taken offline because two of its feedwater pumps failed. Could cold weather interfere with a feedwater pump? Quite possibly. Depending on the design of the pump, the source of the water, and other factors it’s quite feasibly that a feedwater pump could fail if the water source or intake froze. Water freezing inside of a pump is even feasible (although flowing water doesn’t freeze as easily as standing water).

Backup diesel generators could also be troublesome in Texas at the moment. There are two types of diesel. #1 diesel tends to work better at lower temperatures whereas #2 diesel tends to work better at higher temperatures. Because #2 diesel tends to turn into gel at cold temperatures, here in the Upper Midwest during winter months we mix #1 and #2 diesel or include additives in our diesel to prevent it from gelling up. I’m guessing the same isn’t done in Texas since there normally isn’t a need. That means backup diesel generators, which are needed now because mains power is unreliable, could also be unavailable.

I wish I had more to offer than observations that I find interesting, but truth be told there likely isn’t anything anybody can do for Texas until the temperature goes up. The fixes necessary to make a state like Texas capable of weathering (pun intentional) these conditions require redesigning almost everything, which is likely too tall of a task for anybody to undertake and too costly for how rare these conditions do occur.

Dissoi Logio

Greek rhetoricians had a practice called Dissoi Logio. The practice involved arguing both sides of an issue in order to obtain a deeper understanding of it. I enjoy practicing this because it not only helps develop a deeper understanding of an issue, but it also helps demonstrate that truth isn’t as absolute as commonly assumed.

One of the best tools available to assist in this practice is statistics. If you follow any online argument long enough, you get to the point where both sides are throwing statistics at each other. A good example of this is the debate around gun restrictions. Those in favor of gun restrictions will toss around comparisons of violent crime statistics between countries with strict and loose gun control laws. People opposed to gun restrictions will then rebut by throwing around statistics involving defensive uses of guns and point out that since the definition of violent crimes differ from country to country, comparing said statistics isn’t an apples to apples comparison. Your perception of which side is telling the truth is usually decided by your personal biases.

This is also common with economic arguments. For example, any argument about minimum wage laws inevitably involves supporters citing statistics that predict economic benefits from doing so and opponents citing statistics that predict economic problems from doing so. Which set of statistics you decide to cite as truth will likely depend on your economic biases.

Statistics aren’t the only tools available to assist you with this exercise, but I cite them because they are becoming one of the most common foundations upon which arguments are built. Starting this exercise by wielding statistics provides a lot of bang for your buck. Once you’ve done that, you can start looking at other argumentative foundations and master their uses too.

Even if you don’t decide to start with using statistics, I urge you to practice Dissoi Logio. Your initial attempts will likely be half hearted because most people aren’t taught the practice and the act of successfully arguing against your own position can be disturbing. However, practice makes perfect. The more you practice it, the better you will become. Eventually you should be able to make very strong arguments for and against any position. This will give you a leg up when debating because you will likely enjoy a better understanding of both your position and your opponent’s position than they do. It will also hopefully help you realize that truth and lies aren’t as black and white as most people mistakenly believe, which should make you far less susceptible to propaganda.

The Continuing Deterioration of Duolingo

A few years ago I used Duolingo in combination with a number of other resources to learn Esperanto. I also used it to dabble in a number of other languages. My experience at the time lead me to recommend it to people who expressed an interest in learning another language with some caveats. A few months ago I decided to reassign most of the time I spent on social media to more productive activities. One of those activities was returning to language learning. As part of this endeavor I logged back into my Duolingo account. After a couple of years of almost complete absence (I did log in a couple of times, but never to do more than poke around) I discovered that my small list of caveats has grown.

My previous caveats were mostly related to the varying quality of Duolingo’s courses. Most, if not all (I’m not sure about the service’s flagship languages such as German and Spanish), of Duolingo’s course are created, maintained, and updated by volunteers. This results in courses with wildly differing levels of quality. A handful of courses such as the German and Spanish courses are very good. Another handful of courses such as the Swahili course are notoriously bad. But most of the courses lie somewhere in between.

To briefly illustrate the variety of middling quality, I’m going to highlight four courses: Esperanto (a language I know fairly well), Japanese (a language I took in college), Latin (a language I’m decent at reading and writing, but shit at speaking), and Hebrew (a language about which I know almost nothing).

The Esperanto course is quite good. This isn’t too surprising since there are a lot of passionate Esperantists willing to volunteer their time and energy to create educational material (Lernu.net is a great example of this). The Esperanto course includes extensive language notes, audio that is generally good, and enough content (65 skills) to keep learners engaged. But the course hasn’t received a lot of updates since I last used it. In fact the only content update appears to be the inclusion of skills in the main tree that were originally only available by paying lingots (Duolingo’s original in-app currency, which has been replaced by gems… except when it hasn’t). Popular features in the top tier courses, such as stories, are not available in the Esperanto course and I have my doubts they ever will be.

The Japanese course was awful when it was first released. Japanese uses three writing scripts: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. The initial release of the course taught hiragana and katakana, but taught little if any kanji. I also remember the original audio being variable in quality. However, unlike the Esperanto course, the Japanese course has been improved. Now it’s serviceable and there’s apparently a major update about to be released, which hopefully means the course will become decent or even good. But in its current state it still has some issues with kanji. Periodically the shown pronunciations for a kanji character is wrong in the context of a sentence and the pronunciations are written in romanji (showing the pronunciation using the Roman alphabet) instead of furigana (showing the pronunciation using hiragana). The reason this matters is because most elementary level written Japanese material use furigana and higher level material will still use it for lesser known kanji. It’s better the get learners acquainted with how a language is used in the real world. The current course also lacks stories, but it sounds like that’s part of the upcoming update.

I was excited when I heard that a Latin course was going to be released. Latin is one of my favorite languages and I’ve studied it for years. I wasn’t expecting a lot from the Latin course since Duolingo courses tend to be bare bones when they’re first released, but I was expecting more than what was released. The entire course only has 22 skills and only teaches the present indicative tense. There are useful notes and audio for many of the sentences. The pronunciations in the audio are obviously attempting to replicate Classical Latin. For the most part they do an OK job, but not a great job. Unless more skills are added the Latin course is useless for anything other than dipping toes into the Latin waters. With that said, the foundation is good enough that a better course could be built upon it someday.

So far I’ve covered courses for language with which I’m already familiar. Now I’m going to highlight a course from the perspective of a totally new learner. I decided to try the Hebrew course because I wanted to dabble in a Semitic language. The fact that Hebrew is a one of only a few examples of a successfully revived language also makes it a novelty to me. However, I immediately ran into a major roadblock. Hebrew, like Japanese, doesn’t use the Roman alphabet, but the Hebrew course, unlike the Japanese course, doesn’t teach you the alphabet. If you’re completely unfamiliar with Hebrew and want to use the Duolingo course, you need to first find another resource from which to learn the alphabet. Obviously I can’t comment any further on the Hebrew course because I couldn’t get anywhere in it (and as I said I wanted to dabble, I’m not interested enough to seek out other resources), which is what I wanted to highlight.

My first caveat when recommending Duolingo in the past was that some courses were good, some were OK, and some were terrible. If somebody expressed an interest in learning German, Spanish, or even Esperanto, I had no problem recommending Duolingo. If somebody expressed an interest in learning Japanese, I’d warn them away. My other major caveat was that Duolingo couldn’t be used by itself to become fluent in a language. Years ago Duolingo advertised itself as a tool that allowed users to achieve fluency (it would even rate how “fluent” you had become) in another language. The idea that one can achieve fluency in a language solely through translating sentences and typing out what was said in audio recordings is bullshit. Fortunately, Duolingo appears to have backed off from those historical claims and now prefers the much vaguer “learn a language” slogan.

Those two caveats remain, but now I have a number of new caveats when recommending Duolingo.

One of the biggest changes that was starting to roll out when I was first using Duolingo was hearts. Hearts are akin to hit points. Each mistake you make deducts one heart and if you make five mistakes, you’re kicked out the current lesson and blocked from doing anything other than practice. Duolingo claims that the heart system exists to discourage users from making mistakes, but this claim doesn’t hold up for two reasons.

First, what qualifies as a mistake is poorly defined and that definition changes. For example, missing punctuation normally wasn’t considered a mistake. Now it is (at least on some course). Sometimes a typo isn’t counted as a mistake (instead it’s highlighted as a typo, which doesn’t cost a heart), sometimes it is. Second, when you do something that is correct but the volunteers who created the course didn’t anticipate, it gets marked as a mistake and costs a heart. Consider the Latin course for a moment. Compared to English Latin has a very free word order. The standard word order in Latin is subject object verb (which is the same in Japanese, but the standard word order in English is subject verb object). When the Latin course was released on Duolingo a lot of my answers were marked as incorrect because the volunteers apparently assumed that everybody would use subject verb object word order whereas I normally use subject object verb word order for Latin. Likewise, Esperanto has a freer word order than English. Sometimes I’ll provide answers on the Esperanto course in subject object verb word order just to keep things interesting. The Esperanto course has existed long enough where most of those unanticipated answers have been discovered and are now accepted. However, when I first did the Esperanto course, that wasn’t the case. I’ve managed to block myself from progressing in both course by giving correct answers that the course creators didn’t anticipate.

If you run out of hearts, you have a handful of options. First, you can do a practice session, which gives you a single heart. Second, you can wait several hours. You get one heart back after five or six hours. So it takes almost a full day to get all of your hearts back. Third, the Duolingo app periodically provides you the opportunity to regain a heart by watching an ad. Fourth, you can pay gems (but not lingots for reasons I’ll get to in a bit) to get some hearts back. Finally, you can bypass the heart system entirely by signing up for Plus. The hearts feature brings one of the worst aspects of free-to-play games to the educational market: the choice between paying real money or grinding. But Duolingo manages to make this already annoying model worse by punishing you inconsistently and sometimes when you didn’t even make a mistake.

This leads me to one of my new caveats: if you plan to use Duolingo seriously, you should consider either paying for Plus or using the website. What do I mean by using the website? The hearts system only exists in the iOS and Android apps. If you log into the website to use Duolingo, you don’t have to deal with hearts (for now). This brings me to my second new caveat.

Your experience on Duolingo can be significantly different from other users. There are two major reasons for this. First, as I already mentioned, the website experience differs from the experience on the Android and iOS apps. The hearts system isn’t the only difference between the two. Notes that are available on the website can’t be accessed from the phone apps. Without notes you have to resort to a lot of trial and error, but the hearts system punishes you for using trial and error unless you subscribe to Plus. I also made a quip about gems replacing lingots except when they haven’t. If you use the website, you use lingots. If you use the phone apps, you use gems. There isn’t even a one-to-one ratio between lingots and gems. As I type this I have 3310 gems in my iOS app and 954 lingots on the website. When I earn lingots on the website, the number of gems that appear on my iOS app goes up and vice versa, so there is an exchange rate, just not an integer one.

The second reason your experience will vary from other users is A/B testing. Duolingo is infamous for it’s A/B testing. A/B testing is a method where a service provides one experience for one set of users and a different experience for another set of users. Because of Duolingo’s obsession with A/B testing, I have to warn anybody to whom I’m recommending the service that the experience I’m recommending may not be the experience they get. For example, a current A/B test on Duolingo is locking skill tests behind lingots (or gems). If you’re not part of this A/B test, you can test out of skills instead of drudge through multiple lessons. This is useful if, for example, you’re starting a course for a language with which you already have some familiarity. I tested out of the hiragana and katakana skills when I started the Japanese course because I learned those scripts in college (I didn’t test out of other early skills because I wanted a refresher). Since there is almost nothing to buy with lingots, this wouldn’t be a big deal. However, a new user won’t have any lingots so they will have to grind for some before they can skip a skill. If I had been a new user when I started the Japanese course, I would’ve had to do the hiragana and katakana skills, which would have been a waste of my time.

My third new caveat is related Duolingo’s gamification. Gamification is a two-edged sword for educational tools. On the plus side gamification encourages engagement. A user may continue using the app and therefore learning because of the game elements. On the con side gamification often encourages the game aspect of the service over the educational aspect. Duolingo has leagues and leader boards. When you complete a lesson, you get experience points. At the end of the week the top three user in the league win. Mind you the prize is just mostly useless lingots, but that’s enough for a competitive person. This has lead a lot of users to grind experience points in lessons that they can complete with confidence quickly in order to climb the leader board. Since you receive the same amount of experience points for doing a previously completed lesson as you do for a new lesson, there’s no motivation to push yourself in order to win your league. So my third caveat is that if you’re a competitive person, Duolingo may distract you from actually learning.

Rather than improving, Duolingo has gotten worse since I last used it. I used to enthusiastically recommend it for a lot of people. Now I’m hesitant. If somebody is willing to primarily use the website or pay for Plus, it can be a useful service… so long as the language course that interests you is decent and you don’t get trapped in a bad A/B test. What worries me the most is that I see no indication that Duolingo is going to turn itself around. How many headaches will users tolerate for a supplemental tool?

My Review of the Sennheiser HD 450BT

My rule of thumb for adapting new technologies is that the technology must provide a net gain to my quality of life. I haven’t jumped onto the Internet of Things bandwagon in part because the added headaches outweigh the benefits. Being able to change the color my lights output would be mildly useful to me, but having to worry about the security issues involved with an Internet connected device, the possibility of not being able to configure my lights if the Internet goes down, etc. greatly outweigh the benefit.

This brings me to Bluetooth headphones. Ever since Apple had the “courage” to remove the standard headphone jack from the iPhone, Bluetooth headphones started seeing a rapid increase in adoption (at least as far as I can tell). I stuck with wired headphones because my use case made Bluetooth headphones a bigger headache than the benefits warranted. Apple’s “courage” did benefit me in one major way though, Bluetooth headphones improved rapidly and have finally reached a point where they offer more benefits to me than headaches.

I settled on buying a pair of Sennheiser HD 450BT for reasons I’ll get into in a bit. This review isn’t going to delve too deeply into the usual considerations for Bluetooth headphones such as sound quality, noise cancelling effectiveness, etc. More qualified individuals have already expounded on those features in great detail. Instead this review is going to be based heavily on my use case, which has a few oddball specifics. So before I begin, I’m going to explain my use case.

My Use Case

During the day I primarily use two computers. The first is my ThinkPad P52s running Fedora Linux, the second is my iPhone SE (2020). I do most of my work on the ThinkPad and listen to music and podcasts on my iPhone. Even though most of my audio output comes from my iPhone, I periodically needs to hear the audio on my ThinkPad. This need to jump between two devices is what has kept me using wired headphones. It’s easy to unplug a headphone jack from my iPhone (which relies on a Lightning to headphone jack adapter because of Apple’s “courage”) and plug it into my ThinkPad and vice versa. Disconnecting a pair of Bluetooth headphones from my iPhone and connecting them to my ThinkPad is a much bigger pain in the ass that involves going a couple of layers deep into Bluetooth settings on both devices.

So my use case requires the ability to easily switch between two devices and compatibility with both Linux and iOS.

Not My Use Case

It’s also worth noting what my use case isn’t. Many Bluetooth headphones offer some kind of active noise cancellation. I don’t like active noise cancellation because I prefer to maintain some audio awareness of my environment so I always turn it off if it’s present. I also don’t commute on public transit, don’t wear headphones when out and about (due to my preference for maintaining audio awareness), and work primarily from a desk. When I do travel, I always take my laptop bag, which is big and already packed with gear. A pair headphones isn’t much extra to carry when considered along with all of the other gear I carry. If portability is one of your primary criterion, I’m the worst person to ask.

Selection Criteria

I have several preferences when it comes to headphones in general. Closed studio style over-ear headphones are my favorite. In-ear ear buds are also acceptable to me so long as they don’t rely on a component that rests around my neck. Wired ear buds with equal length wires (I really hate the style where the wires going to the ear buds are different lengths) and so-called true wireless are both good in my book. I dislike on-ear headphones because I get a headache from wearing them for too long and open studio style never appealed to me because, even though I want to maintain audio awareness, I like having some amount of isolation as well.

I also have several preferences when it comes to Bluetooth headphones specifically. One of my favorite things about wired headphones is that they don’t rely on an internal battery that needs to be recharged periodically. For Bluetooth headphones I’d prefer having a battery life measured in days rather than in hours. Knowing that Bluetooth headphones do need to be recharged, I’d prefer a USB-C charging port (but will consider all standardized connectors other than micro-USB) since that is becoming the powering standard for a wide range of devices.

While I avoid video conferences and talking on the phone as much as possible, built-in microphones for those occasions when I can’t avoid either is a definite plus. So long as the microphones are good enough that the person(s) with whom I’m conversing can understand me, they’re acceptable to me.

Audio playback controls are a must. I hate having to turn on my phone screen to pause music or skip a song. This preference is so strong that my favorite pair of headphones, my Sennheiser HD 280 PROs, see very little actual use anymore. They sound great and they’re very comfortable, but they lack audio playback controls. Instead I usually use my ear buds, which do have built-in audio playback controls.

Because of the number of shoddy products on the market, I gravitate towards products made by companies with which I have had positive experiences. The downside to this strategy is that a lot of great options released by new companies fall off of the radar. The upside is that I get burned far less often by shoddy products. For similar reasons I tend to shy away from newly released products even when they’re manufactured by companies I trust. When I was young, I was willing to be the guinea pig for new products. Now that I’m older and have less free time, I prefer to let other people be the guinea pigs.

Since Bluetooth headphones, unlike traditional headphones, are necessarily a disposable product due to both their built-in battery (which wears out and usually isn’t replaceable) and continuously aging technology (for example, you usually can’t add new Bluetooth features to old headphones), I didn’t want to spend a fortune on a pair. I capped my budget at $150.

Based on my preferences I narrowed down my options to a handful of products. My three favorite options were the Sony WH-CH710N, Sony WH-XB900N, and Sennheiser HD 450BT. I eliminated the Sony WH-XB900N because of its focus on bass, which isn’t my thing, and opted for the Sennheiser HD 450BT over the Sony WH-CH710N because the former supports more high quality Bluetooth codecs.

My Review

That was a lot of preamble for a review, but I believe a review is far more useful if you understand both the use case of the reviewer and their preferences.

As I noted above, I’m not going to delve too deeply into the usual consideration for headphone reviews like sound quality and the effectiveness of the active noise cancellation. Far more qualified individuals have already written extensively on those topics. Suffice to say these headphones sound good to my ears. I haven’t tested the active noise cancellation to any extent so I won’t say anything about its effectiveness.

The three most appealing features of Bluetooth headphones for me are that Bluetooth is built into most modern laptops and smartphones (I had dongles), there are no wires to get tangled, and you’re not tethered the the audio source. My office is in the basement of my house. If I go upstairs, I can get to the furthest edge of my kitchen, a distance of approximately 60 feet with several walls and a floor in between, before the HD 450BT loses its connect to my laptop. I will also note that I live in the country so there is very little electromagnetic interference in my house on the wavelengths used by Bluetooth other than my Wi-Fi network and one or two other Bluetooth devices I use such as my Apple Watch. I’m not sure whether the range I’m experiencing is considered good for a pair of Bluetooth 5.0 headphones, but I’m more than happy with it.

My biggest gripe with Bluetooth headphones was solved by the introduction of multipoint connectivity, which allows a single pair of Bluetooth headphones to simultaneously connect to two or more source devices. Unfortunately, multipoint support is a bit of a mess. I’m happy to report that the HD 450BT multipoint support when simultaneously connected to my laptop and phone has fulfilled my needs. As I noted above in my use case, I periodically need to switch my audio source between those two devices. What I don’t need to do is get audio output from both devices at the same time. When connected to my laptop and phone, the multipoint support provides output from one of the two devices at a time. If I’m playing music on my phone, I don’t get audio from my laptop and vice versa. To switch between the two devices I only need to pause the audio on one device, wait a second or two, and start playing audio on the other device.

I have experienced a couple of multipoint hiccups. The first is that sometimes when a notification is created on the device not currently playing audio, it’ll cause the playing audio to pause for a second or two (the notification sound may or may not play through the headphones). The second is that after pausing the audio on one device and attempting to restart it using the built-in audio playback controls, the command sometimes goes to the other device (so if I pause the music on my phone and press the headphone’s play button to restart it, that play command may go to my laptop instead). These hiccups manifest infrequently enough that it hasn’t motivated me to return to hard wired headphones.

Another quirk that I’ve experienced is that when somebody calls my phone, before answering the call the microphones activate and route the the sounds to the speakers. If somebody calls when I’m typing, I can suddenly hear my mechanical keyboard very clearly. I’d prefer the microphones not activate unless I answer the call and maybe this is a but that will be fixed in a future firmware update.

Speaking of firmware updates, one gripe I do have with these headphones is that firmware upgrades can only be applied using the Sennheiser Smart Control app. This gripe applies to most Bluetooth headphones so it shouldn’t be seen as a criticism specific to the HD 450BT, but a criticism of Bluetooth headphones in general. I want to apply firmware updates using fwupd on Linux. But if Sennheiser is going to relegate me to using its app to apply firmware updates, it would be nice if the app wasn’t so bloody slow. The firmware update I recently applied took at least half an hour, which seems like a ridiculous amount of time to apply a firmware update to a pair of headphones. This is easily my least favorite thing about these headphones and the only saving grace is that firmware updates seem far and few between.

Sennheiser advertises 30 hours of battery life for the HD 450BT. That advertised battery life is with active noise cancellation enabled. As I stated above, I don’t like active noise cancellation and always turn it off. When active noise cancellation is disabled, the battery life increases significantly. I last charged my headphones on Friday afternoon and have used them heavily since then including through two working days. While I do turn them off a night, I’d estimate they’ve been running between 30 and 40 hours (not always playing audio, I do pause my music when I have to concentrate on something). As I write this Tuesday afternoon, the Sennheiser app on my iPhone shows the battery charge is still at 90%. When I press the volume up and down buttons simultaneously, the headphones report more than 12 hours of playtime remains (which I believe is the maximum the headphones will report). Needless to say, I’m very happy with the battery life of these.

Pressing the volume up and down buttons simultaneously to get the battery life probably seems a bit intuitive and one of the more common criticisms I’ve read about these headphones is the unintuitive layout of the built-in controls. All of the controls are located on the bottom of the right speaker. From front to back there is the power button that doubles as the active noise cancellation activation and deactivation button, the volume down and up buttons, a three position audio playback control switch, and a button for activating a phone’s voice assistant (such as Siri on the iPhone). I actually like the button layout and for the most part really like the audio playback switch. Pressing down on the switch will play or pause your audio, pressing the switch forward goes back a song, and pressing the switch backwards goes to the next song. The only annoyance for me is that pressing down to pause or play music can be finicky. If the switch isn’t perfectly centered when you press down, the control doesn’t activate. Since the switch is easily moved slightly forward or backward when pressing down on it, it’s pretty easy to press the button without your audio playing or pausing.

The last thing I want cover is comfort. A common criticism of these headphones is that they’re uncomfortable when worn for a long time. Most reviews attribute this to the small holes in the ear cups. My Sennheiser HD 280 PRO headphones have large holes in the ear cups so my ears have plenty of room. The HD 450BT has narrow holes in the ear cups. The holes are slightly wider than my thumbs, which is just barely large enough room for my ears. If I don’t position the headphones with some care, the ear cups will press down on parts of my ears. I did find some aftermarket ear cups that are supposed to be more comfortable and may invest in a pair at some point, but the stock ones are decently comfortable although not nearly as comfortable as ear cups on the HD 280 PRO. Compared to the HD 280 PRO, which has a wide headband with a replaceable thick pad wrapped around the top, the headband on the HD 450BT isn’t nearly as comfortable. It’s narrow and the only padding is a thin integrated strip of rubber on the inside that has no discernible padding. I do like the clamping force of these headphones. It’s strong, but not too strong. To me the clamping force feels lower than on the HD 280 PRO, but it’s not so low that I’m worried about them falling off of my head. Overall, I find the HD 450BT to be adequately comfortable when worn for hours, but a couple of steps below the HD 280 PRO.

Summary

I paid $99 for them and at that price I’m happy with my purchase. The multipoint feature fits my use case, the battery life is great (with the caveat that I disable the active noise cancellation), there are built-in audio playback controls, and the headphones are adequately comfortable. I’m not impressed with the Smart Control app, especially with the speed at which is updates firmware, but that’s an unhappiness I would likely have with any pair of Bluetooth headphones. If you’re looking for a pair of Bluetooth headphones in the $100 ballpark, I recommend considering them.

New Theme

Your eyes aren’t deceiving you. I changed the theme for the first time, at least that I can recall, since I started this blog. The old theme hadn’t been updated in a long time and a recent plugin update caused a catastrophic error to occur in the administration interface (why a theme that is only used by the user facing part of the site causes errors on the administration facing part of the site is something I can only attribute to WordPress being, well, WordPress).

I switched the theme over to the least offensive one I could find on short notice. I may change it again if I find something I like better. However, it’s tough finding a theme that doesn’t want to take up a third of the top of the page with a useless image, only show summaries of posts on the main page (I want the complete contents of each post to show on the main page to save you pointless clicking), or otherwise waste screen real estate and introduce unnecessary clicking. This blog is predominantly text and most themes seem geared towards multimedia (which is why I stuck to my old theme for so long). Maybe my preference in simple themes shows that I’m an old curmudgeon when it comes to blogging.

They’re Not Real Anarchists

Facebook performed another purge. Amongst the disappeared were a number of anarchist groups:

Today Facebook deleted a variety of far-Right militia and Qanon accounts along with anarchist and antifascist pages, including It’s Going Down and CrimethInc. The following is a joint statement in response.

This follows on the heels of Biden saying anarchists should be prosecuted and Trump taking a swipe at anarchists.

There’s nothing surprising about these events. Anarchists are a threat to the very system that Biden and Trump depend on for power and Facebook is usually quick to demonstrate its loyalties to the political class by banning whatever they’re criticizing at the moment. What is more fascinating to me are the anarchists who start going down the those aren’t real anarchists wormhole. Shortly after Facebook finished its purge I started seeing a number of anarchists, mostly those who identify as voluntaryists, posts memes saying, “Real anarchy is,” followed by any number of nonviolent but illegal or quasi-legal activities such as buying raw milk, homeschooling children, and dodging taxes. This is the same reaction I see whenever violence is attributed to anarchists by the mainstream media.

I take umbrage with this response for two reasons. My first reason is that it ignores a huge part of anarchist history. Anarchists have participated in revolutions, political assassinations, bombings, and other acts of violence. There is even a term amongst anarchists for such actions: propaganda of the deed. Anarchism shouldn’t be treated as a single unified philosophy, but as a number of different philosophies that share the common cause of opposing statism.

The second reason I don’t like this response is because it strikes me as pleading. Trump, Biden, and Facebook are not friends or allies to anarchists. Anarchists shouldn’t give two shits what any of them say about anarchists. Anarchists should setup and use their own social media platforms if for no other reason than to avoid having all of their personal information handed over to law enforcers by Facebook, Twitter, and other social media household names. Instead of telling them to go pound sand, the anarchists making these statements are effectively saying, “Your criticisms are fair, but I want you to know that my friends and I are not like that. We’re real anarchists! Please like us!”

When politicians or Silicon Valley companies say something disparaging about anarchists, I’d rather give them the finger than people who at least agree with me on a foundational level about the need to abolish government. I understand that an anarcho-communist is unlikely to agree with a vast majority of my individualist anarchist views, but I certainly have more common cause with them than I do with the likes of Trump, Biden, or Facebook.

Educating People in Order to Argue with Them

Long ago I was taken aback when a friend of mind who was a prolific online debater told me he swore off online debates. I was curious and asked him why. He said, “I’m tired of educating people just so I can debate them.”

After that conversation I started to pay attention to my online debates and quickly realized that most of what I thought was debating was actually educating. Since I hold views that are outside of the zeitgeist, most people I encounter have little, if any, understanding of them. In a majority of online debates the people with whom I’m debating make arguments that have no meaning within the context of what I’m saying. I then have to spent time educating them about what I mean just so they can actually debate me.

I’m certainly not unique in this. Consider Marxists for a moment. It’s pretty easy for them to have a very rudimentary debate about workers’ rights because that issue is part of the zeitgeist. However, if they want to make an argument based on historical materialism, they usually have to invest time in educating the other individual(s) on the subject so they have enough of an understanding to intelligently debate the issue. Libertarians have the same issue. It’s pretty easy for a libertarian to debate somebody about decriminalizing cannabis because that issue is part of the zeitgeist. But when a libertarian wants to debate monetary theory, they have to first teach their opponent(s) about the Austrian tradition of economics.

This problem runs even deeper. Few in what I will refer to as the masses appear to be educated on the topics of rhetoric and formal debate. Rhetoric is the skill of speaking convincingly. Formal debate is a framework which establishes ground rules for debates. A lot of people tend to conflate the two. They will try to argue against rhetoric by citing logical fallacies and make statements in a formal debate that contain logical fallacies. For example, consider the phrase “All cops are bastards.” The statement is valid rhetoric, but would not fly in a formal debate because the proposition is made with insufficient data (namely that every single individual who works in law enforcement is a bastard even though the debater is likely basing their argument on a small sample size of law enforcers).

I’m going to create two sides to further illustrate this issue: pro-cop and anti-cop. An anti-cop individual may say, “All cops are bastards,” as a form of rhetoric. They may not have meant the statement literally nor were they taking part in a formal debate. They’re merely trying to convince people to join their cause. But a pro-cop individual may rebut with, “That’s a hasty generalization fallacy!” The pro-cop individual is citing a rule that doesn’t apply to the situation. Now I’ll change the scenario. The two individuals have agreed to participate in a formal debate. When the anti-cop individual says, “All cops are bastards,” it would be proper for the pro-cop individual to say, “That’s a generalization fallacy,” because they both agreed to operate under the rules of formal debate.

How does this relate the the need to educate people in order to argue with them? More often than not I run into individuals who know nothing about rhetoric or formal debate. Their counterarguments will often involve pointing out logical fallacies in my rhetoric and making logical fallacies of their own. They know just enough about logical fallacies to recognize and call out a few of them, but not enough to avoid making the rest (which is usually the majority) of them or to know when they are appropriate to cite. They unknowingly (or knowingly, but I’m giving the benefit of the doubt here) attempt to establish an environment where I have to abide by the rules of formal debate while they operate by the rules of rhetoric. I then need to explain the difference between the two and convince them to pick one or the other. By the time that’s done the thread has digressed so far that everybody has lost interest.

This is where I reminisce about the good old days of the Internet when I could participate in online debates without having to spend a lot of time educating my opponents just so they could intelligibly argue with me. At one time I blamed the change on the diminishing state of education in the United States. However, when I was reminded of the term Eternal September, I started to blame two related issues: everybody and their grandmother is now online and Internet forums are more centralized. The early Internet was broken up into a large number of small Usenet groups, forums, and chatrooms. Most of those were topical so the people who joined usually already had an interest and at least a basic understanding of the group’s, forum’s, or chatroom’s topic. Today it’s not uncommon for a random user to find a Facebook group because it appeared on their Timeline when one of their friends made a comment in it. That random user may have no understanding of the group’s topic, but they end up posting a comment to the thread because they saw it on their Timeline and disagreed with something another user posted.