So here I am on Sunday afternoon, in at the office hoping to get some work done without the din of the jackhammers. Except that today’s the day that Nathan has decided to construct some sort of sailboat out of 2x4s in the back yard, 4 feet from my office window. Which requires use of Noisy Power Tools.

Try as I might, thus, I cannot escape the din. I might as well fold and move to New York City and set up on the sidewalk. Sigh.

This project, an “Animated Atlas of Flight Traffic Over North America,” produces oddly compelling time-lapse animations of flights over North America. Look at the sample animation of Atlanta airport traffic.

The more I peel off the layers of the new Plazer application for OS X, the more I like. Truth be told, the original Plazes Launcher for the Mac didn’t have any layers to peel; the Plazer, though, is a bona fide Mac app with lots of nice touches. My favourite so far is this:

No more “left the Launcher running at the office so everybody thinks that I’m there and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

The big Plazes challenge for me now is to convince other locals of its value. While it’s proved an excellent tool to locate Cynthia Dunsford, its practical utility as a general purpose “find my friends and family” tool has been limited by slow uptake (or uptake and then opt out). If you’re interested in experimenting with Plazes, but need an overview (complete with what the privacy implications are), get in touch.

I’m happy to report that we’ve located housing in Copenhagen. Thanks to everyone who helped with the search; craigslist provided the lead that panned out.

The jackhammers are back at it again today. Dennis upstairs said last night that the silver lining the the cacophony is that when the knock off at the end of the day it seems more silent than usual.

I’ve still received no reply to my email to Les Parsons at CADC, but I did receive an encouraging email from the City of Charlottetown Planning Department indicating that they would bring the matter forward to CADC on our behalf.

David from Calgary suggested that I try to contact the Project Manager for the work, reasoning that it’s always in a contractor’s best interests to maintain good community relations. I tried to find out who’s doing the work through the Construction Association of PEI, but they told me that because the work wasn’t put to tender (!), they have no record of this; they suggested I contact CADC.

More as the hammering continues…

My friends over at Plazes have released new ‘launcher’ applications for Windows and Mac — now rebranded Plazers. You can download them now.

The new application is considerably more capable than the old “Plazes Launcher,” and it does more than just “launch” you with Plazes, it has built-in search tools:

The menu-bar icon also has a lot more information, including a map showing the current Plazes. Kudos to the Plazes team for the sweetness.

Several weeks ago the CBC here in Prince Edward Island ran an excellent series of radio and television pieces called Is there a doctor in the house?. This is the kind of “integration” of radio and television that’s always talked about when “synergy” rears its head around the CBC table. Sometimes — like with the old “big picture” projects of olde — this seemed like an annoyance for reporters more than an opportunity; in this case it worked, and it worked extremely well. Perhaps because it was a local effort not saddled by a national agenda?

There are audio and video excerpts on the CBC website; several of them feature our own family physician, Dr. Pauline Champion.

I spend an inordinate amount of my spare cycles thinking about latitude and longitude. Today I went looking for some ballpark figure to use that would let me approximate measurement in degrees, minutes and seconds of latitude in miles. I was intrigued to find that:

The nautical mile was historically defined as a minute of arc along a great circle of the Earth.

An extremely helpful forum post tells more of the story.

Special bonus revelation: speed measured in knots is really just speed measured in nautical miles per hour.

Stay tuned for picas, points and agate lines.

The sound of silence — CNET reviews noise canceling headphones. Cost, including shipping and taxes, of the Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones to Prince Edward Island: $503.

Update: someone upstairs just bought a pair of the QuietComforts for $267 on eBay.

The City of Vancouver has a program called SoundSmart that provides comprehensive urban noise information, including:

In our daily lives we are rarely exposed to sound levels near either end of our huge (0 to 130 dBA) audible range. Typically we encounter noise levels between about 20 and 30 dBA (a faint whisper or night-time background noise in a quiet suburban bedroom) and 100 dBA (unmuffled motorcycle or jackhammer operating nearby). Typical noise levels experienced include:

• 40 to 50 dBA in a general office situation.
• 60 dBA when talking normally to someone 1 to 2 m away.
• 65 to 75 dBA when riding in a car at highway speeds.
• 85 to 95 dBA while cutting the grass with power mower.

Roughly speaking, each 10 dBA increase in sound level corresponds to a “doubling of subjective loudness” so that, for example, jackhammer noise at 110 dBA would typically be judged to be 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16 times as loud as the inside of a car at 70 dBA.

In other words, I’m 64 times more likely to go crazy from noise today than I was on Sunday.