Sennheiser HD 429s

Despite the relatively large number of headphones Sennheiser has out on the market at any given time, the German audio company manages to maintain an impressive standard of quality. The HD 429s, at $89.95 (direct), can be considered a budget headphone option in Sennheiser's deep lineup. Its volume control-free remote, dearth of accessories, and inability to fold down or collapse for easy storage and packing are not ideal, but it's easy to forget when these lightweight, comfortable headphones are playing your favorite music. Simply put, they sound excellent for this price range. The HD 429s is a pair that can afford to skimp on extras because it sounds so good for the price, bringing rich bass and clear highs to the sub-$100 range.

Design
The HD 429s's?design is reminiscent of the Sennheiser HD 558, with large earcups featuring a small Sennheiser logo in the center?and not much else. The material on the edge of the cups and the headband is matte black plastic, with padding that is comfortable despite not feeling very plush to the touch. There's a bit of flexibility to the angle of the earcups, too, that helps the comfort factor, but the primary reason for the comfort: The HD 429s is an extremely lightweight headphone pair.?

The thin black audio cable descends from the left earcup and ends around the upper chest where it can either be plugged into a player that is clipped onto or sitting in a pocket, or plugged into a longer cable that has a built-in microphone and remote. The compartment housing the remote also has a shirt clip on it, and all the cables terminate in 3.5mm?there's an adapter for Nokia-style headphone jacks.

Other than that, the HD 429s has no included accessories, which is a bit surprising even in the sub-$100 price category. There's no carrying pouch or case, nor do the headphones fold down flat, so stowing them for travel might prove to be a bit of a hassle.?

Call clarity through the inline mic is about what you should expect?your call partner will hear you just fine and understand you, but it will still sound like a low-fidelity cell phone call. The single-button remote controls playback and track navigation (depending on how many taps you give it), but there is, disappointingly, no volume control, which should be a given in this price range. Of course, the lack of volume control ensures compatibility with a wider range of phones, but you could always include multiple cables or options to buy different cables on the same headphone pair?none of which are options here.

Performance
On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife's "Silent Shout," the HD 429s delivers serious deep bass without going overboard. At maximum, unwise listening levels, the HD 249s doesn't distort on tracks like this, although the earcups vibrate so much, it feels as though it's teetering on the edge. At normal listening levels, the headphones still produce plenty of low frequency rumble, but they do so without going overboard, and the balance with the highs is ideal.

A better insight to the HD 429s's sound signature is gained when listening to Bill Callahan's "Drover." Often, a headphone pair with deep bass response achieves it by boosting the lows too much, almost across the board, so that the sub-bass frequencies get boosted as much as, say, the low-mids in a male baritone voice. This is rarely a good thing, and the HD 429s avoids it?instead of delivering Callahan's vocals in an bass-heavy manner, with dulled edges, we get the crisp high-mid response that keeps his vocals in the forefront of the mix. There's plenty of depth to his baritone voice, but it doesn't overwhelm the mix, and the drums on this track sound natural, rather than bogged down with too much bass. There's low-end here, but there are crisp high-mids and highs to match it.

On Jay-Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild," the kick drum loop's attack gets the right amount of attention in the high-mids. Nothing is boosted so much that the attack sounds too sharp or harsh, but it has a nice crunch to it that's complimented by the low-end presence of the kick's sustain. The sub-bass synth hits that dance around the drum loop are delivered with a richness that does them justice?bass fiends will find them lacking, and purists may feel they're a bit boosted. For those of us who like a little bit of bass with our crisp highs?without everything turning to a lopsided, muddy mess?the HD 429s delivers.

Classical tracks, like John Adams' "The Chairman Dances," often seem to naturally cede the spotlight to the instruments in the high-mid to high frequency range, like higher register strings and brass, when played through pairs that are not bass-heavy and unbalanced. The HD 429s falls into this category?much of its bass presence serves the sub-bass realm, where many classical tracks have little content aside from some percussion hits and lower strings and brass at their lowest. The lower register instruments in this piece get a bit of added richness, but the focus is squarely on the mids-to-highs here. So, on classical tracks, the HD 429s feels fairly close to a flat response pair, whereas it packs a little more oomph on modern mixes that boost the bass. And that's probably the best way to think of it: These headphones give you the deep bass when it's in the mix, and don't invent it when it's not.

If big bass, a bit beyond what the HD 429s brings, is what you're after, consider the Skullcandy Navigator. For the price, it won't disappoint you and doesn't distort, but you sacrifice overall balance. If you have more room in your budget and like the idea of a balanced pair that can reproduce deep lows when called upon, both the Logitech UE 4000 and the Sennheiser HD 280 Pro are fine options. And if all of these are more expensive than what you're looking for, the Skullcandy Hesh 2 offers decent balance and solid bass response for far less money.

At $90, the Sennheiser HD 429s is a solid deal?it delivers excellent audio performance in a comfortable fit. It's lacking in the extras department, and the remote and un-foldable design aren't the most user-friendly decisions. But if you want a fantastic-sounding headphone pair and couldn't care less about the extras, the HD 429s will not disappoint.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/pwT_vg3BEUk/0,2817,2420570,00.asp

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Wallenda to cross gorge near Grand Canyon on wire

SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) ? Nik Wallenda, the Florida-based daredevil, acrobat and heir to the famed Flying Wallendas circus family, is afraid of only one thing.

"I would say the only thing I fear is God," said the 34-year-old Wallenda.

He certainly had no fear of walking across Niagara Falls on a tightrope, riding a bike on a high wire 260 feet above the ground or hanging from a hovering helicopter by his teeth.

On Sunday, Wallenda will attempt an even more ambitious feat, even for a man who was born into a family of risk-takers.

He will bid to walk on a tightrope stretched across the Little Colorado River Gorge near the Grand Canyon. The event, which will be broadcast on live television at 8 p.m. EDT on Sunday with a 10 second delay, will take place on the Navajo reservation near Cameron, outside the boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park.

Wallenda will walk a third of a mile across a wire suspended 1,500 feet above the river. (In comparison, the Empire State Building in New York City is 1,454 feet high).

"I respect deeply what I do and realize there's a lot of danger in it," he acknowledged on a recent day in his Florida hometown of Sarasota.

Wallenda, who is married and has three children, always says a prayer with his family prior to stepping onto the wire.

The 34-year-old is a seventh-generation high-wire artist and is part of the famous "Flying Wallendas" circus family ? a clan that is no stranger to death-defying feats and great tragedy.

His great-grandfather, Karl Wallenda, fell during a performance in Puerto Rico and died at the age of 73. Several other family members, including a cousin and an uncle, have perished while performing wire walking stunts.

Nik Wallenda, who was born a year after his great-grandfather died, began wire walking at the age of 2, on a 2-foot high stretched rope. He grew up performing with his family and as a teen, had an epiphany.

"It's an honor to be carrying on a tradition that my family started over 200 years ago," Wallenda said during a news conference on a recent day in Florida. "When I turned 19, I told my family I was going to set out to make sure everyone in the world knew who the Wallendas were again."

Over the years, Wallenda has performed some dangerous stunts, but his walk across Niagara Falls in June of 2012 placed him firmly in celebrity territory.

Wallenda became the first person to walk on a tightrope 1,800 feet across the mist-fogged brink of the roaring falls separating the U.S. and Canada.

Other daredevils had wire-walked over the Niagara River but farther downstream and not since 1896.

Niagara Falls, Wallenda said, was a dream of his. So is the Grand Canyon.

But here's the difference between the two stunts: ABC televised the walk and insisted Wallenda use a tether to keep him from falling in the river. Wallenda said he agreed because he wasn't willing to lose the chance to perform the walk.

On Sunday, the Discovery Channel will televise the walk, but Wallenda won't wear a tether. There won't be a safety net, either.

He anticipates it will take him about 30 minutes to cross the chasm.

For the last two weeks, Wallenda ? who has a boyish face, strawberry blonde hair and a muscular build ? has been practicing in front of crowds in his hometown of Sarasota.

Each morning and evening, he glides across a two-inch cable strung on the banks of a river. Hundreds of his local fans show up every day to watch, and talk ? Wallenda usually will stop and sit on the wire and take questions from his fans from high above.

"I'm just fascinated by the movement, the way he walks," said Loy Barker, a Sarasota resident who watched one of Wallenda's practice sessions. "He's just an amazing athlete."

Wallenda has tried to simulate different conditions he might face while crossing the gorge.

"It's very important that I train on a cable that simulates the weight, the feeling, the movement of the cable, the way it will move under my feet," he said. "We have also brought wind machines out. I've walked in 52 mile an hour gusts during Tropical Storm Andrea, with a torrential downpour. And we also brought out wind machines where we simulated 45-55 mile per hour gusts. Then I also walked in 91-mile an hour winds that day."

Only one thing could halt the planned wire walk, he says: lightning detected within a 15-mile radius of the wire.

In the meantime, he's training physically and mentally. Wallenda said the adrenaline has "kicked in" and that he's anxious to be suspended with only a 2-inch-cable below his feet.

"I absolutely will look down," he said. "And I'll enjoy the view."

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On the Web: http://skywire.discovery.com/

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Follow Tamara Lush on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tamaralush

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/wallenda-cross-gorge-near-grand-canyon-wire-074701429.html

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Congress struggles with ending the war in Afghanistan

Visitors gather around President Barack Obama, center, during his visit to Arlington on Memorial Day 2013. (Pablo??The war in Iraq is over, everybody knows that. ?I promised to end the war in Iraq?and I did? was one of President Barack Obama?s best-received stump speech applause lines last year.

Except it?s not. First, most obviously, because bombings and other acts of violence have killed more than 2,000 people there this year, as detailed in this amazing Agence France-Presse analysis. Pressed on that point last year by Yahoo News, White House press secretary Jay Carney said: "The president promised to responsibly end our war in Iraq, the United States military operation in Iraq. He did that and our troops came home."

Except that "our war" isn't technically over either: The "Authorization for Use of Military Force" in Iraq, signed into law on Oct. 16, 2002, is still the law of the land. (H/t to independent national-security writer Marcy Wheeler, who follows this issue?and many others?closely.)

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is expected to offer legislation this year to repeal the Iraq AUMF. And he's expected to fail?his previous attempt, in November 2011, was routed in a 30-67 vote. (Among those voting no: then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the current secretary of state.)

Asked whether Obama favored repealing the Iraq AUMF, the White House had no response at the time this post was published.

Obama made no mention of repealing the Iraq AUMF in a sweeping national security speech on May 23. But he made a case for ending the "perpetual wartime footing" against terrorism?and that means revising a separate AUMF, the founding document of the war on terrorism adopted immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes.

That one, signed into law Sept. 18, 2001, gave then-President George W. Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan. But both he and Obama have used its vague wording to justify a wide range of actions.

"Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don?t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states," Obama said in his speech, arguing the time has come to wind down the global war on terror.

"This war, like all wars, must end," he said.

Enter Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California. Schiff, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, has introduced legislation to repeal the Afghanistan AUMF on Jan. 1, 2015?when America's combat troops are supposed to be out of that war-torn country. The problem, he explained to Yahoo News, is coming up with something to replace it.

"There's a lot of bipartisan recognition that we can't continue to rely on this," said Schiff, who has started to seek co-sponsors for his bill. "There's a lot less consensus about what should come after."

Some lawmakers want a much broader AUMF that explicitly expands the list of groups that can be targeted, perhaps to include Iran-backed Hezbollah, Schiff said.

Some believe "we should not have any further authorization" and instead should "use the criminal justice system" the way it was before Sept. 11, 2001, Schiff said, adding that some want a new AUMF "more narrowly tailored to the present threat."

The uncertainty about the post-AUMF legal framework is a "risk" and "the biggest obstacle" to the legislation, Schiff told Yahoo News.

Still, setting a Jan. 1, 2015, sunset date "gives us about 18 months to work with the administration," he said. "I have been working with" the administration in the sense of consulting top officials to find out what they think is necessary, Schiff said.

But "we can't abdicate our responsibility," he said. Without the pressure of a sunset date, "Congress will do what it does best, which is essentially kick the can down the road.

"We?re such a dysfunctional body," he said.

Where does Schiff stand? "It may be necessary to have a further authorization after 2014, but we should also look at extending the capacity of our criminal law system," he said. "It may very well be necessary, but should be much more narrowly constrained."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/congress-struggles-ending-war-afghanistan-iraq-213153386.html

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Channel Surfing: Are Dry Ice Sleds Carving the Surface of Mars?

Researchers have found that chunks of dry ice, jetting around on cushions of gas, may be responsible for mysterious channels on the Martian surface

By Christopher Crockett

Linear gullies on Mars Gullies like these appear on pole-facing slopes at mid-latitudes on Mars. Are chunks of dry ice carving them? Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

• 

  Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...

  Read More??

Some things are uniquely Martian. And dry ice hovercraft may be one of them.

For 10 years, scientists have been trying to understand what causes ?linear gullies? on Mars?long, thin canals carved into sandy slopes and crater walls. Flowing water doesn?t quite work as an explanation. Water should carry rocks and dirt downstream, dumping it in a fan-shaped apron at the bottom. But these gullies don?t have debris deposits. They abruptly stop.

New gullies appear?and old ones grow?every spring as the winter ice thaws. And some researchers noticed that the sinuous, leveed ditches looked like trails carved by blocks sliding down the hills. That led astronomers to consider an intriguing possibility for the gullies? origin: chunks of dry ice?frozen carbon dioxide?plowing through the sand while riding cushions of gas. But the idea had never been tested.

Researchers at NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) spent a couple of days in Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park in Utah to see if ice, on its own, could carve out a furrow on the shallow slopes. Water ice?the same stuff you put in your lemonade?didn?t do much. Mostly, it just melted. The dry ice, however, came alive. ?The dry ice behaved dramatically different,? says JPL systems engineer Serina Diniega, lead author on a paper in Icarus. ?The water ice blocks didn?t move at all, but the dry ice just took off!? After a small nudge, the dry ice glided down the dune, blowing away sand as it did. When the block stopped, the sand beneath it writhed as jets of carbon dioxide escaped from under the ice. ?We were surprised,? she adds.

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?

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Dry ice doesn?t melt; that?s what makes it ?dry.? Instead, it changes from a solid to a gas via sublimation. And that?s the secret ingredient. The gas collects in a very thin, flat bubble under the block. Like a hovercraft, the gas cushion makes the ice highly mobile. Something similar happens when you flick water onto a hot pan: the bubbles dance around on miniature cushions of steam.

Frozen CO2 is prevalent on Mars. During the Martian winter the polar caps grow as carbon dioxide condenses out of the atmosphere. Ice sheets form a couple of meters thick. In the spring the ice breaks up. Blocks jutting out from overhangs and crater lips, weakened by warming temperatures, can break off and land on the shallow slopes below. The fall serves the same purpose as the nudge from the researchers?it gets the blocks going. From here, sublimation takes over and the ice rides its way to the bottom of the hill, carving out a groove as it goes.

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dry-ice-martian-gullies

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Colton Haynes HOMO MAGAZINE: FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK & TWITTER

Colton Haynes

HOMO MAGAZINE: FOLLOW US ON?FACEBOOK?&?TWITTER

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Kate Middleton Baby: Gender Still Secret, Even For the Couple!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/06/kate-middleton-baby-gender-secret-even-from-the-couple/

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98% Before Midnight

All Critics (131) | Top Critics (38) | Fresh (127) | Rotten (3)

Hawke and Delpy remain as charming as ever, and their combined goofiness is more endearing than annoying.

Love is messy here, life cannot be controlled, satisfaction is far from guaranteed. Romance is rocky at best. But romance still is.

Though "Before Midnight" is often uncomfortable to watch, it's never less than mesmerizing - and ultimately, a joy to walk with this prickly but fascinating couple again.

"Before Midnight" is heartbreaking, but not because of Jesse and Celine. It's the filmmakers' passions that seem to have cooled.

Before Midnight is fascinating to watch, and so long as Celine and Jesse are communicating, there's still hope.

How (Jesse and Celine) try to rekindle that flame is what drives Midnight, a film that feels so authentic it's like overhearing a conversation you're not sure you should be hearing.

Hawke and Delpy, who are both credited on the script too, have never found co-stars to bounce off more nimbly or bring out richer nuances in their acting.

The performances and dialogue are wonderfully naturalistic; a reminder that the best special effects are often the cheapest.

Before Midnight is about the nature of long-term relationships, and the way love deepens and grows but also finds itself subject to the complications of maturity. Smart, insightful, and poignant.

For those who witnessed Jesse and Celine's tentative getting together as inter railing students almost twenty years ago, it's reassuring to see them still in love.

Brilliantly directed, superbly written and impeccably acted, this is a thoroughly enjoyable, thought-provoking and emotionally engaging drama that perfectly complements the previous two films.

It remains as engaging, illuminating, honest and funny as its predecessor; here's hoping we revisit Jesse and C?line in another decade or so.

Nine-year gaps between films would sink a studio franchise, but the unforgiving impact of time and the slipperiness of its mysterious mental record, memory, are the very subjects of 'Before Midnight.'

Contains more shrewd and candid insights than many Hollywood midlife crisis dramas.

A couple persistently digging at each other might have been insufferable to watch except that Hawke and Delpy manage to be goofy, funny, witty and charming, even while they're fighting.

A bit tarter than its predecessors, but not skimping on their woozy, chatty charm, this perfectly played, gently incisive film is a welcome new chapter in one of cinema's most beguiling ongoing romances.

Director Richard Linklater's life-affirming Before trilogy is the Lord of the Rings of the art-house experience, the Toy Story of the American indie movement.

Whatever wins Best Picture for 2013 ... long after that film's glory fades, actors, writers, cinephiles, and lovers will still lavish Before Midnight with praise.

It's a brutal parade of heartbreak and mind-rake that leaves you curled up and wound up in a ball, covering your eyes but peeking through parted fingers.

"Before Midnight" presents a paradox: It's the best entry in director Richard Linklater's romantic trilogy, but it's also the first in the series that doesn't leave me dying to know what happens next.

Awesome, authentic examination of a constantly evolving romantic relationship, it's a definite 'must see' for adult audiences.

Before Midnight is a beautiful reminder that a movie with nothing more than two people talking can have just as many explosions and fireworks as any high-tech summer blockbuster.

Before Midnight understands that when love falters it isn't with a bang but a long protracted sigh. It's a perceptive and humbling view of romance that debunks all notions of fairy tale endings.

...We are not likely to get a more thoughtful or thought-provoking film than Before Midnight.

"Before Midnight" puts us in the same position with Jesse and Celine that they are in with each other. The romantic idealism has evaporated, and now we see them for who they are - real, deeply flawed, sometimes selfish people. Can we still love them?

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/before_midnight_2013/

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