Bet you thought I forgot about this series, huh? Not so: I needed a little time to take a broader look at the field. (Click here for Part 1 and Part 2.) Someone told me that a lot of 1930s/40s/50s pulps were being scanned and posted on Usenet at alt.binaries.pictures.vintage.magazines, so I went up there [...]
Posts under ‘Ideas & Analysis’
Drink Hard, Live Longer
Judging by the number of times I’ve seen links to it online yesterday and today, the liveliest Web story in recent memory is an item suggesting that heavy drinkers live longer than nondrinkers. The curve isn’t linear; moderate drinkers live longer than both heavy drinkers and nondrinkers. The WTF moment lies entirely in the correlation [...]
The Last Box
We moved here from Arizona in 2003, and (as usual) it took us literally years to unpack everything. Some stuff was not meant to be unpacked, really–I left my vinyl collection and 8″ reel-to-reel mix tapes in boxes on the big shelf in the mechanical room, knowing they’d be there if I needed them but [...]
At the Sign of the Green Cross
The closest retail cluster to our house (a mile and a half down the hill) has a fair number of vacant storefronts, but the last time Carol and I went down for lunch at China Wok, we noticed that the storefront right next to the restaurant was no longer vacant. Who had moved in was [...]
Rant: Higgsism and the Moral Dimension of Health
As most of you know (or can guess) I’m not content to accept received opinions about things like health insurance reform. I’ve been researching it and working it out for myself for a couple of years now. Most of the discussion online has been tribalist bullshit and not particularly useful, but I’ve managed to define [...]
What Dogs Gave Us
We domesticated dogs. And dogs, in return, made human civilization possible. Work with me here. A lot of my recent reading has been about human origins, stemming from my fascination with Homo Neanderthalis and what became of him. Two books of note: The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond (1993) and Before the Dawn by Nicholas [...]
App Inventor for Android
Whoa. Yesterday morning Google took the wraps off App Inventor, a visual development environment for the Android mobile OS. I’m still trying to slurp from the firehose, even though I’m finding that all the hoses have basically the same information, and in truth not a great deal of that. But I’ll tell you right now: [...]
Realtime Cloud Logging to Spot Band Openings
(Note: This is a total ham radio geek-out entry, so if such things make your eyes glaze over, be advised that there’s an extreme glaze warning in effect until at least tomorrow morning.) Anyway. I stumbled on a band opening yesterday by accident: I scanned the 6 meter band, expecting its usual near-silence, and instead [...]
Query By Sketching
Earlier today, while Carol and I were out on an errands run, we were stopped for a light behind a beat-up pickup truck. On the back of the truck was an emblem on a sticker, and Carol asked me what it was. And in truth, I don’t know, though I’ve seen it a time or [...]
Coding vs. Compiling EPubs
It’s always unsettling to admit that the other side has a point, but it’s good practice and often absolutely necessary. I am the VDM guy, after all, and I’ve never been one for hand-coding what can be generated automatically. As I’ve mentioned here earlier, an awful lot of people take their text and hand-code an [...]