- That’ll leave a mark, Mark: Unsealed emails indicate that Meta downloaded 81.7 terabytes of pirated books from sites like Anna’s Archive and LibGen. Why? To train their AIs. Most people would consider that a violation of copyright law all by itself apart from seeding the monster files while torrenting them.
- After hearing how bad eggs are for your cardiovascular health for literally decades, new research on the over-70 set finds that people in that age bracket who eat eggs six or seven days a week see a 29% reduction in heart disease. I have an extra-large egg every morning (I used to have two, until I realized one would carry me to lunch) and am much relieved. Carbs are the enemy. Eggs are your allies.
- Warner Brothers has dropped more than 30 of its feature-length films on YouTube without charge, including Waiting for Guffman and Oh, God! Note that this isn’t the YouTube paid service, but just plain, ordinary free YouTube. People wonder why, though I’d guess that WB is trying to establish itself as “the good guy” vis-a-vis old content, unlike The Mouse House, which cannot let anything go no matter how old or bad it is.
- As my regular readers know, I’m not much of a fan of AI—but I am a huge fan of nuclear power. What AI seems best at right now is persuading power utilities to put unused (“zombie”) nuclear plants back online, or even—egad!—building new ones. TechCrunch has a decent story. Me? More AI! More AI!
- I remember reading about this, um, eccentric—who claimed alien visitation and is now being sued by investors who were persuaded that he had invented an antigravity machine. Here’s the whole long-form story, from Bloomberg.
- Lazarus 3.8, a bugfix release, is now available. Worth it. Really. Pascal isn’t dead.
- From robocop to rolocop: Spherical Chinese robots are hitting Chinese streets to assist police in chasing crooks and breaking up riots. One plus: They’re pretty rugged. I can think of some minuses, and I’ll bet you can too.
- Here’s a world map showing what the commonest last name is in every country on Earth. Here? Smith. Same in Canada, Australia, and the UK. Who could have guessed?
- In the first cut of Google’s AI Super Bowl ad, the ad claimed that Gouda cheese represents from 50 to 60 percent of all cheese consumed here on Earth. They fixed it with a little non-artificial intelligence, heh. Ok, one could argue the point, since a lot of stuff labeled “cheese” isn’t really cheese as I understand the term—but even Velveeta doesn’t have numbers like that. Come for the football, stay for the Super Bowl AI hallucination about…cheese.
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Christmas Lots
- Be careful with your art and writing, making sure it can’t be misconstrued. (See above.) In the original draft of my story “Whale Meat” (which I wrote when I was 18) I used the word “frot” as the name of a magical power. I thought I invented the word. A friend later took me aside and told me what “frot” meant. I gulped and changed it to “zot.”
- My old friend Lee Hart took a forgotten 1844 Charles Dickens Christmas story, trimmed it down some, and modernized some Victorian archaisms. It’s free and very much worth reading. The Chimes is a short novel (about 20,000 words) so budget some time. I did a copy/paste into a Word .docx, so I could control the type size for the sake of these old eyes.
- While we’re talking Christmas stories, just a reminder that my Christmas story “The Camel’s Question” is still available for 99c on Amazon. More on the story in this entry from a few days back.
- While troubleshooting my Lionel ZW train transformer, I ran across a nice article on the ZW, which Lionel sold from 1948 to 1966. I may try to repair my ZW, though it won’t happen in time for Christmas this year. Or I may just hunt around on eBay until I find another one.
- (Not Christmas, but timely): The Altair 8800 personal computer, the one that began the desktop computer revolution, went on the market 50 years ago last Thursday, on December 19, 1974. I found it at the same site with the ZW article. Other interesting stuff there too.
- Our favorite spiked egg nog is Van Der Haute Egg Nog Traditional. Review here. We get it from Safeway, because Total Wine doesn’t carry it, nor Fry’s, though I won’t claim that no Kroger grocery does. Jewel-Osco carries it, if that’s your local store.
- If you’re mulling the issue of spiced holiday wines, consider Firebrand Spiced Red Wine, which Total Wine carries. It’s a sweet red with cinnamon, vanilla and fruit flavors that most people would consider a dessert wine. There is no vintage year on the label, which for wines of this sort really isn’t an issue.
- Sarah Hoyt recently published a book of four SF-flavored Christmas stories, called Christmas in the Stars. $2.99 on Kindle. I bought it but haven’t read it yet, although I’ve always enjoyed Sarah’s writing. And it’s making me wonder if there’s an AI SF story I could spin about Christmas. I haven’t written a short story since 2008, so it’s about time.
- Some of my older readers will know why lead tinsel was a forbidden pleasure back in the 50s and 60s. Well, you can buy it on eBay. Just search for “lead tinsel.” No shortage of choices. (It seems like the Germans may still use it!)
Odd Lots
- PLAUD recently announced their NotePin, a little AI device that hangs from a string around your neck. (I assume you could clip one to your lapel, which is what I would do.) I wrote about that concept in my SF and my magazine between 1984-1992. I called them "jiminies" after Pinocchio’s little advisor. Nice to see it become real!
- This is clever as hell: A sizeable chicken coop without a floor that moves to a new grassy spot in the pasture every day and thus gives chickens fresh grass, fresh bugs, and exercise. Some are even solar powered, wow.
- Here’s yet another reason to go low-carb and especially low-sugar: a study showing that high-sugar diets may inhibit neuron growth in the brain. I’ve been doing low-carb/sugar for 27 years now. I sure hope this study is correct!
- Wegovy and similar weight-loss drugs may treat alcoholism and opioid addiction. More research needed, obviously, but boy, that would be HUGE if proven.
- Lazarus 3.6 is now out. Built with FPC 3.2.2. Bugfix release, but why not have the latest?
- The Moon is getting its own time zone—or at least a system of standard time that would greatly help calculations of lunar missions. It’s made complicated by the fact that gravitational time dilation is involved; i.e., the gravity of the moon is less than Earth’s gravity, which makes a lunar second shorter than an Earth second. Not much, but at the speeds of spacecraft, that tiny difference can really mess up a mission. [Note well: I got this wrong the first time, and corrected the error here. Alex Dillard pointed out my error and provided a long and detailed explanation of the problem in the comments. Definitely read his comment!]
- Roy Harvey sent me a link to a BBC article about “knocker uppers,” the people who woke people up to go to work during the British industrial revolution by tapping on their windows with a long pole (especially for upper stories) or (egad) with little hammers. I guess the British never knew that “knocked up” meant “got pregnant” out here in the Colonies.
- From my friend Pete comes a report of a study indicating that high cholesterol isn’t a heart disease risk if you keep your diet low in carbs and sugar. I’ve heard that in a few other places, but this is a real study, and I sure hope it’s true, as I’ve been low carb/sugar now for over 25 years.
- Charlie Martin recently posted a number of superb astrophotos, including a picture of hurricane Milton from orbit. I can call them superb because astronomy has been a hobby of mine for over sixty years. Don’t miss it.
- Carol and I did see comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from our front yard, but it was a bare smudge by naked eye, and only showed a trace of coma in binoculars. Yes, we live in Phoenix and light pollution can be intense here. That said, I’m pretty sure that comet Hale-Bopp (1997) and Hyakutake (1996) were lots brighter, and Hale-Bopp was visible for a very long time as comet appearances go.
Odd Lots
- It’s a little late but there’s still time to see it: Tonight will be the full Moon, and also a partial lunar eclipse. 7:45 PM makes it about ideal for the Pacific and Arizona time zone, with all the usual adjustments for Mountain, Central and Eastern.
- Scott Pinsker posted an article on PJMedia back on September 9th, about dogs allowing humans to out-compete Neanderthals. I wrote about that back in 2010: Dogs were alarm systems that made dawn raids ineffective. Lacking dogs, Neanderthals may have simply dawn-raided themselves into extinction.
- I’m looking for a book that defines terms and instruments used in classical music. Andante, allegro non troppo, adagio, the viola, the celesta, and that instrument consisting of a series of pieces of metal tubing hung from strings under a bar, whose name I just cannot recall. A lot of that stuff can be found online, but, well, I’m just partial to books. If you have one that you like, please mention it in a comment.
- The blinking cursor on our computer screens is now 54 years old. Here’s a short history of how it came about.
- It’s been a pretty sparse hurricane season, with the single exception of Beryl. Right now on NOAA’s hurricane map there is a dying hurricane in Arkansas, one named tropical storm, Gordon, and two disturbances with less than 40% chance of becoming cyclonic. We’re halfway through hurricane season, and not much has been happening. My take: predicting a hurricane season’s severity is a fool’s model. Too much chaos and butterfly effect. It could get worse any time. Or it might not. We won’t know until we get there.
- Who had this on their 2024 bingo cards? Good ‘ol Yellow #5 dye, in large quantities, makes living tissue temporarily transparent. Scientists have created temporarily transparent mice. No human trials have happened as yet. So go easy on those Cheetos, ok?
- This is boggling but perhaps inevitable, assuming it’s true—and I’m skeptical: A chemhacker group is creating software and desktop labware allowing people to synthesize expensive prescription medications at home. An $800 pill becomes a $1 pill. Yes, there are risks, but if you’re dying for lack of an expensive drug, well…
- Over on City Journal Michael Totten has a long-form meditation on Liu Cixin’s SF trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past that bears on the Fermi Paradox and the question of whether we should actively seek out alien life–or hide from it. A little outside what I see in City Journal, but well-worth reading.
Odd Lots
- The Sun spat out an X5.8 flare last night, the strongest of this solar cycle so far. I went out in the back yard and looked northeast, and damned if I didn’t catch fleeting glimpses of faint flickering light. Was too faint to discern color, but if it was an aurora, seeing it from Phoenix must be some kind of record.
- If you don’t have a link to the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, bookmark it. I suspect that they’re going to have a lot to say during the solar maximum that’s now bearing down on us.
- I’m not expecting a Carrington-class event, but my longwire, by default, is switched to my engineered ground. I’m of two minds about listening to the low bands (or lack of low bands) while this storm is underway. 77 feet of wire is more than enough to develop enough voltage to spark with a strong enough coronal mass ejection. I don’t want to fry the front end of my IC-736.
- From the "That’s a Very Low Bar" Department: AIs can pretend to be stupider than they actually are. Forgive me if I say that they may be able to do it, but they’ll be BAD at it. Still, could AI’s "four-finger problem" be a joke on us? (By that I mean the tendency of AIs not to “know” how many fingers or toes a human being has.)
- Francis Turner’s opinions on LLM-style AI pretty much map to mine, and his Substack essay on the topic is a must read.
- I ran across an intriguing piece of music listening to KBAQ, our local classical station. It’s “Sky Blue After Rain” by Joseph Curiale, and consists of a piano and a Chinese erhu 2-stringed violin alternating with full orchestra. The piece is short (4:48) punchy, melodic, and when the orchestra picks it up, energetic. You can hear it on YouTube. Be sure to listen to the whole thing, even if the erhu grates on you. The orchestral part is worth it.
- Here’s a good short article explaining how cloud levels help regulate Earth’s temperatures.
- The highest observatory on Earth is now open for business, atop Cerro Chajnantor mountain in the Chilean Andes. The observatory was designed to capture infrared images with its boggling 6.5 meter (22 feet) clear aperture telescope.
- I have a robot dog with a 9mm gun in the (for now) dormant version of The Molten Flesh. What I didn’t imagine was a robot dog with a built-in flamethrower and laser targeting.
- While I was writing this entry, I had an idea: What if I unplug my antenna from the Icom and in its place on my antenna switch, put a coax plug with an NE2 neon bulb soldered across the connector. Well, it didn’t take but ten minutes (I’ve got plenty of neon bulbs and PL-259s) and the experiment is in place. Tonight when it gets dark I’m going to spend a little time out there in the garage, watching that NE-2.
Odd Lots
- Alas, we have lost my favorite country music star, Toby Keith, of stomach cancer, at 62. He had lots of hits, but may be most famous for “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” the most-played country song of the 1990s. (And if you’ve never seen my filk “Should’ve Been a Jedi,” you can find it here.) Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.
- Ever heard of Venus’ moon Zoozve? You say Venus doesn’t have any moons? Well…it’s complicated. And interesting. Not to mention funny as hell.
- Orkin (the bug people) posted a list of the top 50 US cities for bedbug infestations. My home town is #1. My current metro isn’t even on the list. I guess I chose wisely.
- February is National Grapefruit Month, and today is National Fettuccine Alfredo day. Alas, my birthday is National Mud Day—granting that when I was a kid, I played happily in the mud. How do I know such important things? Of course: There’s a website for it. Select a day, week, or month, and who knows what people will be celebrating?
- Well, it’s not exactly a flying car, but…it’ll do, it’ll do.
- Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes were gathered into a botnet that tormented Swiss servers with DDOS attacks. Uggh. My toothbrush is smart enough to be dumb. And hey, it smells like Pepsodent. Can’t beat that!
- Trout gonads can cure baldness when injected into your head. So just eating the trout doesn’t work? Bummer. I’m out.
Odd Lots
- Happy New Year, gang! My prediction: 2024’s gonna to be a wild ride across the board. If popcorn weren’t so fattening I’d buy a pile of it.
- The Quadrantids meteor shower is tonight. The shower’s characteristic behavior is having a brief peak but an intense one. The predicted time of the peak is 7:53 AM EST, which would be 6:53 CST and 5:53 MST on 1/4/2024. That may sound awfully early to some of my night-owl readers, but Dash typically wakes us up by that time. I intend to be out watching for it, even though we have a first-quarter Moon—and it might rain. Hey, if you don’t play you can’t win.
- The JWST has begun showing us how many odd chunks of stuff are drifting around the galaxy without actually orbiting stars. Some of these rogue planets are in pairs, orbiting one another. Fascinating long-form piece on the phenom if astrophysics—or writing science fiction—is your thing.
- Here’s a dazzling video of a volcano erupting in Iceland. It’s unique because it shows the very beginning of the eruption, which almost resembles a sunrise. But then, boom! It gets spectacular!
- Sports Illustrated was buying articles generated by AI, with authors also invented by AI, right down to the author headshots. Futurism called them on it, and all questionable articles vanished. That doesn’t mean a few weren’t so ridiculous as to stand out and may still be there.
- Old timers like me will recall text user interfaces (TUIs) which, when we got started in computing, were what was on the menu. (It was a one-line menu.) Here’s a fun Substack piece about TUIs, and how in truth, modern GUI programming editors in IDEs don’t really give us much that we didn’t already have back then. Hell, when I was at Xerox in the early 80s somebody was passing around a Pac-Man game written in text mode for a 24X80 display.
- Alas, Bill Gladstone, who founded Waterside Productions, passed on to higher realms on 12/27. Waterside is the agency that represents my book-length nonfiction via agent Carole Jelen. We acquired a fair number of books through him during the Coriolis years. He knew what he was doing, and the world could use a few more agents with his savvy.
- New research suggests that red meat is not fatal. Body weight, not meat consumption, appears to cause the inflammation behind much cardiovascular disease. It’s carbs that put the weight on, as I’ve found over my past 25 years eating low-carb.
- Back before Christmas I was over at Total Wine buying vino to honor the Bambino, and was standing in the (long) line for the checkout beside a spinrack of hard liquor shooters. Most were things I’d heard of. But there…does that little bottle say it’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich whiskey? Yes, it did—so I bought one. Hey, 99c is cheap thrills. Carol and I tasted it when I got home. I expected to spit it out, but…it wasn’t half bad. From Skatterbrain, though Total Wine tells me it’s no longer available. Maybe the shooters were market research, and it flunked. So it goes. Alcohol is a volatile business…
- Cheap thrills? There’s a cheap ($10) red blend called Sheep Thrills, which was vinted in Italy but bottled here in the US. I bought some. Like PB&J whiskey, it wasn’t awful, but I still don’t recommend it. Too thin, too dry.
- I assumed that Skatterbrain’s PB&J whiskey had to be the weirdest whiskey in America. Silly boy. Have a look at this. Sorry, I’ll pass.
- If you’ve ever wondered what shallots were, well, here’s how to tell a shallot from an onion. I like the notion of shallots as heirloom onions (imaginary band name alert!) and Carol and I are going to try a few recipes that might tempt Tennyson’s Lady of Shallott. Ok, sure, it’s the Lady of Shalott. Maybe that’s the British spelling. Or Tennyson’s spellchecker wasn’t working. Yes, ok, I’ll shut up now.
Odd Lots
- My 2020 novel Dreamhealer was at heart about lucid dreaming. Now a startup is attempting to create a wearable device that can trigger lucid dreams on demand. I wish them all the best, but my own research on lucid dreams and dreams in general suggest that it may not be as easy as they make it sound.
- The Raspberry Pi 5 has been a huge success since its release in October, but it runs hot compared to older versions. Here’s a review of RPi5 cases and coolers (and cooler cases) from Tom’s Hardware.
- I missed this piece last year, but it’s an overview of what software can be had to make a Raspberry Pi usable as a desktop PC. Most of this I’d at least heard about, but the notion of Zoom running on an RPi threw me back in my chair.
- This may strike some as clever. It may strike others as deranged. But what better way to make ice cream cake the standard dessert for Thanksgiving dinner than making dessert look like…thanksgiving dinner? BR’s Turkey Cake is an ice cream cake in the shape of a turkey, with caramel glaze and two sugar cones for legs. But it gets better: There is also Turkey Fixins Ice Cream, which contains spiced sweet potato, honey cornbread pieces, and swirls of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce. Yum? You tell me.
- On the other hand, a similar effort from Brach’s is certifiably deranged: Turkey Dinner Candy Corn. Each bag includes six different flavors: Cranberry, Green Bean, Stuffing, Roast Turkey, Apple Pie & Coffee. I burned out on candy corn when I was 9 or 10. Green-bean flavored candy corn will not bring me back into the fold. I will give thanks that this, um, turkey is not getting anywhere near our house.
- The largest lighter-than-air airship since the Hindenburg is about to begin testing. What surprised me the most is that the German dirigible firm Luftschiffbau Zeppelin is still in business (since 1908!) and built the new airship’s gondola.
- New(er) research suggests that Viagra and Cialis are not preventive against Alzheimer’s Disease, as was reported with much fanfare back in 2021. Bummer.
- Who could have seen this coming: Microsoft’s MSN news portal is pumping out tons of news pieces created by generative AI, and quietly pulling the items reported as false or simply absurd. Sigh. People who pretend to think seem to be drawn to software that pretends to think.
- They’re having a problem in Montana: Overfilled railcars spill grain on the tracks; rain wets the grain and starts it fermenting; bears lap up the ferment and get drunk and try to outrun the trains. The race ends as you probably suspect. The state wildlife people aren’t sure what to do: The railroads want full cars, and the wildlife people want live bears. Getting there could be a challenge.
Odd Lots
- NASA’s first asteroid sample, from asteroid Bennu, safely landed and is now in a clean room awaiting analysis. That’ll take some time yet, but let’s just say that the journey was definitely the reward—the first of many rewards, I suspect.
- FEMA and the FCC are planning a test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and the Wirless Emergency Alerts (WEA) on Wednesday, October 4 of this year. The timing for the alert is 2:20 PM EST. The WEA portion of the test will be heard on cellphones. The EAS portion of the test will go out to broadcast radio and TV stations. The test broadcasts will announce themselves as test broadcasts and no action need be taken. As I read the release, the EAS portion will last for one minute and the WEA portion for half an hour. (H/t to Don Doerres.)
- Older adults who use the Internet regularly have only half the risk of dementia compared to those who use the net occasionally or not at all. I avoid social media fistfights and use the time I devote to the net to learning new things and promoting my books. Pace Woody Allen, my brain is my first favorite organ.
- The Raspberry Pi 5 has been announced, and the 4 GB version should be available in quantity to end-users by midlate October. (The 8 GB version may not ship until November or December.) Tom’s Hardware has a good long-form overview. The CPU is an A76 quad core with all cores running by default at 2.4 GHz. It overclocks well. Oh, and it has a power button!
- NOAA’s average temperature anomaly chart for the contiguous US shows no clear trend from 2005 to the present. The data come from USCRN, the United States Climate Reference Network, all sites of which are well away from any UHI.
- UHIs bias temperatures quite a bit. Here’s a new study from the peer-reviewed journal Climate that credits UHIs for most of recent recorded warming. As much as 40% of the warming measured since 1850 might be due to measurements made in cities rather than out in the natural environment.
- An NHS study shows that cannabis is a “hyperaccumulator” of heavy metals, especially lead and cadmium. Regular users show hazardous levels of those metals, and traces of several othes, in blood and urine.
- Cannabis isn’t the only hyperaccumulator of heavy metals. Brazil nuts contain 1,000 times the amount of radium found in typical foods. Barium too. I gave up Brazil nuts in my teens because it was just too damned much work to get them out of their shells. Right choice, wrong reason. But emphatically the right choice.
- Another NHS study shows that typical N95 masks emit hazardous levels of toxic organic compounds linked to seizures and cancer. So not only will N95 masks not protect you from COVID, over the long haul they could kill you.
- The penny jars are still coughing up old uncirculated pennies in considerable numbers. Over the past week or so I got brilliant uncirculated (BU) 1976-D and 1969-S pennies. Peculiarly (or maybe not) the uncirculated pennies I find before 2000 tend to be older than pre-2000 pennies showing signs of daily handling. I think this proves my theory that they’ve spent a long time in a jar in somebody’s closet.
- There is now reasonable evidence that night people are at greater risk for type II diabetes than morning people. The researchers seem puzzled by this, but I have a hypothesis based on a lecture I heard 25 years ago at the Mayo Clinic here in Scottsdale: Night people stay up late, but their work or school schedules begin at the same time as for morning people, so night people get less sleep overall. Mayo Climic researchers found that dogs deprived of sleep both gained weight and developed diabetes. There is a metabolic connection to sleep quantity and quality that we don’t fully understand yet, but the research is out there and we could use a lot more.
- A new baby giraffe was born back in July with no spots. Actually, no reticulation; her coat is uniformly the color of giraffe spots. She may be the only such giraffe in the world, and although she’s enjoying the spotlight now, I don’t think she’ll be quite as happy once she gets into giraffe middle school.
Odd Lots
- Interesting item about drilling holes deep enough to allow geothermal energy harvesting anywhere, and not simply where magma happens to live close to the surface. It’s still a hard problem, but geothermal energy offers most of the upsides of nuclear power, and fewer of the (admittedly mostly bogus) downsides.
- What most people don’t know about EVs is that it’s very difficult (and sometimes impossible) to replace the battery pack in an EV. And even minor collisions can cause enough damage to the battery to raise the risk of fire unacceptably. Insurers often must junk the whole vehicle if the battery is damaged only slightly.
- We had an incident in Scottsdale not long ago where a Tesla was in an accident and caught fire. After putting out the blaze with tens of thousands of gallons of water, the damned thing caught fire again when they tried to tow it away. Why are lithium-ion batteries so dangerous to extinguish when they catch fire? This video lays it all out.
- Vitamin D-3 (cholecalcipherol) supplementation appears to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. The study cited isn’t the best, but it’s as good as I’ve found so far. Carol and I have been taking D-3 for years. Here’s hoping…
- A couple of years ago there was some buzz about Viagra and Cialis reducing the incidence of Alzheimer’s, but a more recent study from the NIH shows that this isn’t the case. Bummer; talk about a serious twofer!
- Heh. I’ve had this suspicion for some time, but it appears to be true: Tech companies overhired for “vanity” reasons, and to keep talent from being hired by competitors. Once cash gets expensive due to rising interest rates, carrying unneeded talent becomes untenable.
- The world’s last Meccano factory has closed. Meccano is the British metal construction system, much like the 1950s US Erector sets, but with better parts. It was my favorite toy from the time I was 7 until is was 12 or 13, and I have used it in various projects since then, especially The Head of R&D.
- Speaking of construction sets: MIT has designed a sort of Erector/Meccano set to build different human-scale robots for lunar exploration. Rather than trying to ship specialized robots to the Moon, researchers could snap together legs and other components to create robots to match specific challenges.
- I’d never heard of quercetin until the spring of 1990, when my doc told me that partnered with bioavailable zinc, quercetin could prevent viral relication, via much the same mechanism as the much-maligned HCQ. Here’s a long-form piece on how quercetin works and why it may be a better flu treatment than Tamiflu.
