August 21st, 2013:
- Wired ran a wonderful photo piece on one of the weirdest aircraft ever to fly: the Soviet Union’s ground-effect ship-killer seaplane Lun. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the pointer.)
- Surezhell, a faint tickle of a memory led me back to even more Lun-y goodness at Dark Roasted Blend. Don’t forget Part 2.
- Which led directly to Awesome Armored Trains. (Steamfrack? Again, the Russians seem to be the masters of this game.)
- Yet another photo gatherum from Spiegel, highlighting zany transportation ideas that didn’t pan out. Or get anywhere near the pan.
- Ars has a nice article on a very new category of aircraft: the solar-powered “atmospheric satellite,” a robot plane that flies in the high atmosphere for indefinite periods without fuel.
- Sakurajima is acting up again. That was one of my favorite volcanoes when I was a kid, right after now-extinct (probably) Paracutin. One thing to note here is how good the comments are. I read Klemetti’s blog as much for his community as for his own (excellent) posts. No politics, no hate, no incessant tu quoque from tribal slaves. You don’t see that very often.
- As with all claims in this category, whether fission or fusion, I’ll believe it when I see it, but damn, I would like to see this.
- The Nook business is in trouble. We’ve seen that coming, but it makes me wonder if the Nook is alone, or if the rest of the color-screen ebook readers are falling into line behind it. (E-ink will remain as a niche for daylight reading.) I read ebooks on my Transformer Prime. Works. It’s a general-purpose tablet with a keyboard dock that makes it an only slightly crippled laptop. The number of specialized gadgets I’m willing to cart around is limited.
- That said, B&N’s print book business is in reasonably good shape, especially its very profitable textbook division. (Thanks to Janet Perlman for the link.)
- Ouch. “There’s no real ebook piracy problem because most people don’t think books are worth stealing.”
- Publishing is an ecosystem, and the parts don’t thrive without the whole. The ecosystem can change, of course, but the changes take time, and not all parts of the system will survive the changes. (Again, thanks to Janet Perlman for the link.)
- Forget underage women. Crossing state lines with rented textbooks can get you into trouble.
- Composers on acid? I’d be curious to hear from experienced musicians whether most of these, um, compositions are playable at all.
- Now this is the sort of drought I can celebrate: We’re looking at a record low tornado count this year.
- On the hurricane side, the accumulated cyclonic energy (ACE) value, which is an aggregate of how much power has been seen in cyclonic storms so far this year, is 48% of normal to August 21. Less than half. The Coriolis Gods are evidently taking a break. Let’s hope it’s a long one.
- The latest Duluth Trading catalog is pushing a product called Ballroom Jeans. Huh? For cowboy proms? Ballroom…wait. Ok. I get it.
- Always read food labels carefully.