Odd Lots
- Although I created a Twitter account back in November, I haven’t done much with it until a day or so ago. I’ve begun posting what amount to instant Odd Lots on Twitter, so if you were waiting for me to do something useful before following me, well, the wait is over.
- Twitter has been using its own link shortener t.co to shorten all links in tweets since 2011 or so. It’s automatic and requires zero additional keystroking. Why, then, do tweeters still use services like bit.ly and goo.gl?
- The FCC may change the definition of “broadband” today, which could demote tens of millions of people (mostly DSL users) to some weird limbo between dialup and broadband. Most of the DSL connections I’ve used have been hideous, some providing measured speeds right down there with 1994 dialup, along with weird lockups and general bit-mayhem.
- Update to the above: Yup. It happened. Next on the agenda: net neutrality.
- NASA’s New Horizons probe is now waking up. We’re about to get our first close-in views of the last (known) un-visited planet in the solar system. Pluto and its gigantic moon Charon are only 12,000 mles apart and orbit one another in 6.3 days, so I’m expecting that some of the upcoming images will be startling, to put it mildly.
- Your coding style gives you away. Mine certainly does–all my reserved words are in uppercase. Why run with the pack?
- Wired tests five wine-stain removers. $18 a bottle? I dunno. At $3.50 or so, Spray & Wash Resolve Stain Stick always works pretty well for us. (Me, actually. Carol drinks white wine.)
- Apple’s app store billed more than Hollywood’s entire box-office take last year.
- It’s easy to say “We’re going to tie health-care payments to health-care outcomes. It’s a lot harder to measure those outcomes objectively.
- This thingmajigger–called a “Panjandrum”–is almost certainly the silliest weapon in 20th century military history. I invite you to nominate competitors, but I warn you, it’s a tough act to beat. (Make sure you scroll down to the video, even if you don’t read the whole thing.)
- Finally, from the Global Vaporizing department: 2,960 degrees in Cave Creek. Boy, it didn’t get quite that hot back in the 90s… (Thanks to Bill Roper for the link.)
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: health · history · humor · networking · programming · wine
"
That’s interesting about the App Store grossing more than the film industry.
I find it a sign of the times that top-level Youtubers are now making more income from ad revenue than TV sitcom stars were in the 70,s
The top youtube income earner is averaging over $15,000/day and she just puts up videos of herself opening Disney toys and talking about them. I believe the second highest earner is Taylor Swift’s youtube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/user/DisneyCollectorBR/videos?sort=p&view=0&flow=grid This channel has more viewers than many cable TV network shows do. Some individual videos achieve over 100,000,000 viewings after being up a while…that’s a lot of ad views.
Instead of dreaming of moving to Hollywood to make it big on TV or in the movies many are now dreaming of hitting the big time on youtube.
My DSL certainly is mediocre. This is what the modem reports right now. DSL Connect Rate (Down/Up) 1819 Kbits/sec by 605 Kbits/sec We can upgrade to 7mbps down but the cost is steep and upstream does not go above 1.5mbps.
I mentioned the toy-opener lady in my last Odd Lots. Man. Maybe I should figure out something visual I could do with a voiceover, though in truth I’d rather just write SF.
BTW, the Baofeng radio should be here on or about February 2. I’ve already downloaded and installed CHIRP. Looking forward to this like I haven’t looked forward to a new piece of electronics in a long time.
I have been hearing a lot of Baofeng radios on the local 2-meter repeaters, and I just heard that our club is relocating a 220 repeater to the same site (top of Stone Mountain) as our current 2-meter repeater. That puts it just shy of 1,000 feet above average terrain so I may be shopping for one of the X models real soon now.
If the 146/440 version works out, I may get an X model as well…for a total less than what I’d probably pay for a single HT from a major manufacturer.
I actually payed less for a UV-82 than I did for the spkr/mic for my Kenwood TH-F6A. The Kenwood is a tri bander 144/220/450 and receives from 0.1~1300MHz in LSB/USB/CW/AM/FM and is smaller than the UV-82. But I never seem to use it. I hate to carry it for fear I will lose the tiny thing…with the UV-82 losing it would be no big deal so I tote it everywhere.
I’m going to have to trade the Kenwood for some big ugly boat anchor at the ham club or raffle it off or Ebay it or maybe just bury it in a time capsule..lol
payed!? $%^&… what was I thinking PAID
Oh, also the video gaming industry is bigger than Hollywood these days… I never was able to develop an interest in games though but I do love to see the amazing improvements in graphics. And amateurs are now creating Hollywood quality video graphics in their fan films that they post online.
I asked somebody on Twitter about the URL shortening thing once. Evidently other Twitter clients are built to use different shortening services instead. I don’t know if that means only Twitter, Inc.-written code may use t.co, or if that’s just a preference of the third-party app authors.
I can’t think of anybody who manually uses another URL shortener when posting. (That said, I do use YouTube’s “Share” button which automatically uses the youtu.be shortener, even when I could copy and paste from the URL bar.)
> broadband
The local phone company has been advertising “broadband” for $19.95. With tiny print saying “up to 56K.” A little checking showed that their fastest service was 1/3 of what I have via cable, at a slightly higher price.
Dealing with Comcast, which is nationally infamous as far as customer service, is also less hassle than the local telco. Dealing with Comcast is like trying to drill your own tooth for a filling with no anaesthetic. Dealing with CenturyTel was like doing the same thing, except with rabid weasels gnawing your ankles while you’re drilling.
> coding style
Prettyprint! Though I imagine data type choices and commenting would be tells, too.
Ah! Code shrouding! That was a simple encipherment method that let compilers work on source code that wasn’t (practically) human-readable. Though given how some C++ programmers write code, that might be redundant…
> health-care outcomes
That’s shoot the whole “wellness” concept in the head. Though I always figured it was a fancy way for doctors to keep their waiting rooms full of people who weren’t sick.
> planet… Pluto
Yes. The IAU is a good example of an organization which has no real purpose.
And while I’m at it, I was poking about some old entries in the Diary a couple of weeks ago and saw your mention of “The Tomes of Delphi.” I snagged a copy from Amazon and I’ve been reading on it as time permits. Julian Bucknall did an excellent and very readable job of presenting various algorithms in Pascal.
I consider Julian’s algorithms/data structures book the best since Knuth, and whereas it’s not the only algorithms book to focus on Pascal, it’s by far the most current and the most practical-minded.
Looking back 62 years, health seems ever more a semigenetic crapshoot once you eliminate several obvious stressors like smoking, sugar addiction, heavy drinking, heavy drug use, and promiscuity. Johns Hopkins itself has called most cancers either genetic or “bad luck”:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/bad_luck_of_random_mutations_plays_predominant_role_in_cancer_study_shows
Living a virtuous life does not imply a healthy life, especially for people who define “virtuous” as “constantly attacking people who disagree with them or their tribe.”
RE: coding style: I suspect it’s deeper than just the names of things and comments. I suspect it goes all the way to data structures and logic style.
I was made acutely aware in my college CS coursework that my logic style is … different, and I dearly love a well crafted data-structure that does most of the heavy lifting for me. I haven’t seriously pursued OOP, but I can’t imagine what little I have done isn’t instantly recognizable as my handiwork. Fingerprints indeed. Perhaps phrenology might be a better word. It is, after all, reading your brains.
-JRS
Recently read an article on the New Horizons probe in which one of the main project people gleefully stated that soon each image of Pluto the probe sent when received would be The Best Photo of Pluto *ever* and that this would go on for months!
One of the people behind the Great Panjandrum was SF writer Neville Shute Norway. He can bee seen in photos of the launching barge. In some he is working one of the two winches they tried on a test or two to see of they could be used to steer the contraptions. He was nearly injured when the steering cables snapped.
[…] you liked the Panjundrum (see my Odd Lots for January 29, 2015) you will love this thing, whatever they call it: It’s a Panjundrum that flies. (Thanks to […]