Odd Lots
- I wrote about the dearth of color variety in cars a few years back. This morning I ran across an article about the same topic. And not only in cars, but in clothes and much else. He sees color variety as way down, along with color saturation.
- He may be on to something: There’s a new style of houses being built here in our area that I refer to as “Etruscan tombs” because they’re entirely white and all right angles, without curves or any kind of ornamentation. They look like they’re made of limestone or white marble:
- And cars, well, it’s not all bad news. Carol and I are seeing a lot more colors in cars around town these days, and the majority are bright and sometimes electric blue. But there are also yellows and oranges; not as many as blues but way more than we saw four or five years ago.
- By now I’m sure you’ve heard the buzz about “de-extincting” the dire wolf. I was suspicious of that claim, and turns out I’m right: What the genetic engineering firm did was modify gray wolf genes to make them look like what we think dire wolves looked like. The same firm created “woolly mice” through a more authentic process, by injecting a few recovered woolly mammoth genes into lab mice. Whether this is a good idea I’m not sure. We’ll see how far they can take it.
- As I wrote about sometime back, we dodged what might have been global extinction in the thick of the last ice age, when CO2 levels fell to the edge of what could support plant life on Earth. The claims of the climate doomscreamers haven’t panned out, and now we’re discovering that more CO2 in the atmosphere has led to a new greening peak, enlarging crops and reducing deserts. This looks like a big win to me.
- Computer modeling has solved one of mankind’s greatest problems, what some call “tinkle sprinkle”: urine splashing to one side of a urinal or another, getting on the floor, on adjacent urinal users, or on the user himself. The designs are clever and interesting in a number of ways, and one has to wonder what took us so long.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: climate · genetics · housing
The white, rectangular designed houses are common in the PHX metro area. I assume the white color is to help mitigate the summer heat, although I’m not sure what motivates the box design. When I moved to the PHX area in 1994, many new subdivisions had the ubiquitous vaulted ceilings, stucco exteriors, protruding garage fronts, and red Spanish roof tiles.
I think the box design is simply to keep costs down. The white, yes, is Arizona sun protection. The box design seems limited to one-off construction. I have yet to see a subdivision with nothing but box designs. There are a few new houses in our extended neighborhood of different designs, but they are all huge (5 square kilofeet or more) and probably priced at 2.5M or more.
I was looking at Planetarium software yesterday, after seeing a show and talking the the local planetarium director Friday, and noticed that Cartes du Ciel is written in Object Pascal.
Hosted on SourceForge, which is still around…
Yes, I knew that–and unless I’m misremembering, there is a list somewhere of software written in Pascal generally and (again, if I remember right) FreePascal/Lazarus in particular. If I can find it I’ll post a link in the next Odd Lots. Too much going on this weekend to chase it down, but if it still exists I intend to find it.