- Watch out when upgrading to Skype 4: The upgrade installs a Firefox/IE extension called Browser Highlighter that slows the browser down significantly, and I sure don’t remember it showing me a checkbox to uncheck or in any other way refuse the install. This install-without-warning has gotten people more than a little het up. Like Skype, Browser Highlighter is owned by eBay and appears to facilitate online price comparisons. To get rid of it, execute the uninstaller via Start | Programs | Browser Highlighter. Don’t just disable it in the browser; it must be uninstalled from Windows like any app or it’ll just show up in your taskbar tray again when you reboot.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: An acnestis is an itchy place that you can’t reach to scratch. (Thanks to Larry Nelson for the suggestion.) I use a 24″ slide rule to scratch my acnestes. Very accurate; gets to precisely the right spot!
- The Arrington Crunchpad may be in trouble. Dayum. I had high hopes for this one, not so much for Web or cloud work as for an ebook reader.
- Here is a fantastic archive of scanned Radio Shack catalogs, browsable page-by-page. I had a lot of these from the midlate 60s to 1980 or so, and intermittently since. (Thanks to Bernie Sidor for the link.)
- From Bill Cherepy comes word of a managed PC built into a network jack. It’s unclear how well this would run desktop software, but for cloud computing it could be useful, and in a cube farm setting would not be easily picked up and walked away with.
- In addition to Green River and Diet Green River, there was at one time Green River Orange Soda, and Pete Albrecht reminds me that there was yet another (unrelated) Green River: The Whiskey Without a Headache. I’ll believe that when I feel it. (But I can’t stand whiskey, so don’t wait up for me to do the experiment.)
- And if “whiskey without a headache” sounds a little unlikely, then say hello to the robotic cow rectum.
humor
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- The University of Utah has a fascinating animation demonstrating the relative sizes of very small things. Starting at the scale of a coffee bean, you can zoom down by pushing a slider past single cells, various viruses, proteins, until you reach the carbon atom. Won’t take but a minute, and has plenty of wow factor, especially if you can’t picture things clearly at nanoscale.
- For all the beautiful weather and the fact that school was out, this year’s Halloween saw no trick-or-treaters here on Stanwell Street until almost 5 PM. Summer from around the corner and her third-grade friends arrived in a mob at 6:30, and Dash got plenty of girl-attention, but that mostly exhausted the supply of local grade-schoolers. A few young teens came by between 7 and 8, but that about was it. The neighborhood has a fair number of teens, but we were told they were all having at-home parties, and we’re good with that, though I have a mass of Milk Duds here that would probably go critical if placed in a single sufficiently large bowl.
- Carol and I went over to our next-door neighbors later in the evening. Carol wore her footie jammies and put her hair up in huge 70s rollers. I cobbled up a Ben Franklin outfit that wasn’t half bad, and I carried the small pink kite tethered to a balloon stick with about two feet of string. When we walked in, the guy down the street commented, “Lost some weight, huh Ben?” “Yup,” I replied. “Low-carb and all that.”
- Want to haunt a house? Hire a team of scientists and an architect. Real ghosts just never show up for work when you need them.
- This is the smallest packaged PC I have ever seen. Not worthwhile, given that it lacks digital audio out, is Atom-based, and stuck on Ubuntu 8.04 (!!) but it is small.
- And if you’ll settle for something only a little bit bigger, the AOpen MP45D will do a lot more.
- I may have linked to this once years ago, but it’s worth running through again: The Museum of Unworkable Devices, which is bestiary of perpetual motion machines, with careful explanations of why they don’t work. Lots of links to even more of the same.
- NASA has calculated the “average color of the universe“…and it’s the color of my livingroom walls! (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Finally, don’t forget the contest I posted yesterday once it goes down under the fold! Keep those shortie filk schticks coming!
Contest: 1-Verse Filk
I’ve had a bummer couple of weeks for many reasons, most of them relating to Global Cooling and a mild skin rash on several of my knuckles. So I need to increase the silliness factor a little, and am hereby mounting a contest, with real prizes.
The challenge: Submit a 1-verse filk; that is, a short parody song with original funny words to only one verse, what ur-filker Allan Sherman called a “schtick.” It has to be a funny filk, and the contest will be judged by people who know what “funny” means. (They will not necessarily be filkers. I will have a vote.) The tune can be anything, but it has to be a tune that has some chance of being recognized by a reasonable number of people. The song should only be one verse long; brevity is the soul of damned near everything, humor not the least of it. You can send me more verses, but your chances of winning decrease with each verse submitted beyond the first.
All entries should be submitted as comments to this blog. Your choice which site, and if you feel so inclined, submit entries to both sites. Being in both places does not increase your chances, though it may increase the number of people who see your entry. The two sites, in case you only ever read one, are LiveJournal, and WordPress.
No other rules except: Use no dirty words that will get either of us into trouble. Numerous things rhyme with “duck” and even more with “wit.” (Here’s a rhyming dictionary, in case you get stuck.)
The winner will be judged by Thanksgiving Day, or as soon thereafter as I get at least three entries. If I don’t get three entries by Christmas, we’ll call it done and both entries will get prizes. The prize will consist of your choice of one from the following list:
- One copy of any title from the Copperwood Press catalog.
- One copy of Assembly Language Step By Step.
- A variable capacitor from my collection. I’ll test it for shorts before shipping.
- A TO-36 auto radio power transistor from my collection. Sub a 6SN7 if you’re allergic to germanium.
- Anything else somebody sends me to be a prize, to be listed later.
Hey, if that don’t get your mouth watering, what will? And in case you’re not sure what a one-verse filk is, let me show you:
Let There Be Fleas on Earth
(To: “Let There Be Peace on Earth”)
Let there be fleas on Earth, but keep them away from me;
Let there be toads and snails, but not where I can see!
To love each creature’s obnoxious features would drive me up a tree–
So let there be fleas on Earth, but keep them away….from me!
Shirley, you can all do better than that. So get on it!
Odd Lots
- It was inevitable: Be the Balloon Boy for Halloween. However, as the ad says, don’t get carried away… (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I downloaded an Xubuntu 9.04 LiveCD, and (interestingly) the OS does not appear to be able to identify my Samsung 1600 X 900 display, and thus defaults to a 4:3 something too narrow and a little too high. More interestingly still, it shows a blank field for the current display resolution in the Settings dialogs. Ubuntu and Kubuntu 9.04 have no trouble with the display, and I’m wondering if the xfce resolution is hardcoded. Either way, it didn’t leave me with an especially good impression of Xubuntu.
- There’s something telling about my feeling it necessary to tell you that there’s a spot on the sun! I’ve done screen-projection sunspot observations at, um, spotty intervals since 1970, and until quite recently, sunspots were more or less always there when you wanted to look. Not so for the last two or three years, when sunspots–and band openings–have become something of a novelty.
- Heath-Zenith still exists. They make doorbells. (Thanks to Bp. Sam’l Bassett for the link.)
- Use your deordorant and become a better person. (Clean the catbox, ditto.) I’ve sometimes wondered what odors are actually for, and whether there’s an evolutionary reason that humans are so much lousier at detecting and discriminating among them than other mammals.
- Oh, and you may be more productive with your shoes on. (If that’s true, how the hell have I ever gotten anything done?)
- Wired Magazine has a cover story on the antivaxers, and whatever your views on the issue (mine are so strong as to be essentially unprintable, so don’t look for them here) it’s worth reading.
- The New Yorker always has clever covers, but this is the best one I’ve seen since the Mullahs on Segways.
- Recommended Obscure Halloween Reading for 2009: Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs, which was published in 1980 but can still be had for cheap on the used book sites. The biographer of a legendary (deceased) author of children’s books travels to the small Midwestern town where the author once lived and finds that fantasy is blurring into reality in some odd and very creepy ways.
- Is there a more modern technical term for those jokes/inspirational/polemic notes that people email out to their entire address book, with instructions at the bottom to send this to 10 people / 20 people / everyone you know? I call them chain letters, but wonder if their email incarnation has a geekier term attached to it.
Odd Lots
- Gizmodo has a decent overview of the jungle of Intel CPU chip families. Core, Atom, and old reliable Pentium are compared and contrasted. Good short brushup, even if you’ve been following along as best you can. (I cop to not paying as close attention to Core i7 as I should have been.) My one objection: Late-build Pentiums are not nearly as bad as the author suggests.
- With 225 sunspotless days, 2009 just edged past 1867 in its climb up the Most Spotless Years Since 1849 hit parade. 2009 is now in position 11. Two more spotless weeks and we’ll overtake 1855 and enter the Top Ten. 2008 was a killer, now standing at #4, with 266 spotless days. Will 2009 beat that? Unlikely; there are only 77 days left in the year, and while the Sun is sleeping, the old guy isn’t dead. (He throws up a few sunspecks now and then just to keep his hand in.)
- An article in today’s Wall Street Journal reminded me that American author/poet Stephen Vincenet Benet wrote the postarmageddon short story “By the Waters of Babylon” in 1937, before even the possibility of nuclear weapons was understood by the general public. It stands in my mind as one of the finest SF shorts of all time, and certainly one of the most prophetic. (The story’s been posted on the Web and is easily Googleable, though how legal those postings are is unclear.)
- Very nice summary of what we know about the second-largest asteroid Pallas here. Interestingly, Pallas has its own “death star” astrobleme, which can be found on most of the smaller bodies of the solar system, suggesting that during the solar system’s formation everybody got pounded, and the biggish moons that survive just barely missed being turned to gravel. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Google just clarified its plans (a little) for Google Editions, an ereader-agnostic ebook store that will offer ebooks in a universal format based on HTML. Books will be readable offline. One suspects that Google Gears will be involved, but what sort of DRM will be slathered onto the binaries is still an open question, and in a lot of people’s minds (including my own) that’s the only significant question there is.
- From Michael Covington comes the suggestion (from one of his grad students) that if a coral snake were a resistor, it would have a value of 24 ohms at 20% tolerance. (Determining the snake’s power dissipation we leave as an exercise for the grad student.)
Odd Lots
- When I was a (much) younger man, I wanted a ’59 Chevy. Having seen this, I guess it’s just as well that I didn’t get one. (Thanks to Todd Johnson for the link.)
- Micropayments may not allow small creators (like me) to make money. They may not allow big huge monstrous media outlets make money either. They may not allow anybody to make much money at all. Bummer. I did have hopes…
- Oh, and the Long Tail may not be as long as we thought. Double bummer.
- Has anyone reading this ever played with the Alice language/GUI system for teaching programming? (Alas, no Linux version. Triple bummer. ) Any opinions? I have nieces who are growing up so fast…
- From Pete Albrecht comes word that Chicago’s Kiddieland is closing. My father took me there in 1955 while my mom was working. We had pizza and I went on all kinds of rides. That night I puked my guts out, and my mom thought I was coming down with polio. (They don’t call it the Scrambler for nothing.)
- Here’s another thing I thought I might have imagined: World Of Giants , a b/w TV show from 1959 that went into syndication and used to run just before the 4:00 PM monster movie on Channel 7 in Chicago, circa 1965. At least two people must have watched this, and the other one must have been Irwin Allen. (And the guy who created the show must have read Richard Matheson.)
- Although the sun’s face has been devoid of sunspots for 18 days running (and 212 days this year) there is a major sunspot on the other side of the Sun, which may rotate into view sometime tonight. I boggle a little to think that we can image a sunspot on the far side of the Sun. How this is done is interesting, and has little or nothing to do with light. Flying cars or no, we are living in the future!
- From the Not Too Clear on the Concept Dept: I just nuked a spam message pitching “herbal testosterone.” Right.
Odd Lots
- What the Hell: Some researchers at the University of Michigan have created an 8-bit processor incorporating pneumatic gates, pointing toward a computer that doesn’t require electricity at all. Make sure you watch the videos. It’s not going to beat your local Beowulf cluster on the speed side, but if you find yourself on a planet where nanomachines eat electrical conductors (as they did in my novel The Cunning Blood) such a machine might well come in handy.
- The Make Blog aggregated probably the best writeup of a homebrew railgun that I’ve ever seen. Make sure you prowl around the site, and make double sure you see the pictures and watch the videos!
- Bill Cherepy sent me a link to a short writeup on the still-hypothetical Asus 2-screen ebook reader. You can use it as a netbook, with one screen doubling as a touch keyboard, or you can use it as a facing-pages ebook reader display. Now, displays are probably the most expensive part of devices like this, so I doubt a 2-screen model will be the low cost leader. Still, it’s an idea that’s well worth a try. (And please, guys, make the card slot XDHC compatible, ok?)
- If you ever loved whole milk and wish you could go back to it, read this. And then go back to it. No guilt. No apologies. And yes, no heart attacks.
- Back in the ’50s there was a product called Siz that was (I kid you not) foaming Napalm in a spray can. It was for starting charcoal. Lileks does a wonderful riff on it. (They had such indescribably cool toys in the ’50s.)
- On the other hand (with Lileks always there to remind us) they did some ungodly weird stuff in the ’50s too.)
- When I was a kid, Verne/Wells films were all the rage, and by far my favoriate was Journey to the Center of the Earth . Small boys aren’t equipped to appreciate Arlene Dahl, but I was quite the fan of James “Nemo” Mason, and was willing to tolerate Pat Boone even though my older cousin Diane thought he was “dreamy.” The film was dazzling in 1959, especially the “cave of crystals,” which flooded out when dreamy Pat Boone got too agressive with a geologists’ pick. Well, some years ago Mexican miners discovered a real cave of crystals 1200 feet beneath Naica, Mexico that makes those old 1959 movie sets look sick. National Geographic has more textual coverage, and it’s worth noting that the cavern is unliveable without life support suits, being at a constant 122 degrees and 90% humidity, which is worse than Houston, if that were possible.
“Here’s my card…”
I was in here working earlier this morning when I heard some minor disturbance behind me, after which a white blur hurtled toward the door. Sensing something interesting going on, I grabbed my pocket camera and followed Dash to his little tiger-striped dog bed, where he sat with four or five of my old business cards hanging from his mouth in only slightly chewed condition, paw extended as though to shake on a deal: Don’t hit me, and you can have your cards back.
I didn’t hit him. And I allowed him to keep the cards for a minute or two, since they were in fact obsolete and headed for the recycle bin anyway. (I need new business cards, but not as badly as I need the time to create them.) It wasn’t until he began to shred them and swallow the pieces that I took what was left of the cards away from him.
Ten minutes later, he ambled back into my office and went directly to the bottom shelf where the box of cards lay. Looking over my shoulder, I watched him carefully withdraw another five or six cards from the nearly full box and edge toward the door again. Gotcha! This time I actually dumped the box into the recycle bin.
A fortune in dog toys, and he wants to chew pasteboard. Or maybe it was a noodge to clean up my office. With dogs, it’s hard to tell.
Odd Lots
- This morning, Slashdot aggregated two articles representing both sides of the Google Books settlement: The Authors Guild arguing for it, and the William Morris Agency arguing against it. My thoughts: Since nobody knows where this will lead, but it will happen whether I opt out or not, I’m in. It’s not like I’m making money on books like Turbo Pascal Solutions anyway. If they can wring a few nickels out of my old material, I for one will be glad to have it. (This is worth a whole entry, but I just don’t have time today.)
- Old Catholic geek bishop Sam’l Bassett sent me word of Micro-Rax, a 10mm version of the well-known 25mm or 40mm 80/20 system for industrial prototyping. I’ve held off fooling with T-slot projects because the stock was out of scale for what I was trying to do, but this could be just the thing. The company (owned and run by a pair of identical twins) is just getting underway with Micro-RAX, and it’s worth watching. I’m may buy a set just for the helluvit.
- Leave it to Lileks to find a matchbook from The Griddle, billed as The Scientific Restaurant, which boasts an automatic griddle cake machine that looks like it should be a fusion reactor of some sort. Close Cover Before Ignition…
- And speaking of nuclear, I spaced on this back in late June because my site got hacked, but Pete Albrecht pointed out a whole site devoted to nuclear yield and exposure slide rules.
- Wait! There’s more! If you want one of your very own, you can buy one from Don Lancaster. (Yes, that Don Lancaster!)
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: Shoegazing is a musical subsubsubgenre that existed for a few years in the early 1990s, and sounds like, well, nondescript rock music. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for pointing it out.) The name comes from a tendency of some shoegazer bands to stare at the stage while they played. Apparently the movement died when it became “…over-privileged, self-indulgent and middle-class.” Damn. The nerve.
- GM is now selling cars on eBay. It sounds ridiculous at first blush, but what piques my interest is the de-emphasis on face-to-face dickering, which I absolutely cannot stand. When Carol and I bought our 4Runner in April 2001, the sales experience was so hideously unpleasant that every time we think about buying a new car these days, we shiver and stick with what we have.
- Spaceweather has a wonderful animated gif of Jupiter’s moon Io crossing its disk at opposition, meaning that Io’s shadow is immediately below it on Jupiter’s disk and gives a 3-D effect to the photo that you generally don’t see.
- And if that weren’t enough, the same site has an animated gif of Io’s shadow passing over Ganymede!
- Here’s a Web site I could have used back when the Lord of the Rings film trilogy was in the theaters: RunPee.com, which makes suggestions as to when you might miss less of the film by taking a bathroom break. Very important for certain old guys with certain oversized glands.
- How did Benjamin Frankin manage his time on a typical day? Here’s a page out of his daily scheduler, though Outlook was still a couple of centuries in the future. Ben’s day is amazingly like my day, save that I generally stay in bed a little longer. But I too hit the sack at 10 PM or before–been doing that for five decades and then some. Thanks to David Stafford for the link.
- And in in reading about Ben’s day I found this article by Paul Graham, about the differences between managers’ schedules and what Paul calls “makers’ schedules.” Definitely worth reading. The two cultures need to understand one another, and generally don’t, with much anguish and lost productivity resulting.
Odd Lots
- Sleep seems to be key in allowing the brain to infer big-picture relationships from scattered facts–and by implication, memories. I’ve never been a strong sleeper, and I wonder if some of the “fails” in my older memories stem from inadequate deep sleep.
- Also from Wired Science: People who don’t get enough sleep are touchy and angry. (Not like that’s news to anyone who’s prone to sleepless nights.) Could this explain the peculiar unpleasantness of the political blogosphere? I’ll vouch for the fact that peace, love, and tolerance of people who disagree with you is much easier on nine hours’ sleep than five.
- If you’ll forgive the expression, here’s a long, beefy article on why everybody thinks animal fat is a bad thing (hint: it’s because a Right Man cherry-picked his data to confirm his hypothesis) and why, to the contrary, animal fat may be very, very good for us.
- Maybe this will bring the issue of bad patents to the top of the queue. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht and numerous others for the link.)
- From Jim Strickland comes a link suggesting that your family dog may be smarter than the average toddler. (Your dog, maybe. Mine, probably not.)
- I was wrong about it coming from a Kum & Go store; while sorting my charge card receipts I discovered that Fat Dogs (see my entry for August 7, 2009) is a small chain of Conoco-franchised gas station/convenience stores limited to Western Nebraska. They had some water private-labeled by Sandhills Water, and put their wry corporate motto on the top of the label.
- Lileks takes on the Sears Catalog for 1973. I remember that catalog. Fortunately, my clothes came from Goldblatts. And did real, human, breathing girls wear these things? Maybe the girls in Hoffman Estates did. In my neighborhood, well…no.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: juiceboxer, a young, arrogant, high-status preppie-type. Their parents got their juice from bottles. And their grandparents mostly got it while it was still inside the fruit. Juice as a product is a relatively new thing; keeping juice from fermenting is difficult and one of the unappreciated miracles of our modern age.
