weirdness
- My installation of Thunderbird 3 has correlated with a lot of weirdness, not only in system performance but in taskbar “stalls” in response to clicked links in messages. I’ve heard a lot of people having trouble with it as well, and we are apparently not in the minority.
- How can I have lived the last ten years as an SF writer and never heard of John Titor, Time Traveler?
- Stephen Hawking has told us that we must abandon Earth or die. Agreed. Now, Dr. Hawking, would you please invent us a hyperdrive already?
- No, bichons are not groomed this way. (That’s for miniature poodles.) Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.
- Microsoft is working on a tablet prototype with keys on the back surface, opposite the display, so you can type with the fingers that you’re using to grip the device. (Thumbs remain on the front.) This looks better than it tells; do follow the link. Will it work? No opinion until I try it.
- If anyone here has not yet been to thereifixedit.com, Go. There. Right. Now. (Via Make.)
- Many people have sent me a link to this item from City Journal , which may indicate that some sense is finally creeping into the nutrition world. Sugar and grains may be killing you. Meat, eggs, dairy, and animal fat are probably not. I’ve known this from my research for a long time. Now, to get the government to admit that they’ve been slowly killing their citizens for over 30 years…
- Not convinced? Fructose seems to be the preferred sugar of cancer cells.
- Still not convinced? The inventor of Cheese Doodles just died at age 90. So much for salt and fat being deadly. (The food dyes worry me more than either.)
- Pete Albrecht points out that LA coffee shops are beginning to unplug their Wi-Fi access points and plaster over all their wall outlets. They’ve found that people buy more coffee and snacks when they actually talk to one another. No shirt, Sherlock!
- Formufit: PVC pipe fittings for when you’re not using PVC pipe for plumbing. Fine stuff!
- I think that what we’ll miss most about our deathwish-afflicted newspapers are all the silly headlines.
- And anyone who has ever scratched his or her head over that famous if gappy Latin expression “Et in Arcadia ego” should look at the variations here. (I find myself thinking of a paraphrase of another classic expression from junk mail: “You may already be in Arcadia!”)
- Heh. As long as Carol’s beside me, I am.
- Stumbled across Atlas Obscura, which is a collection of pointers to peculiar places around the world, including a museum in Iceland housing the world’s largest collection of animal penises. Alas, they do not list Bubbly Creek, on the south side of Chicago, where the stockyards dumped untold quantities of animal blood and offal for 80-odd years, forming a layer of clotted blood up to three feet thick on the riverbed. Peculiar don’t quite capture it.
- Don’t know if I buy this, exactly, but there is some evidence that people lose weight just by living at higher altitudes. I certainly weigh less at 6600 feet than I did in Scottsdale at 1900, though strength training, shunning sugar, rationing grains, and eating lots more meat and dairy may have had something to do with it as well.
- AVG is at it again; I got a trojan warning today for Trojan Generic 16.AUZZ in the installer for the Pan newsreader, which I have used off and on for several months. The file has been in my installers directory since last September and never triggered an alert before. I don’t think it’s a threat, but it demonstrates the difficulties of signature-based virus detection.
- In case I haven’t mentioned it before: I’ve abandoned Winamp (after something like twelve years) for the VLC Media Player. It plays every audio and video format I’ve thrown at it (including some odd ones like mkv) except for MIDI. It never bitches about codecs and so far has never failed to play a playable file or disc. It even plays HD video, though the only example I have right now is some footage of me doing stand-up comedy with Terry Dullmaier at our 40th grade school reunion. Simple, sane interface with controls big enough to see. Free. What’s not to love?
- And the Gimp may become a lot more lovable within a year. Man, I’ve tried to love the product for years…and always failed. The 2.8 version, due in December, could be just the thing.
- Cool emerging space tech: Ionic mini-thrusters small enough to build several into a CubeSat.
- What is the term for those people who dress up in chicken suits and wave signs too damned close to the street near places like Wild Wings? (Lately it’s mostly been guys in Statue of Liberty suits hawking Liberty Tax Service.) Helluva way to make a living. (I keep thinking I’ll be wiping them off my windshield.)
- Greg Singleton sent me a pointer to an English translation of a Russian short story done in comics format. I’m not a huge fan of comics, but the wizardry in this piece is mostly in the drawings: When I saw the large pane in which the man stands behind the boy he once was, reading the same Jules Verne book against the backdrop of Captain Nemo’s ocean—the very same exact copy of the same book—I shivered.
- Another sunspot, albeit a very small one, has appeared, so we’re not likely to break the 1913 record of the longest time without an observed sunspot any time soon. Also note the article on Martian dust devils, which have been dancing around the Phoenix lander and have been caught on video.
- This article on Intel’s current research into programmable matter (but not the quantum dot kind, fortunately) qualifies as the worst-edited Web article I’ve seen in a month. Don’t these people proof their work before they post it?
- The Large Hadron Collider went live the other day, and people died. Strange physics has nothing on strange psychology.
- Particle Accelerators of Unusual Size (PAUSes) loom large in a number of apocalyptic SF novels, and here’s a summary collection, courtesy Frank Glover.
- Here’s another reason I rather like Good Pope Benny: He’s cracking down on nutcase apparitions of the Blessed Mother, which have gotten weirder and weirder and fuller of God-stomps-the-shit-out-of-everybody apocalypticism in the last sixty or seventy years, and are making the whole idea of Catholicism look bad.
- And to round out this this discussion of Apocalypses of Unusual Stupidity, I give you a list of thirty ends-of-the-world that never happened. Here’s hoping that the New Agers will become so dispirited when nothing happens on December 26, 2012 that they will take up a more productive hobby, like woodburning, or breeding planaria worms.
- Here's a nice article from NPR on sleep. Worth noting is the author's comment that in 20 years, the stylishness of getting only five hours of sleep a night may be seen the same way that the “stylishness” of smoking is seen today: As something that kills you before your time.
- Pertinent to the above: I have notes on an SF novel postulating a drug that lets people sleep as much as 23 hours a day, with a side effect that lucid dreaming is not only normative but shared: People using the drug encounter one another in their dreams, and struggle for control of the weird collaborative colony they've created within the human collective unconscious. As years of use roll by, research shows that drug-induced sleep occupying over 75% of each day leads to reversal of aging and what might actually be physical immortality. Sleep forever and live in your dreams! Take that, you short-sleepers!
- I stumbled upon Gos earlier today, and it's an interesting concept: A Linux distro focused on Web apps that might be ideal for ultra-mobile PCs, tablets, and ebook readers. (Alas, it's not mature and may not be as “small footprint” as people would like.) Many of the Web apps it installs by default are Google apps, which led me to wonder if the product's creators intended from the start to sell the company to Google someday.
- Pete Albrecht put together a long and detailed resources page for model rocketry. Perhaps only peripherally related to model rocketry but interesting nonetheless is the linked-to story of Miss Bomarc. (I had a model Bomarc when I was a kid, and Pete is building a flying model.)
- From George Ewing comes a pointer to an intriguing article about 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense. Actually, they do make sense—the problem is that we don't understand them yet. (Humanity's most grievous sin is refusing to admit its own ignorance.) I'm glad they included cold fusion, and the one I would add is poltergeist activity.
- Jim Strickland sent me a pointer to an item about a pair of prosthetic legs that communicate via Bluetooth in order to help a double amputee walk more effectively. The story I currently have doing the rounds (though all the majors have bounced it) posits a prosthetic leg with a 128-core Intel processor, a snarky AI personality, a thigh speaker, and WiMax, with all that that implies. If I don't sell it soon, you'll see it in Souls in Silicon later this year.
- This June, ContraPositive Diary will be ten years old. (How many blogs can make that claim!) What would you all suggest I do to celebrate? Should I publish a print book “best of” on Lulu? (Might make good bathroom reading…)
