- The media loves to build its own myth: Orson Welles’ famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast did not cause panic.
- Had this last night, over dinner with friends: Zinzilla, a monster zin that could be the perfect Halloween wine.
- BTW, “monster zin” is not a term I made up: It’s winespeak for a zinfandel with alcohol content over 15%.
- The Neanderthal in me rejoices at body hair. Wax is for candles.
- Why are so many kids myopic? This article says it’s about not getting outside enough. I’ve read that it’s about not sleeping in darkness, but don’t recall ever seeing an actual study. If lack of exposure to bright natural light is the issue, a population study somewhere with grim crappy weather could nail it. I nominate Chicago.
- The Feds are repurposing an old technology in use at least since Vietnam for domestic spying: radios inside rocks. If it ever becomes clear what frequencies these are on, I could imagine a massive national radio foxhunt. There’s some mythspinning about their batteries, and it would be fun to see what dissecting such a device would reveal.
- Related: If you’re an anal-retentive spy, this page might interest you. Scroll down to see why. Scroll further to see a genuine CIA turd radio. These were once sold on the surplus market. I almost bought one.
- More spy stuff: Bondian gadgets from the movies that have (more or less) become real. I notice the absence of the James Bond assassin ball-point pen that dorkeroo Alec was fiddling with in Goldeneye. I used to do that a lot, which is why I no longer use retractable ball-point pens.
- From the Global Calming Department: The Atlantic hurricane season still has another month to run, but so far it’s the quietest we’ve seen in 45 years.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: rodomontade, defined as swaggering boastful talk without any grounding in reality, which makes the speaker look like an utter moron; see political bullshit. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for dropping the word in my presence.)
- Shades of Newsweek’s execrable “The Case for Killing Granny“: Slate endorses death panels. Way to make friends for health care reform, guys. Sheesh.
- People can live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but not Chernobyl. Here’s a decent explanation why.
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Blasting away on a book project that I’ll tell you about when the publisher announces it. One thing fersure, it’s certainly reminding me what I’d forgotten.
- Your brain takes out the toxic trash while you sleep. Short your brain on sleep, and the trash piles up. Let it pile up enough (particularly beta amyloids) and you could put yourself on the fast track for Alzheimer’s. (Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for the link.)
- I described a coffee-station sized version of this, controlled by a hipster AI, in Ten Gentle Opportunities.
- Oh…and a blood-powered computer. Reminds me of another book I wrote once. Ok. It’s not blood. It’s “blood.” But still… (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.)
- Apple’s iCloud system has been cracked. It’s true that anything can be cracked. But I’m still convinced that it’s harder to crack stuff located down here than it is for stuff up there.
- Intel now has a competitor to the Raspberry Pi, the Galileo. It’s compatible with most Arduino shields and the Arduino software development environment. The board is based on the Quark microarchitecture, which is somewhere south of Atom and aimed squarely at the mobile device market. The board will be generally available to hobbyists by the end of November, for about $60. More on Ars. (Thanks to Bill Meyer for poking me about this; I knew but have been too busy to mention it here.)
- Very nice site on Earth’s cryosphere, which shows sea ice extent and much else. Antarctic ice is in good shape and growing. Arctic ice is a tougher call. It’s down from the 70s but looks to be coming back.
- There is a hoarder house so full of vinyl records that the collector ended up sleeping in his car. Hey, is there an undiscovered hoarder house full of variable capacitors somewhere?
- There are a number of reasons I don’t read Time Magazine. This may be most of them.
- Manshunyogger!
- Maybe it’s a triple-humped solar max. Or maybe Old Sol is just having some fun with us.
- Here’s why the Russians didn’t beat us to the Moon.
- Turbo Pascal as a Javascript browser window. Not complete (and it doesn’t understand Readln!) but still. Egad. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.)
- If you f&$!*!ing love science, you should f&$!*!ing hate how we do it in this country.
New Photo of John T. Frye
Reader George Cohn sent me a photo of John T. Frye that I had not seen before. It’s from the May, 1948 issue of Radio News, which contained the second installment of his very long-running “Mac’s Service Shop” column. Assuming the photo was recent when published, Frye would have been 38.
For those who don’t recognize his name, John T. Frye was the author of the Carl & Jerry educational stories from Popular Electronics, “Phone Phunnies” from QST, and a whole metric passel of other things in other places, including two books on tube-era radio servicing that from what I can tell have passed into the public domain. See my article on Frye and his creations Carl & Jerry. I republished all 119 stories in five books several years ago (plus one new storyI wrote myself, and another one from the late George Ewing WA8WTE) and they’re still selling. Frye was a paraplegic who never walked, and how he did what he did in his life is one of the great success stories of disabled people who just didn’t let anything get them down. Legs? We don’t need no steenking legs!
When XP’s svchost.exe Takes 100% of the CPU
I have computers the way some people have mice (those other mice, with legs) and two days ago, a couple of them went nuts. Carol’s SX280 went to 100% CPU usage and roaring fans, and when I turned it on, a second machine (an older SX270) did the same thing. Rebooting changed nothing, though it took a minute or so after reboot for the problem to reappear, which allowed me to do some hasty troubleshooting.
Meanwhile, my quadcore purred along without incident. All three machines use XP SP3, and all three are set for auotmatic updates. I pulled an older SX270 off the shelf that I knew was still at XP SP2 and hooked it up on the bench. Nothing so far. I booted into Windows 7 on my GX620 (it ordinarily runs Mint) and have not seen anything out of the ordinary.
The module sucking all those cycles is the instance of svchost.exe that runs all of the miscellanous Windows machinery, including updates. Hmmmmm.
This is not a new problem; in fact, this rang some bells so old the cloud of dust took an hour to settle. As long ago as 2004, people have reported svchost.exe suddenly taking the whole CPU. Quite a few reports indicated that the culprit was the Windows Update automatic updates client, wuauclt.exe. I turned off automatic updates on the misbehaving machines, rebooted again, and the problem went away.
That’s only a partial solution, of course. And the problem is evidently still with us. In the comments to that post, a user suggested this command series as a fix:
- net stop “Automatic Updates”
- del /f /s /q %windir%\SoftwareDistribution\*.*
- net start “Automatic Updates”
- wuauclt.exe /detectnow
In essence, you disable automatic updates, delete all the files from the subdirectory where wuauclt.exe keeps its logs and other data files (you can’t do this if automatic updates is running), restart automatic updates, and then force an immediate check for updates. This worked, and I dusted my hands together in triumph.
Alas, yesterday noonish, both machines again went nuts. Both are scheduled for replacement, so I just let them run. After about two hours of screaming fans, svchost.exe let go of the CPU, and everything returned to normal. In the meantime, my quadcore and that creaky old SP2 machine have shown no symptoms.
I still don’t know precisely what’s going on, but it’s almost certainly some kind of bug in automatic updates. (I’ve scanned all machines for malware and found nothing.) XP updates end next April 1, and by that time I’ll have replaced the two wonky machines with much newer Win7 boxes. (One is already on order.) In the meantime, I’d be curious to hear if anyone reading this has seen the same issue. I expected to see a flurry of online reports and found nothing, right up to a couple of minutes ago. So maybe Carol and I just got to the top of the XP karma fairy’s little list. Still looking, and certainly open to suggestions.
A Venerable Old Con
I got the email below this morning. It’s similar to messages of this sort that I receive regularly, with the single difference that I know the supposed sender. I say “supposed” because I know damned well it didn’t come from her. Here’s the text, minus identifying characteristics:
Good morning,I Hope you get this on time, I made a trip to UKRAINE and had my bag stolen from me with my passport and personal effects therein. The embassy has just issued me a temporary passport but I have to pay for a ticket and settle my hotel bills with the Manager.I have made contact with my bank but it would take me 3-5 working days to access funds in my account, the bad news is my flight will be leaving very soon but i am having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won’t let me leave until i settle the bills, I need your help/LOAN financially and I promise to make the refund once i get back home, you are my last resort and hope, Please let me know if i can count on you and i need you to keep checking your email because it’s the only way i can reach you.Looking forward to hearing from you,
Ms. Real PersonREAL_HOME_PAGE_URL.comFAKE@aol.comREAL_BLOG_URL.comFollow us on Facebook and Twitter
This con has been around forever and most people have heard of it, but in case you haven’t, beware. Everything in the contact info is real except for the email address, which will not put you in touch with Ms. Real Person, but the scammer. I checked with Ms. Real Person and she had not yet heard that she was being used in the scam. It’s possible that the mass mailing used many scraped contact blocks to avoid popping up immediately on scam reporting sites.
Scams appealing to greed (i.e, 419/Spanish Prisoner) are way down here, and scams like this appealing to goodheartedness are on the upswing. I’d be curious to see if the same is true for all of you.
Odd Lots
- Anger makes you stupid. Politics makes you angry. Do the math. (Thanks to Bob Trembley for the link.)
- Running across George O. Smith’s books while redistributing titles on one of my shelves led me to look for the most powerful vacuum tube ever produced commercially. This was the understated Eimac 8974, which contains its own vacuum pump and could hurl out two million watts in Class C. QROOOOOOOOO! You can’t drive a truck into it, but you’ll need a truck to move it. And once you get it home, your first problem will be finding 600 amps to heat the filament.
- Winter’s coming early to the West: We hit a record low here for this date yesterday night: 26 degrees. Two feet of snow fell in parts of the Dakotas, with some unofficial reports (like this one, in the appropriately named Deadwood, SD) of as much as four feet.
- The Farmer’s Almanic is predicting a truly bitchy winter this year. (Note that this is not The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which is less sanguine.) We’ve noticed that the squirrels here are busting their nuts eating acorns, which is at least as good a predictor.
- Speaking of brrrrrr: Recent research fingers the Llopango volcano in Ecuador as the triggering event of the severe global cooling of 535-536, which finished off the Western Empire via crop failures and the Plague of Justinian. It was a truly titanic eruption, hitting 6.9 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index and thus a peer of the gigapuissant Tambora. After that, well, there was nothing much to do except have the Dark Ages.
- More scary robots. Four legs seems optimal for this sort of creature, which seems to be designed to carry cargo over bad terrain. It’s pretty clear to me that drones with machine guns make better manshunyoggers.
- Most people don’t have a gut sense for what “ephemera” means, but if you want a sampling of the weirdest examples ever seen (as well as many cool and sometimes beautiful ones) prepare to spend some time on it. Don’t miss Part 2.
- Which led me to Found in Mom’s Basement, a compendium of vintage ads. Some weird, some peculiar, some creepy, much Seventies. “Guess Whose Mother Used Downy?” Mort Drucker’s tampon ads. Read the archives!
- How to deal with the highest of all high-class problems, albeit the one you’re least likely to face. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- One of the siller analyses I’ve seen recently. Then again, it may be the case that geeks are about culture and nerds are about ideas. I actually thought that nerds were what they called us in the Seventies and geeks are what they call us now.
- From the Brutal Truth In Labeling Department. I’m in.
It’s a Zoo Out Here
Yesterday afternoon I walked down to the mailbox to see if the held mail notice was still in it. Just as I slammed the mailbox door, an adult black bear rounded the corner of Stanwell and Langdale, and ambled down the middle of the sidewalk, straight at me. It was fat as bears go, granted that this is the time of year for bears to be fat. Fat or not, what impressed me was that it saw me and didn’t stop ambling. On it came. Forty feet. Thirty feet. Twenty-five feet. There the bear paused, still in the middle of the sidewalk. This was closer than I’d ever been to a black bear without lots of iron between us, and way closer than I’d prefer to be. My first thought was to look for cubs. Not the time of year for that, and nothing in view. My second thought proceeded from my training as a fiction writer: What does this character want? No clue. My third thought was to start backing up, slowly. I’m thin. The bear was fat. It was about 100 feet to my front door. I started doing the math.
After I backed up ten or fifteen feet, the bear ambled across our neighbors’ gravel landscaping and galomphed down into the gully between our houses, where there is a galvanized iron pipe under Stanwell carrying runoff from farther up the mountain. It’s gotten a lot of use this (wet) summer, and was still trickling a little. The bear hunkered down and started lapping water from the open end of the pipe.
I had gotten between a bear and what it wanted, which probably isn’t a good idea. At least the bear was courteous enough to wait for me to figure that out.
Today’s animal stories don’t end there, Uncle Lar. No indeedy. On Tuesday, a skunk got into Jimi Henton’s back yard. Jimi boards the Pack when we travel (we bought three of them from her, in fact, so they’re basically family) and the four of them much enjoy the luxury of having a back yard where they can run around in circles. Aero likes to bark at animals that he sees, generally out the kitchen nook window. Here was one of a sort he doesn’t see often, and he headed off at a gallop to protect his breeder and his pack from the interloper. Shortly afterward, Jimi smelled skunk in the house. She has a doggie door into the back yard and assumed the worst. But no, it was skunk by proxy. By the time she cornered Aero in her living room the whole house reeked.
Four baths and all sorts of exotic remedies later, he still smells a little. But here’s a tip for the skunklorn: Take off the dog’s collar. Much of the smell that remained was in the leather, which is now double-bagged in the big garage trash can.
Oh, and earlier today I saw nine deer right across the street, eating the grass. This is one reason we didn’t plant grass.
Tonight I will grill a good steak in honor of the animal kingdom. I will grill it from my main deck, which lacks stairs and is 23 feet above the ground. If I see any of my animal friends down in the gully, I will wave, hold up the steak, and say, Don’t push your luck.
37 Years of Joyful Determination
Carol and I just got back from Chicago last night, after twelve out-of-breath days largely spent marrying off our older nephew Brian. Done! More on this later; it was a wedding like no other. I’ll post pictures when pictures start trickling in. (The photo above is another couple you may know, dodging a mixture of rice and punch-card chad.)
Brian and his lady Alexis are now at the beach on an island on the opposite side of the planet, and Carol and I are still cheering for them. They’re not our children, of course, not precisely (Brian is Carol’s godson) but we’re very proud of them for a great many things. Among these are a sense we see in them that marriage can work, and a determination to make it work that we recognized instantly. We recognized it instantly because that determination lies at the very heart of our own lives together.
Thirty-seven years ago today, Carol and I took that determination and made it explicit: We would stand beside one another no matter what. Marriage is friendship sanctified, and we had been working hard on our friendship for seven years by then. It’s difficult to describe how much deeper and stronger our friendship is now. The best we can do is let our friendship stand on its merits. Time shatters what cannot hold, and perfects what cannot be broken. You’ve seen us, spoken with us, worked with us, and celebrated with us. I think you all know which way Time has taken us.
For Brian and Ali and all the rest of you who have chosen the path of marriage, we offer our encouragement and our applause, in the hope that Time will grant you all that it has granted us, and more.
Wayne Green W2NSD, SK
It’s hard not to have an opinion about Wayne Green. Depending on whom you listen to, he was a visionary, a crank, delusional, eccentric, generous, lecherous, honest, optimistic, boundlessly energetic, or all of the above and maybe a few more. Someone wrote a bogglingly angry book once (I had it but have misplaced it) that spent its entire length trying to persuade us that he was a liar, a scoundrel, a thief, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of Byte Magazine. Anger that dense warps the fabric of truth. (Be careful with your anger. Let it get too dense and you will vanish into a black hole of lost credibility from which you may never emerge.) Don Lancaster put the lie to it without any trouble: When Don was writing for the extremely early Byte, Wayne was there, buying articles and signing checks.
That said, Wayne Green said a lot of peculiar things about a lot of things both mundane and peculiar. He said he was richer than (as best we know) he actually was. He said he was sexy and available. (One out of two ain’t bad.) He was constantly bitching and moaning about the FCC, the ARRL, and lord knows what else. He bragged about affairs he had had with his editorial staff. He published articles about homebrew radio gear that simply couldn’t work, or were such peculiar lashups of pipe fittings, power tubes, trash cans, glue, staples, beer bottles and copper tubing that nobody wanted to try. (I say this with some affection. Many of those articles were by the late Bill Hoisington K1CLL, who admitted…gasp!…that VHF/UHF circuits could be cranky. The crankiness of those circuits led him to try a lot of things that looked dicey, but to me their craziness indicated a certain honesty about how cranky VHF/UHF electronics actually are. Which is, of course…cranky.) There is a long list of things that Wayne Green did here. How many are true is hard to say. Did he really pilot a nuclear attack sub? Scary notion, if you’ve read his editorials. The truth, I suspect, is that he was a legend in both senses of the term.
Wayne Green, whether he was crazy or not, remains one of my heroes, for this reason: He bought the first piece of writing I ever sold, but not the first I ever had published. I guess I need to clarify: When the article appeared in the December 1974 issue of 73 Magazine, it was not my first publication. I had sold “Our Lady of the Endless Sky” to Harry Harrison for Nova 4 about a month later, but Wayne, as was his wont, paid me immediately and then sat on “All the World’s a Junkbox” for over a year before getting it into print. (“Our Lady” was in my hands in September.) And then he changed the title, to the inane “Zillions of Parts for Nothing.” (See page 36 of that issue.) Was I annoyed? A little. But heck, you only sell your first article once.
I subscribed to 73 for a lot of years, and have most of a full run of the mag on my shelves. Wayne was an editor of CQ for years before 73 appeared. Both magazines were lively and entertaining under his watch. The tech ran hot and cold, as it did almost everywhere but QST, which had paid techs on staff to build things and make sure that they were a) buildable and b) worked. But boy, when the late George Ewing WA8WTE and I got together on 40M, as often as not Wayne’s latest editorial was tops on our rag-chew agenda. Wayne published books, too, including George Ewing’s Living on a Shoestring, which George called “my scrounge book” and I consider a marvelous technical memoir. For a little while Wayne published a magazine called Cold Fusion Journal, which may have been the best fit of an editor with his niche that we will ever see.
Wayne died a few days ago, on the 13th. He was 91. His brief article on Wikipedia indicated that he was ready and eager to go off adventuring in the afterlife, an attitude I much admire. We speculate about what happens to good people after death, and what happens to bad people. What, then, happens to crazy people? Does God try to “fix” them, or do they just go on being crazy? “Crazy” is a debatable term, of course, but it seems to me that if Wayne Green weren’t his very particular brand of crazy, he wouldn’t be Wayne Green anymore. And that, my friends, would be a tragedy, whether here or in the afterlife.
TNX ES 73 OM DE K7JPD SK.
Pat Thurman K7KR, SK
I’m numb. This past Tuesday we lost Pat Thurman, K7KR. He had been struggling with multiple medical issues for a couple of months, and at some point they simply overwhelmed him. Flesh is fragile, even when the spirit is strong.
Like many people, Pat knew of me from my books and my magazine work, and when I announced in my DDJ column that Carol and I were moving to Arizona at the beginning of 1990, he sent me a note and told us to get in touch once we arrived. We did. Pat and his wife Sue became instant friends, and within a year, neighbors, out in the wild dirt-road country at the northern tip of Scottsdale.
Pat was a DXer and contester of formidable skill. While I watched in awe, he put up a 75′ winch-up tower with a highly engineered ground system and a couple of very large steerable beams. (I contented myself with a 200′ longwire and a 6M vertical.) His thunderous signal was heard around the world. His official DX count is 245 countries. (There are 340 right now.) Mine? 17.
We did a lot of offroading in the Tonto National Forest in his high-clearance Jimmy, and visited Sheep’s Bridge. On one of those early trips, Pat stopped the Jimmy for a tarantula in the road. We got out and gathered around the tarantula, which was the first (though it would not be the last) that I had seen in the wild. I wanted a picture, and for scale Pat tossed a quarter onto the road about a foot away from the spider. I worried that the quarter would scare it away. Not so: The tarantula pounced on the quarter so quickly we figured it just teleported. Then once it realized that quarters weren’t edible, it ambled slowly off into the brush.
Pat and Sue were early and eager beta readers for The Cunning Blood, and the inspiration for my Filer Fitzgerald character came from a character in one of Sue’s shows that promoted reading for grade schoolers. It was for that same show that I built The Head of R&D, as I mentioned here some time back. We ate a lot of dinners together, drank a lot of Dornfelder, laughed a great deal, and talked about all kinds of things.
If I can point to any single force that hauled me out of the spiritual mailaise I’d been in for twenty years back in the early 1990s, it was Pat and Sue, and their aptly named parish, Our Lady of Joy. My childhood religion was grim, Hell-centric, and focused on self-denial well beyond what I would call “a healthy discipline.” We originally attended the Sunday night “teen mass” with Pat because Pat and Sue had twin teen sons, and Sue was in the music group. I was astonished: The music they played and sang was downright exuberant: “Send Down the Fire,” “The Canticle of the Turning,” “One Is,” and many more. It made me wonder if there were more to Catholicism than a celebration of human and divine suffering. Our Lady of Joy allowed me to imagine a Catholic tradition that celebrates the physical world, and a God who will not settle for partial victories. Pat and Sue didn’t follow us to Old Catholicism, but without their influence, Carol and I would never have known the journey was even possible.
The older I get, the more I’m certain that friendship is the cornerstone of the human spirit. Alas, the older I get, the more I see my friends leaving this world for other realms. I’m 61 now, and I know enough math to understand that that’s just how things work. Does friendship even have a point, if death can end it so easily?
But…maybe it does, because…maybe it doesn’t. If you get my drift.
K7KR DE K7JPD / TNKS GUD LK ES 73 CUL SK.
