- I hit a milestone the other day: 40,000 words on Ten Gentle Opportunities, which is at least halfway there and maybe (if I’m willing to settle for a 75,000 word story) more than halfway.
- One of my readers sent a link to a page describing how to install the Insight debugger under Linux Mint. As my ASM freak friends will recall, I no sooner described Insight in Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition than Debian pulled it out of their distribution. Supposedly this method will also work for newer versions of Ubuntu. I need to test the repository under both distros, and will report when I do.
- There’s a new nova in Sagittarius. (Is that redundant?) Mag 7.8–which is easy to see with binoculars, if you can separate it from the stellar mosh pit in which it appeared. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
- Michael Covington sent a Google Ngram for the words “whosever” and “whoever’s” indicating that “whosever” has been on the run for a couple of centuries. It became the minority player about 1920 and has been down in the mud since about 1960.
- Ok, I agree: This is the most brilliant kitchen gadget since the salad spinner. Or before.
- I used to do this a lot, though I haven’t done it since 1977: pull the guts out of a photocopier. This guy’s blog, by the way, is news to me but should be on every techie’s blogroll. (Thanks to Jack Smith K8ZOA for the link.)
- Haven’t heard much about software radio recently. Ars Technica just had a nice overview piece on it. The hardware keeps getting better, but all the promised weirdness (including new types of pirate radio) hasn’t happened yet. My theory: Wi-Fi is just a better weirdness magnet.
- Foxconn is releasing a fanless nano-PC toward the end of summer, and I like the looks of it, at least if it’s got something better than an Atom in it. Roughly 7.5″ X 5.25″ X 1.5″. No optical drive. 5-in-1 card reader on the front panel. Under $300.
- Talk about nutty brilliance for film promotion: RC drones in the shape of superhero-style flying people to hype the film Chronicle, which is evidently about…flying people. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- To inflate a Buckyball, just use a laser.
- This sweet merlot (scroll down) was lots better than I thought it would be, especially for a hot summer evening’s barbecue. May be hard to find outside Colorado. No least hint of concord grape, for you mutant-blueberry purists. About $15.
- Yet another sign that we may be winning the Fat Wars: Fat-free dressing is bad for you.
- Still yet another sign may be that the grocery store near our condo outside Chicago carries a sort of spreadable lard called “smalec.” This is the best-kept secret in the food world; it took me ten minutes to even find a picture of it. It was brought here by Polish immigrants and is no less healthy than butter, though I have no clue as to its taste.
- As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, well, the latest home hazard is swallowing loose bristles from your grill brush. My brush is at least five years old and failing. Looking for another technique. (Again, thanks to Pete Albrecht for pointing it out.)
- This sure sounds like a hoax, but there could be a zombie apocalypse theme park in Detroit’s future. The concept suggests that time’s about up for the zombie craze, so I’d better get my novel (which contains dancing zombies) shambling on to completion before the whole thing caves in.
food
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Don’t forget the annular solar eclipse that will touch the Southwestern US this Sunday, May 20.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Ignorosphere, the region from about 120,000 feet altitude to the lowest stable orbit. (It’s a flip term for the mesosphere.) It’s too high for winged aircraft or balloons, and not empty enough for orbiting spacecraft. Sampling it is difficult (one-shot sounding rockets are all we have in terms of tools) and we know less about it than any other region of near space.
- After a long conversation on the subject with mobile developer David Beers the other day, I stumbled on an article that drives home the problematic nature of Android app development: There are actually four thousand different Androids. (Maybe more.)
- I’m seeing more and more videos in, um, bad taste being posted to my friends’ Facebook feeds by something called Socialcam. The suggestion is that those who post have actually viewed the videos, but that’s not true. Socialcam reserves the right to post stuff to your Facebook feed that you have not viewed and have no knowledge of. Tear that damned thing out by the roots.
- This certainly makes me wish that I liked corn more than I do.
- An interesting study here adds fuel to the fire over suggestions that keeping a consistent sleep schedule helps you lose weight. I.e., don’t try to “make up” lost sleep on the weekends. Doesn’t work. I’ve been saying this for years, based on a lecture series I took at the Mayo Clinic: Getting five hours of sleep a night will make you fat and kill you before your time. People get angry at me for suggesting that they be in bed, lights-out, between 9:30 and 10 PM if they have to get up at six to get to school or work, but that’s probably what it takes. A handful of people may be able to get by on five or six hours a night. The usual human-traits bell curve suggests that you are almost certainly not one of them.
- If you remember a speculation I made some time back about dogs and human origins, well here’s another: That dogs helped us drive the Neanderthals to extinction. I’m dubious. My sense is that their lack of dogs allowed the Neanderthals to drive themselves to extinction via dawn raids. Dogs made dawn raids difficult, and so we failed to wipe our own species out. (I haven’t seen any evidence yet that Neanderthals kept dogs, but of course I’m still looking.)
- If you don’t know what a “zoetrope” is, go look it up before you behold the pizzoetrope, which is essentially an edible animation created by spinning a pizza. Sounds loopy (as it were) but it works.
Odd Lots
- Not posting often here, but I’m ok. Working hard on several things, chief of which is getting my office and Carol’s exchanged, outfitted, and fully functional. This involves furniture, wiring, lighting, and sorting an immense quantity of glarble. I hope to return to regular in-depth posting soon.
- I have a new favorite cheese: cave-aged gruyere, which can be had sometimes at King Soopers, and is lucious with a good dry red wine. Get the oldest cheese you can find, as young gruyere tastes nothing like old gruyere. A year is as young as I buy.
- The asteroid that whacked the dinosaurs must have thrown an immense amount of material into space. How much rock might have made the journey, and how far far did it go? Here’s a good quick take on the topic. It would take a million years or more to get to Gliese 581, but suitably rugged bacterial spores might have survived, and made the origin of life on planets there unnecessary. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- A book I’m not bullish on: Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, which describes how the cause of cholera (infected water) was proven by the persistent John Snow through charting of cholera deaths upon a map of London neighborhood water pumps. Why? The book does not include the actual ghost map named in the title. (So what else is missing or wrong?) Whatever editor let that past should be fired and spend the rest of his/her days stuffing toddler clothes in racks at Wal Mart.
- Could the TRS-80 Mod 100 possibly be 30 years old? Yes indeedy, and it was ubiquitous among tech journalists when I was at PC Tech Journal in ’85-86. Its keycaps made a distinctive sound, and sitting in a significant press conference back then was like sitting under a tin roof in a rainstorm. I yearned for one myself (the keyboard was wonderful for such a small device) but didn’t pull the trigger because the machine did so little other than keystroke capture.
- Toward the end of my tenure at Xerox I saw the Sunrise, which was a more ambitious take on the “lapslab” concept. My department was considering writing an app for it, so I had a loaner for awhile. Even better keyboard than the TRS 100, cassette data storage, modem…but the 3-line display was harder to read. Xerox private-labeled the hardware from another company, and basically killed it with a $1500 price point. (There was a flashier version that cost…$2500!) Xerox abandoned the market in 1984, after sinking what rumor held to be an obscene amount of money into it.
- One machine I did consider was the Exidy Sorcerer, which also had a good keyboard and didn’t cost $3000. Lack of software made me spend the $3000 anyway, on a huge honking S100 system running a 1 MHz 8080.
- One of the big issues between Amazon and the Big Six is an explosion of co-op fees, which according to some reports have increased by 30 times since 2011. The whole “co-op” business has always smelled gamey to me, but it had a purpose in the B&M bookselling world. How it fits into online ebook retailing is less clear, and in my view starts leaning perilously in the direction of bribery.
- Most of us think that reading is in decline. Gallup poll results suggest otherwise. Nor are today’s books worse than those of 40+ years ago. This quote is significant: “The bad [books] of yesteryear have gone out of print while the bad ones of today are alive and being sold in supermarkets.”
- I’m still watching the ASUS Tranformer Prime (their botch of its GPS support has kept me away for the time being) but the Prime has a little (as in cheaper) brother now, and it looks like a decent machine in its own right. Here’s Engadget’s detailed review of theTransformer Pad TF-300.
- Here’s another wonderful gallery from Dark Roasted Blend, this time of high-speed photos of liquids. Some of it is photoshopped, but it’s all startling. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the link.)
- Santorini is smouldering again. Yes, the volcano that may have made the Minoans extinct and launched the legend of Atlantis (or at least put an older legend on the map) is getting restless. Like the Greeks need that right now.
- Eating meat allowed our hominid ancestors to reproduce more quickly, by accelerating infant brain growth and thus shortening the breastfeeding period. (Breastfeeding naturally inhibits ovulation.) This on top of several other issues.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Beatboxing , which is vocal generation of sounds like drums and synthesized sound effects. I heard of this in an interesting way: There’s a slightly silly commercial for the Honda Pilot that involves a Pilot full of bored tweens beatboxing the rhythm of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” and by chance we had captioning turned on. When the kids started making noises, the captioning read, “Beatboxing.”
- Pete Albrecht sends a link to a map color-coding US gas prices by county. The very abrupt differences between states suggests that gas prices are more a question of state and local taxes than regional differences in demand.
- It was inevitable: A 3D printer that prints chocolate novelties. Now we need a 3D printer that prints spice-cake Easter lambs with ears that stay on.
Odd Lots
- I’m behind on a great many things, especially fiction writing and replying to email, so bear with me until I get dug out from under the pile. Exchanging offices within a house is precisely the same as moving two offices, and that means a lot of boxes and a lot of bother, exploding intercoms being the least of it.
- I didn’t expect this wine to be as good as it actually is. About $11.
- The weather’s been beautiful here, so yesterday I was going to get out on the back deck with my Icom 736 and work the world. That was, of course, the day that sunspots basically vanished on the visible face of the Sun. What does it mean to have solar flares but no sunspots? Nobody knows.
- Thanks to many people (Jim Strickland being the first) who wrote to tell me about a “smart sand” project at MIT that is the first step toward the sort of nanoreplicator I postulated in my Drumlins stories: Tap in a 256-bit code, and some “smart dust” (very smart) in a stone bowl assembles something for you. I love it when my crazy dreams come true!
- Single-atom nanotransistors can now be reliably made, rather than hunted for. (Thanks to Roy harvey for the link.)
- From Michael Covington comes a link to a fascinating article about the other kind of abduction: abductive logic. If you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, don’t miss it!
- The Colorado state law that led Amazon to nuke my Associates account has been declared unconstitional. No word from Amazon as to whether I can have my account back.
- I would probably buy one of these if I could find one in stock somewhere.
- Jack Tramiel has left us, having created quite a raft of famous computers, including the very best forgotten computer ever.
- I checked the date on this one, but it was nine days too late to assume it’s a hoax. One might argue that solar panels are more elegant, but you can’t make buffalo spaghetti sauce in a solar panel.
- I’ve seen more dumb YouTube posts than I’m willing to admit, but this one takes the cake for sheer willful stupidity. I knew how this worked in 1959, when I was 7.
- Kids, this is futurism. All we need now are better tacos.
Odd Lots
- You can anodize titanium to give it a color finish using ordinary household ingredients like Coca Cola and electrons. Lots of electrons. (Alas, I don’t have enough Coke here to dunk my A-12.)
- The more I look at devices like this, the more I feel that it represents the future of high-end mobile computing. I also think it will accelerate the evolution of mobile device UIs, which are not in any shape (currently) to be productive in content creation or editing.
- This seems just, well, nuts to me, but people are using Usenet as a backup mechanism. Just bundle your stuff up in an encrypted binary file and post it to any binary group at all. With Giganews now providing 1300 days (!!) of binary retention, it could work…if you encrypt it strongly enough. (I remember the time when binary retention was six or seven days.)
- Many people have never heard of the “lineman’s splice,” which is way of joining two wires so that the join is in fact stronger than the wire itself. Now that NASA has endorsed the splice, it may see a renaissance. Only one problem: The drawing in the article is wrong. Can you spot the problem?
- I’ve always been a fan of “hi-rails,” which are small railroad vehicles used to run around the trackage looking for damage to rails and ties. Today, as often as not, they’re street pickup trucks with added small liftable flanged wheels, allowing them to operate on both rail and road. In times past, they were often street sedans with big flanged wheels and even cowcatchers. I consider them Dieselpunk, but I’ve never seen them mentioned in SFF.
- Of course, in the Steampunk era (or if your railroad was especially cheap) you had to pedal around the tracks yourself.
- An answer to a question I myself have never thought to ask: Why does it take less milk or cream to lighten iced coffee than hot coffee?
- I don’t even tweet with a keyboard yet, but with an Arduino and my trusty straight key, I’d have a long leg up on tweeting via Morse code.
- This is not the kind of glow-in-the-dark index you want to be high on, trust me.
Odd Lots
- Very cool: a home-made wire stripper that tells you when you’ve cut the insulation precisely as far as necessary.
- I’ve of two minds about the genre of infographics, but this one appears to capture a pretty complicated business in a fairly small space: That fat does not make you fat. (Thanks to Apostle of Eris on LiveJournal for the link.)
- Jim Strickland showed me something startling when I was up in Denver this past Monday: A cylindrical neodymium magnet slowly tumbling as it drifts down a 2′ length of copper pipe. Drop it at the top, and then watch it (against a reasonably bright floor) as it goes. Videos are on YouTube. No mystery; just physics, courtesy Lenz’s Law.
- Also from Jim is a link to some discussion about why McGraw-Hill seems willing to accept $15 iPad-based secondary-ed ebooks instead of $75-a-pop print textbooks. Most of it comes down to eliminating the resale market, and receiving that $15 from every student who ever uses that book. Expect resistance from many quarters, including this one.
- Those who remember the Steeleye Span song “Seven Hundred Elves” from the 70s may be interested to know that it was only the first part of a much longer and much older poem. (Long forum thread; read it all.)
- Here are some peculiar ways to deliver toothpaste, including Crest-flavored pudding and pie filling. No, I don’t understand that one either, unless it falls under the category of “business development.”
- This certainly sounds like a hoax to me, but whether it’s a hoax or not, it might be seed corn for some interesting fiction. (Thanks to Bishop Sam’l Bassett for the link.)
- Read the Wiki piece carefully, and you’ll discover that Graham crackers were invented circa 1829 by a preacher who thought that eating them would discourage masturbation. Oh…ditto corn flakes.
- In conclusion, don’t forget to watch The Puppy Bowl later today! (Football? Wazzat?)
Behold the EggMcSpamFin!
The place is a mess. Not as messy as it’ll be by tomorrow night, but it’s still a mess. The movers got everything transferred to the uncarpeted portions of the lower level yesterday, and the carpeting has been pulled up. Plastic tarps are all over the place. Tomorrow the drilling begins.
In the meantime, when Carol and I broke for lunch an hour ago, I tried something completely different. I scrambled a single egg in a bowl, dumped some butter into the little one-egg fry pan that I’ve had for years (left) and with the burner on medium made a scrambled egg disk. I then threw a Bay’s English muffin in the toaster, and while it was toasting I broke open a Spam Single onto a Corelle plate and heated it up to a nice sizzle in the microwave. When the muffin came out of the toaster I buttered it good and proper, threw the scrambled egg disk on a muffin’s lower half, lowered the sizzlin’ Spam Single onto the egg, and then slapped the muffin lid on the whole business.
Damn, that was good! Cheap, too, as lunches go. Eggs are about 20c each. Spam Singles run about a buck. A single Bay’s English muffin costs me about 40c. Might have used a nickel’s worth of butter. Total $1.65. Almost entirely sugar-free. Filled me up completely and will probably carry me all the way to suppertime without any need to snack. It would be less fattening without the English muffin, but try as I might, I can’t do completely without English muffins.
Highly recommended.
Odd Lots
- You’re getting two Odd Lotses in a row for a reason. Stay tuned–I’ll try and explain tomorrow, if I don’t run out of Aleve.
- Bruce Eckel is returning his Kindle Fire because the damned thing will not render .mobi files. C’mon, Amazon. I mean, come on. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
- Xoom 2, where are you? Whoops, it’s going to be called the Droid XYboard to distance itself from the Xoom brand, which was done in because Somebody Didn’t Want It To Have a Card Slot. (Don’t know who. Have suspicions.)
- Charlie Stross makes a good case that DRM on ebooks (as required by the Big Six) is a stick handed to Amazon with which to pummel the Big Six. Read the piece, follow the links (make sure you know what a “monopsony” is) and then read the comments.
- Schumann resonance waves can apparently be detected from space. This is surprising, as my earlier readings suggested that they only exist by virtue of a sort of immaterial waveguide formed by layers in the Earth’s atmosphere–the same waveguide effect that allows hams like me to bounce signals around the world.
- Femtotech? I postulated a “femtoscope” in my novel The Cunning Blood, but it was used to plot quantum pair creation and did not rely on exotic matter. I’m not sure such things are possible, or could be done in any environment where we could live or even work through proxies. But as with a lot of things (especially LENR) I would hugely enjoy being wrong.
- I torrented down the brand-new Linux Mint 12 Lisa the other day, and like its predecessor it will not detect the video hardware correctly on my 2009-era Core 2 Quad with NVidia 630i integrated graphics. Somewhat surprisingly, it will install on an older Dell GX620 USFF with (as best I can tell) no video problems. Not sure if I like GNOME 3, though. MATE, a GNOME 2 fork, has promise.
- I may have made this point once before, but hard steampunk authors should have the Lindsay Books catalog on hand, or at least have the site bookmarked. These are books explaining how to actually do steampunk technology, often in the form of reprints of original Victorian-era reference texts. Thermite, brass, steam engines, and loads of other goodies just as great-great grandpa learned them. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the noodge.)
- One of my German friends told me that plagiarism in German doctoral theses is so widespread that it’s spawned a crowdsourced mechanism for detecting it. That’s the abbreviated English-language version; if you have a reasonable amount of German, go to the richer, fuller main page.
- Very spooky time-lapse video of a little-known physical phenomenon. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I originally thought this was a hoax. On the other hand, I have a Tim Bird and I love it. It’s hard to believe that such things actually work as well as they do.
- Sometimes you wear what you eat–or at least a reasonable facsimile.
Odd Lots
- Happy Thanksgiving Day to all who celebrate it–and to those who don’t, well, this guy is still thankful that the world is big enough for both of us. In terms of Thanksgiving Day meditations, I’ll simply offer the one I wrote in 2008. I may not ever do better than that.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday File: seedbox, a remote and generally headless system on a high-bandwidth Internet connection, used exclusively to seed torrents in defiance of ISP speed-throttling of BitTorrent users.
- Also pertinent to yesterday’s entry: Penguin Books got into a snit of lender’s remorse, and basically shut down access to its titles previously available to public library patrons through Amazon’s Kindle lending program. Apparently the DRM wasn’t DRM-y enough, and Penguin (through the Overdrive technology) locked its titles out. Precisely what the technical issues are is still unclear, but I’m researching it.
- We have lost Anne McCaffrey, at age 85. She died of a stroke at her home in Ireland on November 21. She was the first woman to earn a Hugo or a Nebula award, and did a great deal to drag SF out of the locker room to which the pulps had led it.
- Having recently become an Android user (via my Droid X2) I have now begun to dream of SparkFun’s Electric Sheep.
- Debsnews now has a wine channel. It’s one way to focus in on specific short videos (example: WalMart’s new $3 wine line) without having to spend a third of your life parked in front of a TV.
- Anybody who’s tried to spread a Ziplock bag with one hand while pouring leftover spaghetti sauce into it with the other may appreciate this gadget. Everybody else, move along.
- Many people are sending me links to stories about canned goods containing greater than acceptable levels of BPA. This is not new news. However, I didn’t know about it until yesterday, right after opening a can of Spam.
- Maybe the new Spam Singles packaging is the answer. No can!
- Carol met Colonel Sanders at the Mayo Clinic back in 1975, and the guy does get around. You can now see him from space. This is not photoshopped, but the real deal. It’s been there since 2006, and consists of 87,000 colored tile “pixels.” (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Make describes a steam-powered bristlebot. Somehow this reminds me of those little scrubbing-bubble guys on the TV commercials.
- There may be another reason (quite apart from battery life) to turn your smartphone’s power off every night. (Thanks to Pamela Boulais for the link.)
- If you’ve never gone up to the Car Talk Web site and looked at the staff credits page, you’re missing out on people you haven’t seen since your study hall attendance-sheet days. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Daywander: Halloween
It’s Halloween! Eggnog is in stock! Yes, today was the first day that Farm Crest’s almost unsurpassed eggnog goes on sale at the Farm Crest milk stores owned by (I kid you not) Pester Marketing. (Their eggnog is surpassed only, I think, by Oberweis in Chicago.) Stock up now; Christmas is only two months away!
Mmmph. Maybe next month. I bought a gallon of high-fat milk instead. I may not be the 5%, but I sure as hell drink it. On the way, I stopped near the old downtown Colorado Springs train station on Sierra Madre to see the Union Pacific #844 Niagara steam loco, which is on tour and in town for yesterday and today only. #844 was the last steam loco ordered by UP, and it’s been lovingly restored as a sort of rolling, steaming, hot-and-dripping museum. I don’t see 4-8-4’s very often, and never before a live one, so it was well worth the detour. Smaller cities are great in that I scored a parking place right across the street, and could get photos with almost nobody else in the way. I doubt I would have done that well in, say, Chicago.
It’s tough to get size perspective on machines like this. The eight drive wheels are eighty inches in diameter, and the engine as a whole is 114 feet long. Because of a historical quirk, “standard” railroad gauge is four feet eight inches, meaning that the wheels are considerably wider than the gap between the rails. I always wonder, facing a behemoth like this, how they managed to keep it on the tracks. (One answer is luck. Another, gravity. Most of all, skill. Alas, sometimes the answer is, They didn’t.)
There were a number of people swarming the loco, polishing the connecting rods and valve gear and wiping dirt off the painted parts. It was surreal how shiny the metal bits were–I would guess it wasn’t anything like this clean back when it was earning a living. In fact, while I was admiring the dazzlingly burnished iron, a young mother walked over with a three-year-old on one hip. As she turned around to pose for dad’s camera, the small boy reached his hand out to the connecting rod. His mom jerked him away: “Danny, don’t touch that! You’ll get it dirty!”
Some time tomorrow morning, old #844 will head south on the BNSF main line to Pueblo. Given that we look down Cheyenne Mountain toward the tracks and hear the Diesel horns on the BNSF coal trains all the time from our back deck, there’s a nonzero chance that I may hear the 844’s transplanted Big Boy whistle as the consist roars by. I’m sure going to try: The weather will be decent and I may never get another chance to hear any steam locomotive–much less a Niagara!–roar past my house.
As for Halloween itself, well, the Kid Gods are delivering near-perfection this year in Colorado Springs: 68 windless degrees under a cloudless sky. The legendary Halloween of 1964 was something like this in Chicago, and better only because it was on a Saturday. I’m not expecting a lot of traffic this year, since small children are scarce in this neighborhood of retired lieutenant colonels. I did buy a bag of Smarties for the big bowl by the front door, intrigued by the presence of dextrose as the sole sugar. I’ve never seen dextrose explicitly called out in a list of incredients before, even on candy. It’s typically “sugar” (generally sucrose, which is half fructose) or “high-fructose corn syrup.” I wonder if the animus against fructose has become so great that manufacturers are leaving nothing to supposition. If so, it’s a quiet victory–and not a small one.
Finally, QBit and I watched Van Helsing last night on the Family Channel. (Carol is still in Chicago and the rest of the Pack at Jimi’s.) The film is a great, whacky over-the-top paean to Victorian monsterabilia. Lessee: Wolfman, Dracula, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, miscellaneous vampires, plus Dr. Frankenstein, Igor, and the Monster. (The Mummy was indisposed.) Oh, and what I consider the single most dazzling steampunk movie weapon of all time: An automatic-fire crossbow that spits bolts at flying vapiresses as long as you hold the trigger. Dip the front end in a holy water font and you are da bomb! (And if you miss, just flick a fingerful of gooey glycerin-48…)
