- The IBM PC turns 30 today. I had a dual-floppy 5150 and loved it. Hard to believe it came home almost thirty years ago.
- The number of retractions of dead-wrong and perhaps fraudulent scientific papers is surging, rising fifteen-fold in the last ten years. So what’s a citizen scientist to do? Probably not buy into just anything that might be in a peer-reviewed paper. (Maybe we need more peers. Or better ones.)
- Good example: There’s little or no evidence that salt causes hypertension, but that doesn’t stop certain scientists and many government functionaries from insisting that it does. (If salt did cause hypertension, I’d be…dead.)
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-I-Played-Scrabble-With-An-Expert Department: ort, which is a fancy but short word for leftover food scraps. As in, “Yesterday at 12:15 the junior-high lunchroom became an ort cloud…”
- The Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight just before dawn, but a nearly full moon will drown out many or most of the fainter traces. Hey, get up early and plop into a deck chair for a while. Assuming a clear sky, you’re almost guaranteed to see something. And there’s always next year. (Carol and I have been watching them as weather allows since 1969.)
- This is still extremely new, but it has promise: an AbiWord plug-in that exports epub files from within AbiWord. (I haven’t tested it yet.)
- Ditto for Open Office Writer. (Haven’t tested it either, but thanks to Sam’l Bassett for the link.)
- Are you the kind of reader who reads the ending in the bookstore before buying the book? (I used to be.) Apparently spoilers don’t spoil the fun of reading novels as much as most people assume.
- Who doesn’t like control panels? Here’s a wonderful album of panels from every sort of machine, from the Space Shuttle to the 1966 TV series Batmobile. Don’t miss Part 2. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the links.)
- Wow. You used to be able to buy dynamite at the hardware store…at least if you were a farmer.
- Scott Adams thinks that boredom lies behind a lot of creativity. As we become less bored, we grow less creative. He may be right. But…how do we solve the Boredom Shortage? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I like butter. I like it a lot. But maybe not this much. (Thanks again to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Don’t just have your survivors give you a 21-gun salute. Be the 21-gun salute!
Odd Lots
Jeff & Jim at Who Else! Books in Denver
Carol and I just got back from a short trip to the mountains near San Isabel, Colorado, so we’re a little bit beat and (especially Carol) just a little bit sunburned. We rented a cabin at Aspen Acres campground, and walked the dogs all the way around Lake San Isabel. Not much else got done there, which was the whole point. Some new scenes from Ten Gentle Opportunities occurred to me, and that’s as far as the doing went.
But I do want to remind my Denver metro-area readers that Jim Strickland and I will be at Who Else! Books this coming Saturday, August 13, to talk about and read from our double novel Drumlin Circus / On Gossamer Wings. We’re slotted at 3 PM. The bookstore is at 200 S. Broadway, Denver 80209.
I’ve not been to the Broadway Book Mall before, so I may be up there a little earlier than that to poke around. I’m hoping to find some evidence that independent bookstores are on the rise again, after two decades of deepening eclipse. I remember the first time I ever saw a Borders, when Carol and I visited Rochester NY in 1991. I recall thinking: This is going to put a huge dent in the indie bookselling business, and I was right. What I couldn’t guess in 1991 was that the Internet was eventually going to put a huge dent in Borders–like, right between the eyes.
The Internet can do a lot. It can’t do everything. Something will replace Borders. Sooner or later we’ll find out what.
Anyway. I like bookstores. Always have, always will. Most that were in Colorado Springs when we arrived in 2003 are now gone. We have to go to Denver for certain things like Elfa shelving, and it’s starting to look like we’ll have to go there for books as well. I’ll be going on Saturday with my usual hunger for serendipity, and if you’re in the area see if you can stop by.
Odd Lots
- I guess I didn’t look hard enough last week: Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a site devoted to balloon molecules, using the same balloons that balloon artists twist into weiner dogs. The gallery contains lots of examples, from simple tetrahedra through Fullerenes and DNA, so don’t miss it!
- A neuroscientist calls BS on the Singularity. (Ok, the dialect of Singularitanism spoken in the vicinity of Ray Kurzweil.) What He Said.
- Using a laser sintering process (admittedly, on bigger parts than we’re used to seeing) some guys at the University of Southampton have created a 3-D printed UAV with a 6′ wingspan. 3-D printing sidesteps some of the difficulties of manufacturing certain shapes, including elliptical wings. (Thanks to Aaron Spriggs and half a dozen other people for the link.)
- Here’s a gallery of home-brew tube projects that’s one of the best I’ve seen. Take special note of the homebrew coil winder (design by Gingery) that made many of the designs possible. Here’s another link for the same writer.
- There is a NaNoWriMo alternate held in August. I think it really needs to be held in March (which I’ve considered the worst month of the year for decades) but nobody asked me.
- There was once a special phonograph record technology designed for use under car dashboards. It failed epically. I couldn’t stop vinyl records from skipping at home; one wonders what it would take to suppress skipping in a car on crappy Chicago streets. RCA created a different under-dash machine that played standard 45s, but by 1962 they’d all faded out with tailfins, waiting for the impending Age of 8-Track.
- Back in the day we sometimes Scotch-taped pennies on the tonearms of cheap record players to minimize skipping, and later wondered why the records started sounding crappy after awhile. (I think the term was “three-penny record.” I had more than my share.)
- Oh, dear. There may be an emerging film/fiction subsubgenre called “Fantastic Catholicism.”
- Here’s a nice short piece on some new research on airborne dust and its effect on atmospheric carbon levels. We’re finally getting a little hard data on the subject.
- “Wipe that grin off your face, Herr Luther.” (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)
The Mystery Hi-Fi AM Tuner and Amp
Here’s a challenge for some of my older readers, particularly those who were in the hi-fi hobby in the 1960s. While looking for the photo of Carol’s banner mentioned in my entry for July 31st, I ran across a blurry photo of my basement office in 1975, including the portion shown at left. The unit on the top of the pile is definitely a Heathkit FM-4 monaural FM tuner. I had it for quite a few years after 1975, and may still have the manual somewhere. I don’t clearly remember the identity of the other two. The middle item is an interesting one: an AM-only hi-fi tuner. I dumped both the AM tuner and the stereo amp on the bottom shortly after I married Carol and bought a Realistic STA-64 AM/FM stereo amp unit for Christmas 1976. Bogglingly (but why dump it if it works well?) the Realistic is still our main stereo here.
AM hi-fi tuners are something of an oddity, and unless I misrecall, the unit shown above had very good sound for the bass-deprived, static-enhanced AM pop radio signals we all listened to in the 1960s. I think it’s an AJ-21, the AM partner to the Heath AJ-31 FM tuner. The color scheme is about right, including the red Heathkit logo on the lower-left edge of the front panel. The knobs look wrong, but it’s as close as I’ve come in scanning Heathkit photos on Google Images.
As for the stereo amp, I have utterly no clue. I’m almost certain it wasn’t a Heathkit. Any ideas?
The system worked very well as a sort of college-kid junker “stereo” (both tuners were purely mono) from 1971 or so to 1976. I am not an audiophile and don’t have an especially good ear, so equipment like that may have been precisely what I needed at the time, as it was all hamfest-cheap. I don’t need a tube stereo amp anymore (I built my own back in 2005) but it would be interesting to see what the two Heath tuners would do with it.
Dipping Into Books: Conjuror’s Journal
One of the most obscure of the best books I’ve read in the last 30 years is Conjuror’s Journal, by Frances L. Shine. As best I can tell Miss Shine published just three novels, all with Dodd, Mead, between 1968 and 1978. There is almost nothing about her online, and given that she seemed to be 60-something in her 1978 jacket photo, I’m guessing that she’s passed on.
The novel is a Pepys-style diary from a mulatto conjuror (parlor magician; nothing paranormal about it) traveling around Boston in the 1790s with his dog Socrates, giving magic shows while trying to unravel the mystery of his parentage. The story is by turns insightful, funny, and sweet, with just a touch of melancholy here and there, mostly in Joshua’s recognition of the pain he sees in the people he entertains. It ends well (nay, triumphantly) in a way that few stories do anymore, and a lot of what I like about it is simply that. Perhaps the best way to persuade you to hunt up a copy (there are plenty on the used book sites for a dollar) is to give you a quick sample here. I hope to do this now and then with obscure books that I think deserve more attention than they’ve gotten.
February 15, 1794.
Man is a hapless creature, after all, upon this earth; all his vaunted powers as nothing in the face of Loss. This have I tried and proven more than once.
This day I was met in the Lane by a small lass in a sore way of crying; who called out my name and seized my coat in her little hand. She had hung about the door waiting for me; and, 0, Sir, look! Could I not make it to be alive again? Wrapped tenderly within her apron was a dead canary.
I was stricken by her simplicity. Having marvelled at such wonders as her childish eyes found in my sleight-of-hand, she thought on me as a kind of miracle worker who could, an’ he would, make all well again. There was in her utter trust an innocent blasphemy that made me shudder.
Most tenderly, I spoke to her; explaining how far my poor gifts at conjuring fell short of what she asked. My words brought forth a fresh burst of tears. Then my bird’s dead! Charlie’s dead! My heart welled with pity. How can one speak to Six Years of the bending of man’s stubborn will to the Divine purpose? All I could find to do was to palm a coin, fumble in her hair with a “What have we here?” and proffer the coin to purchase another bird.
Child-like, she made pause at the bright money. But then she shook her head mournfully. She wanted no other bird–she wanted only Charlie. Off she went a-weeping, the dead bird cradled in her apron.
Poor little maid! Perhaps till this day her heart has known naught but joys. My bird is dead. Be it youthful dreams, or first love; be it the sense of infinite possibility contained in one land, one idea; we all, soon or late, must utter that same cry.
For All That Will Be, Yes!
Carol and I met 42 years ago this evening. I’ve told the story before, and the backstory. The oldest known photo of the two of us together is here, not quite a month after we met. I won’t go on at length this evening, but I will mention that in 1974, just before she went away to grad school, Carol made me a banner with the inscription, “For all that has been, Thank you. For all that will be, Yes.”
I went up to her a little while ago and said the same thing to her. Funny how it sounds just as good now (and is just as true!) as it was way back in 1974.
Odd Lots
- A lot happened while I was down in Taos, and I’ll do my best to catch up a little here today. But as you’ve seen from my two entries about the workshop, it was tough to pay attention to anything there but the challenge at hand.
- More photos from the workshop: Christie Yant has established a single page linking to all four of her Flickr albums from Taos Toolbox 2011.
- Several people sent me invites to Google+, and I established an account several days ago. (I already had a Google account, so it was no big deal.) Google being insanely paranoid about how real your name is, look for me as…Jeff Duntemann.
- In the wake of Tuesday night’s epic natural gas leak here, I discovered that the ethyl mercaptan molecule resembles a balloon animal weiner dog with its hindquarters on upside down. Hey, I wonder if a balloon artist has ever done balloon hydrocarbons? (Google comes up empty.)
- Motorola is finally rolling out an Android upgrade that enables use of the Xoom’s SD slot. Guys, why was that so hard?
- Only a handful of people ever make it to 114 years old. And, weirdly, that’s when virtually all of the oldest of the oldest of the old actually die.
- Here’s a photo of the largest cannon ever built. No points for guessing who built it.
- And while you’re browsing Gizmodo’s Monster Machines category, don’t miss the largest Diesel engine in the world. Your flip-flops got paddled across the pond by something very like that.
- This SSD might well make that seven-year-old PC a little bouncier…but I still recommend maxing out RAM to 4 GB, cleaning the registry, and getting rid of crapware. I’m less convinced than some people that hard drive speeds are a serious bottleneck when your registry looks like an empty lot in a war zone.
- QBit, who on beach walks favors dead fish but will gladly settle for seaweed, has refused to answer the question: Why do dogs roll in stinky stuff?
- I doubt that this would ever work, irrespective of its cool halfway-to-dieselpunk looks. It does make me wonder what other cool stuff might have been drowned out in the racket coming from WWI. (Thanks to Gary Kato for the link.)
- And I know damned well that this wouldn’t work, but it goes all the way to full-bore, balls-out dieselpunk fantasy. (Thanks again to Gary Kato.)
- Perhaps you’ve seen the Dyson Fan on TV ads. Here’s how they work.
- The site is in German, and is well-known in Europe for high-end licorice. Pete Albrecht assures me that the name of the company really does translate as “Bearshit Pharmacy.” Wow.
Last Night Was a Gas
Yes, last night was a gas. (Do people still say that?) It really was. And I didn’t much enjoy it.
Here’s the story: It was 6:45 PM. We were done with dinner, dishes washed, everything put away. I was back in my office and had begun to scan Facebook. I heard a noise. It sounded like one of the pop-up sprinkler risers when you first turn it on and water is driving the air out: A steady hiss, but loud. Anomalously loud; almost an embryonic roar. I was inside. The risers are all outside. I heard it very clearly. And so I went out the front door to take a look.
The roar was startling–at least on our quiet street, where almost any loud noise is startling. It was coming from the lowest level of the landscaping terraces to the south of our front door, right below my office windows, where the control box and pipes for the sprinkler system are located.
Something obviously broke somewhere. But where was the spraying water? I picked my way around the terraces and hopped down to the lowest level where the pipes were–and the reek of ethyl mercaptan almost knocked me over. The roar was coming from the street feed riser pipe where it met the gas meter. I passed my hand along the riser pipe and felt a strong jet of what suggested compressed air coming from the pipe joint at the meter. It took a moment for the truth to hit me: methane was roaring out of our gas feed at 30 PSI. I hadn’t smelled it because the wind was from the north and the gas meter is near the south end of the house.
The pipe looked as though someone had tried to cut it with a knife. It was still attached to the meter coupling but the metal had opened up where the threads began, to leave a gap at least 3/8″ wide. I only gave myself a second to think WTF? Then I remembered my father’s lessons. He worked for the Chicago natural gas utility his entire career, as an industrial engineer. He knew methane all the way down. He enjoyed ridiculing the vague statements in my kid astronomy books describing Jupiter’s atmosphere as consisting of “poisonous ammonia and methane gas.” Methane gas isn’t poisonous the way ammonia or even carbon monoxide is. However–it burns. That’s its job. Get enough of it in one place, and it blows up.
Carol had followed me out the door when I told her I thought the sprinkler system had erupted again. I called up from the terrace that we had a gas leak, a huge big honking might-as-well-be-an-open-pipe gas leak. I climbed back up the terrace walls in a helluva hurry, and while she threw leashes on the dogs I grabbed the cordless and dialed 911.
The call itself took maybe thirty seconds, and the operator handled it with an icy coolness that I greatly admire. She got the address and called the fire department. Then she told us to make sure no one was still in the house, and then move upwind of the leak by 300 feet.
We’re only a few blocks from the Farthing fire station. The truck was pulling up three minutes later. The firemen took one look at the leak (which you could hear over the rumble of the fire truck’s engine, egad) and started unrolling hoses over to the hydrant. That was a little unnerving, but one came over and explained: The pipe break was on the street side of the main, so flipping the shutoff valve on the gas meter would do nothing. They had already called for another truck with more specific equipment, but in the meantime they wanted hoses at ready in case the methane ignited.
We stood and watched. A second truck came by about ten minutes later, followed by a truck from the gas utility. They carefully cut the pipe (I couldn’t see precisely how it was done) and put a cap on it. They went through the house and opened all the windows. The fire trucks left soon after, but the utility techs worked until almost 11:00PM digging under the riser pipe to find the street feed. The riser has to be replaced, so there will be more digging. In the meantime, they ran a stiff coiled yellow plastic gas hose from the street side of our next-door neighbor’s gas meter.
So what happened? The utility guys had seen it before: The ground under the gas meter has been settling ever since we built the house eight years ago, pulling the natural gas riser pipe down with it. The gas meter was off-level, and has been for years. I never gave it much thought. The riser pipe pulled down on the gas meter until stresses on the riser pipe caused it to break at its thinnnest point, the threads.
We’ve had subsidence problems here for years. So not only did the settling destroy one sidewalk (which was replaced) and then mangled my driveway, it almost blew the place up. There’s a lesson here: If your gas meter isn’t level, the riser pipe may be pulling it down as the soil settles. If the riser is pulled downward enough, the pipe will crack. I’m a little amazed that the gas utility hasn’t publicized this problem more broadly.
Go take a look at your gas meter. If it’s cockeyed, the riser may be pulling one side of it down–and that leads to a species of fun you do not want to have!
Taos Toolbox 2011, Part 2
(Part 1 here.) The Snow Bear Inn is really a set of ski condos only a quarter mile from one of the Taos Ski Valley lifts. The units are complete apartments including kitchens, some with single bedrooms, some with two. Jim Strickland and I shared a two-bedroom suite. The kitchen was well-equipped; indeed, far better equipped than we needed. It had a separate wine refrigerator, coffee grinder, four-slot toaster, blender, crockpot, and probably a few other things on the high shelf that we never poked at. Food was provided in the common room for tinker-it-up breakfasts and lunches. Four dinners a week were catered in by a local woman who really knew her stuff.
Jim and I quickly fell into a daily routine: I’d be up at 6, showered by 6:15, and shoveling grounds into the coffee maker by 6:30. Jim got up about then, and I’d scramble two eggs for each of us. By 7:30 we were already hard at work unless someone stopped by for coffee, as Nancy Kress did more than once. (See above.) But even with morning visitors, by 8:30 both of us were reading mail and hammering out notes on the manuscripts up for critique later that day.
By 10:00 we were gathered around the conference table in the common area downstairs, and if anybody wasn’t there by precisely 10, Walter would lean out the door and give a blast on the Air Horn of Summoning. This happened rarely; mostly we were all present and ready to roar by 9:45. On most days work began with a lecture by Nancy, followed by a short break and then either two or three stories for critique. Lunch happened as time allowed, often before the third critique but always limited to thirty minutes. The class day wrapped up with a lecture from Walter. At that point, typically between two and three PM, we would shift into edit mode, and begin work on the following day’s critiques and our own second-week submissions. Some worked in the common room. Most of us went back to our own rooms. (Alan Smale preferred to sit with his laptop on a folding chair between the buildings.)
I quickly fell back into college-student mode, taking notes on a quad pad in my frenetic block printing, precisely as I did at DePaul in 1974. By Tuesday July 12 we were definitely into drink-from-the-firehose mode, critiquing first-wave submissions (distributed via email before the workshop began) that ran as long as 11,000 words. Toward midweek we were also working hard on our second-week submissions, which nominally demonstrated what we’d learned in the first few days.
Dinner was catered in at 6PM every day but Friday. While not exotic, the fare was beautifully prepared, and included barbecued ribs, coconut shrimp, broiled tilapia, grilled steaks, baked chicken breast, home-made potato & egg salad, and lots of other things I may have been too tapped-out mentally to recall. There was always good conversation over dinner (see above: Peter Charron and Ed Rosick) but by 6:45 most of us to our scattered laptops went, continuing work for the following day. I sometimes kept hammering until 8 or 8:30. At that point I was toast and generally gave Carol a call before falling exhausted into bed. There was a little late-night fellowship over bottles of wine down in the common room, but it all happened long after my bedtime.
Some people managed to get the 20-odd miles down the valley to Taos for occasional shopping or touristing, but my old bones preferred to stay put and rest while rest was possible. The impression I want to give here is that this was boggling hard work, and unlike my Clarion experience back in 1973, there was almost no clowning around.
My camera doesn’t do a great job with indoor shots. For a good collection of captured moments from the workshop, see Christie Yant’s Flicker album.
Next: How critiquing worked.
Taos Toolbox 2011, Part 1
I got home yesterday afternoon, and the smoke is still coming out of my ears. I haven’t posted here recently because it was all I could do to stay ahead of the coursework and the critique. My friend Jim Strickland described it as “a 500-level course on the art of the novel crammed into two weeks.”
That’s putting it mildly.
What I’m talking about is Walter Jon Williams‘ Taos Toolbox writers’ workshop, which just concluded yesterday morning at the Snow Bear Inn at Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico. The workshop was taught this year by Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress, with a guest lecture by Jack Skillingstead. Jim Strickland drove down from Denver Sunday morning and stashed his car in our garage, then joined me in the 4Runner for the 225 miles to Taos. I took my completed steampunk computer table, to which I had grafted the Aethernet Concentrator scant days before we left. Carrying the table, the pipe legs, the Concentrator mast, a Dell GX620 system with 20″ monitor, an ammo can full of tools, plus clothes and a cooler full of food up the stairs from the parking lot took some doing, as we were at 9,800 feet. Mountain geek I may be, but one chases oxygen atoms like fireflies up there.
This is not a workshop for beginners. Jim and I were two of fourteen students, of which I was the oldest. Not one was under thirty. Most of us had already sold one or more short stories, and at least three of us have sold novels. Jim has two novels in print (plus a short Drumlins novel), and astrophysicist Alan Smale was recently nominated for the Sidewise Award for alternate history. Christie Yant is Assistant Editor at Lightspeed Magazine. One had the sense of a mass of talent around the common-room table that could (with just a few more neutrons) go critical.
For two weeks we heard lectures, took notes, discussed the issues, and presented both written and oral critiques of one another’s work. Oh, and sometimes we ate and (more occasionally) slept. When we were not at the big conference table, we were back in our respective lairs, reading manuscripts and hammering on laptops or (like me) larger iron. All told, we each read and critiqued about 200,000 words of material. It took ten days for us to loosen up sufficiently to set aside time to crack a few bottles of wine and a bottle of The Kraken 94-proof dark rum. (This was highly appropriate, as student Jeffrey Petersen had presented a novel starring a giant…flying…squid.) Walter complimented us as being the hardest-working class he’s hosted in several years conducting the workshop. We worked so hard that almost nobody hit the hot tub. By the last day, Nancy Kress herself told the class, “I am just about out of words.”
Words. It was about words. It was about making our words do precisely what we want them to do, and then getting them into the hands of our readers. It was one of the most intellectually challenging things I have ever done. I left emotionally and physically exhausted and am still catching up. It was expensive, but worth every penny. It may have rebooted my career as an SF writer.
More tomorrow.
