- Before we had CGI to draw animated pictures of the Solar System, we turned parts on our lathes and made orreries. Here’s a gallery of 18 beauties, including one made in Lego (ok, injection molded) and two in Meccano. Some of them are pretty steampunkish, if that matters to you.
- And speaking of steampunk, here’s something I’ve never seen before: Windows XP wallpaper in the form of an animated GIF. As wallpaper, this particular item would make me nuts in about ten seconds, but it’s a nice piece of work, and looks best at 1024 X 768. (The animation includes little puffs of steam!)
- I’ve looked for this for several years now and have not yet seen it: A higher-end digital camera with an option to overlay a scale bar across the edges of a photo, calculated from the point of focus. (A ping or crosshairs at the point of focus would be another useful refinement on the idea.) This would certainly be useful to me in some circumstances, and I can’t imagine it wouldn’t be useful to landscapers and those in the construction business.
- Jim Strickland sends us word of electronic bifocals, containing a region of a special LCD overlay that changes its index of refraction in response to an electric current. We’re still a few years away from a practical product, and my big objection to the Pixel Optics implementation is that if you can change the index of any part of the lens quickly and at will, why not change the whole lens? I have separate glasses for computer work in addition to my bifocals, and I’ve considered ordering separate glasses for reading. Finally, I don’t see any provision to correct for astigmatism, which is an issue for me and many others. Still, a damned good start!
- Injecting carbon dioxide gas underground to be rid of it is a hazardous business, because the gas doesn’t stay ridded. Oh noes!
- Here’s the best description I’ve seen of an upgrade from a conventional hard drive to an SSD. The Kingston 128GB SATA device described in the article costs from $200-$275 depending on where you shop, and there are both a 256GB ($720) and a 512GB model ($1400) now. 128GB is more than enough for my backup SX280 Linux/Windows dual-booter, and I think I’ll be outfitting the SX280 with one of these in the near future. Funny that the SSD will cost me significantly more than the (used) machine did originally.
- This kind of genie rarely goes back into a bottle. My suggestion? Have them sit down and think of a way to capitalize on the new and irreversible openness of the system. My prediction? Sony will fail. They just can’t think in those terms. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- When I was a kid I grew up about half a block from a boy named Bill Van Ornum. We both attended public high schools, and both belonged to the Catholic teens organization at our parish targeted specifically at public schoolers. Dr. Van Ornum is now a columnist for the online edition of the Catholic weekly America, and his column (shared with several other writers) is worth visiting. This week: Piaget and the “magic years,” in which children discern the distinctness between themselves and the physical universe, and which may be the well of fascination for Harry Potter style magic in myth and literature.
- For those who don’t have to deal with in snow and ice in hilly country, well, this YouTube video may make you feel better about not living in Colorado Springs. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.) Then again, we don’t have mosquitoes. Sorry about that, Chicago.
- While you have YouTube open, let me nominate this Danny Kaye song (from the 1959 film Merry Andrew, which, alas, has never been available on DVD) as The Perkiest Song Of The Last 100 Years. If you don’t agree, I’ll certainly hear counter-suggestions. And if you’re naturally depressive, don’t click the link. Your head will explode.
Odd Lots
The Importance of Sideloading
You haven’t seen much of me here since the first of the year because I set myself a target for writing fiction, and, micracles of miracles, I’m sticking to it. Blogging is second priority, and if I spend my creative hours working on stories, I’m likely to post a lot less in this space. (What posts I do write I hope to make longer.)
Anyway. CES 2011 is now history, and I followed it more closely than I might have in past years because I’m actively shopping for an Android slate. (I hate to call them “tablets;” we’ve had tablet PCs for almost ten years and there’s one on my desk.) I played a little with a Samsung Galaxy Tab at a Verizon store in Tampa in late November and was much impressed, even though the demo unit did not have any kind of ebook reader installed. (Wireless carriers are pushing video hard, because video will use up a lot of deliciously profitable minutes.) I’ve played with Apple’s iPad as well and have been just as impressed, but there’s a huge worm in it for me: Apple wants to absolutely control its content ecosystem, and sideloading of apps is a gnarly business. Sideloading an iPad is easier with books and music, but I’d like to try my hand at slate apps, and I’m not going to work in a playground with barbed wire around it. The open-source Android just suits my temperament better. I have some faint hope of programming Android apps in FreePascal, but Android is really a Java-like platform (apps run on the Dalvik VM, which has its own specific register-based bytecode set) and a Pascal-to-Dalvik compiler is unlikely, as much as it has precedent in the ancient UCSD P-system.
Sideloading is important in a number of ways. (The term as I use it simply means the ability to get apps and content onto a device locally through a cable or a plug-in memory unit, rather than from a tightly-controlled online store or cloud locker of some kind.) I don’t have a lot of ebooks yet, primarily because the e-ink display on my Sony Reader makes my head hurt. Furthermore, the ones I do have are a very mixed bag, from many different sources and in many different formats. I have novels, but I also have tech books, many of which have intricate art and layouts that don’t reflow. A lot of things I’ve picked off Usenet are image scans of transformer catalogs and ancient manuals for Fifties Heathkits, none of which are legible on low-res e-ink screens. I need a good high-res color display, but more significantly, I need the ability to install arbitrary apps to render any arbitrary content format, including minority formats like DjVu, which I don’t favor but must deal with occasionally. I could readily sideload the files on an iPad, but the apps to render them are another matter.
Sideloading of ebooks is still a geek thing, primarily because the ebook business is so damned young. If you can get everything you want from Amazon or Apple, cool–and almost everybody is starting from scratch, with little or no existing ebook library to deal with. In years to come, people will be jumping from device to device and reader to reader and store to store, and at each jump must face the question of how to pack along the books they’ve already paid for. DRM makes this hugely more difficult, but even in a world without DRM, different kinds of content would require local storage transfer and different rendering apps, not all of which will be readily available from the current vendor’s store, especially for new devices incorporating new OSes.
Sideloading also allows local scanning for malware, which will become increasingly important in coming years, certainly for apps but probably for compromised content files as well.
Any slate I buy will have to support sideloading of both apps and content. Android seems to be the OS for that, and I’m now watching the Motorola Xoom, a dual-core 10″ Android slate running the Honeycomb version of Android. There’s some weirdness involving the SD slot (the CES prototypes didn’t have it) but without that, there’s no sale. More intriguing for many reasons is the Notion Ink Adam, (above) which does have a MicroSD slot and 2 USB ports, and the intriguing PixelQi display. Its Android OS is a custom version that anticipates some of the Honeycomb features but is technically V2.2 Froyo with a proprietary UI. (Their blog is worth following if you’re interested in slate technology.) I just hope they don’t do a FusionGarage thing, but if they can hang in there they’ll be a contender.
I must emphasize that I’m being careful and I’m not in any particular hurry. Much of my personal Jedi self-training in recent years could be summarized as Stop wanting stuff. Buy, or buy not. There is no “want.” When jump I, know you will!
Odd Lots
- I may be the last person to aggregate this, but if you haven’t seen it yet, consider: The Sun being eclipsed simultaneously by the Moon…and the ISS! Thanks to Bill Higgins for pointing it out. (Talk about having to set up a shot!!!)
- And for further astronomical boggle-fodder, consider this: A ten-year-old girl discovered a supernova a few days ago, and is the youngest person ever to do so.
- Here’s a site listing a great many 19th Century and early 20th Century studio photographers, many with addresses and sometimes timeframes. All but one of the studios I’ve seen on old family photos I’ve scanned (circa 1880-1910) are listed. How useful this might be is hard to tell, but if you’re currently doing genealogical research it’s worth a bookmark.
- RF Cafe has a nice table of dielectric constants, useful if you’re winding coils on odd scraps and not commercial forms or cores.
- The same research yielded this short discussion of how good PVC piping is for RF use. Quick form: Most plastics are better, but they don’t make polystyrene pipe. They don’t even make polystyrene vitamin bottles anymore. (Fortunately, I still have a few in the scrap box.)
- From my old friend Dennis Harris comes a pointer to Televisiontunes.com, which has short MP3 clips of 18,351 TV theme songs and all their variations. Elmer the Elephant is missing, but damn near everything else is there, from Supercar to The Ugliest Girl in Town .
- Last week while we were in Chicago, my nephew Brian showed me Google Sky Map on his Android smartphone. Basically (assuming your phone “knows where it is” and when) you can hold your phone up against the sky, and it will show you what stars and planets lie in that direction, even in broad daylight. Aim the camera at your feet, and you’ll see what’s on the other side of the planet, swinging toward rising or circling the opposite pole. Way cool.
- From the Words I Haven’t Heard In A Long Time Department: bric-a-brac , a collective term for odd items of low value. I realized, digging through a box in the garage, that I must hold one of the world’s largest reserves of bric-a-brac. Damn. I shoulda invested in rare earths.
- Related to the above: Rubrique-a-Brac , a long-running cartoon strip by French cartoonist Gotlib. His 1971 Taume 2 collection of strips is the funniest book in French I ever read without knowing French. (I do have a French-English dictionary, which helps, but the art largely speaks for itself.)
- As if the Nazgul weren’t enough: We’ve gotten word that there was once a giant stork that preyed on the Flores Island hobbits.
New Years Eve 1958
(I wanted to post this item on New Year’s Eve 2008, but could not find the file. It was my entry in a holiday story contest conducted by the Santa Cruz free paper in December, 1988, just three months after I had been laid off from Borland. The story earned second prize, which was a nice dinner at a local restaurant. I was 36 in 1988, just as my father was in 1958. The photo above is from that year.)
I heard my old man come down the stairs from the upstairs bedroom. I was awake, and was shining clown-faces on my bedroom ceiling with a ridiculous gimmick toy flashlight that I had received for Christmas and unaccountably loved.
He cranked the doorknob and peered in. I expected quiet orders to “hit the rack, dammit!” but, remarkably, he grinned his slightly crooked grin and said, “Come on out and toast the New Year with me!”
So I slid out of bed and skittered into the kitchen on bare six-year-old feet. I took my usual place on the broom-closet side of the kitchen table. The old man pulled down two crystal glasses with long stems from the high cabinet, and placed one on the careworn Formica in front of me.
I wasn’t sure what to make of it. He had tucked us into bed hours earlier, dressed in his at-home T-shirt and drab baggy pants. Now he was in his best blue suit, high starched collar, and dark red tie with the tiny working slide-rule tie-clip. My mother would be working all night at the hospital, and my little sister was still fast asleep in her crib.
The kitchen was mostly dark, lit only by the bright colored lights circling the Christmas tree in the livingroom. It was dark enough to see the orange glow from the tubes inside the radio on the kitchen counter. Somebody was talking on the radio, not quite loud enough to understand over the Frigidaire’s wheezy clatter.
My old man yanked the refrigerator handle, and for a moment the single bulb within was blinding. He pulled a tall bottle from the rack on the door, turned, paused with the door half-closed, then yanked it back open and pulled a can of Nehi Grape from the top shelf. I watched him fiddle the foil and the wires from the tall bottle, and we laughed when the resounding pop! shot the cork across the room.
He pulled a church-key from the junk drawer and opened the grape soda for me. It was hard enough to score a Nehi during the day (and never during supper!) and here he was pouring fizzy grape soda into that strange tall glass in the middle of the night.
That done, he filled his own glass from the tall bottle. For a long moment, we waited in silence. He had not touched his glass, and I left mine longingly alone, assuming that this was One Of Those Grownup Occasions, to be honored if not completely understood. Yankee was sleeping with his mongrel rump plastered up against his favorite heat register, and everything seemed very warm and safe if only a little bit strange.
“Howcum you’re all dressed up?” I asked. That was the mystery at the center of it, I was sure.
“You ever felt afraid of the future?” he asked.
I shook my head. The future, to me, was full of rocketships and space stations, and the Good Guys always blasted the aliens in the end, right? What was a little scary was my old man the engineer answering one question with another.
“Always look the future straight in the eye,” he said, with a sudden distance that frightened even more than his answering question, “and wear your Sunday best, so it’ll know you mean business.”
In the silence that followed, I heard voices counting down on the radio. All at once, the wordless cheers told me it was New Years. Down the block the big kids were setting off firecrackers. Yankee twitched a half-terrier ear and went back to sleep. In the basement our tired old furnace ground into roaring life.
And the old man was back from his distance, holding the glittering glass high in the air. “Happy New Year, Duntemann,” he said with that paradoxical loving drill-sergeant’s voice that I will miss all the rest of my days. His old-style rimless crystal glasses flashed in the Christmas lights, his ice-blue engineer’s eyes again smiling that omnipotent smile. I cannot forget his face at that moment because it is my face, I who am now exactly as old as he was at the end of recession-year 1958.
“Happy New Year!” I said too loudly in reply, holding my glass in his direction in imitation of his gesture.
He raised his glass to drink, and I was already draining mine before I noticed that his never quite reached his lips.
Instead he had turned toward the empty corner of the kitchen and held his glass in a toast in a direction that was not toward Mother at the hospital, nor toward my sister in her crib, nor anywhere else, but instead in a direction that I never understood.
Until now.
Mal De Caribou
I spent a week in Chicago and gained four pounds. This wasn’t unexpected: A great deal of what Christmas is about these days is sugar, and Christmas is one of the very few times of the year when I let my sugar guard down. Cookies, candy, and egg nog were all over the place, and I indulged. Fortunately, I know how to lose that weight again: Eat animal fat. So it’s back to my accustomed diet, which depends heavily on meat, eggs, and full-fat dairy, plus whatever vegetables I can choke down against my gag reflex. I also eat one slice of Orowheat Master’s Best Winter Wheat Bread per day for fiber, and a few Wheat Thins here and there for carb balance. Desserts are off the table for awhile.
If I can resist the temptation to indulge in potato chips (we don’t keep sweet stuff in the house, as a rule) I’ll be back in range (150-155) in about ten days. Better still, I’ll stay there, probably until next Christmas.
Our visceral fear of eating fat would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Researchers have begun to admit that low-carb diets are best for keeping weight off, but are still terrified of admitting that animal fat is not only harmless but medically necessary. Best illustration: the wonderfully named mal de caribou, also known as “rabbit starvation.”
Mal de caribou (literally, “caribou sickness”) typically afflicts explorers and other cold-weather adventurers who attempt to live on hunted animals but only eat the muscle tissue. Rabbits (and most wild animals, actually) have very little body fat. (I have to brown the local ground buffalo meat in butter or it would burn. There’s basically not a shred of fat in it.) If all you can score out in the wild are rabbits, plus the occasional deer, you run the danger of severe vitamin deficiencies, plus liver dysfunction caused by an overload of protein. Eating carbs helps short-term, but as studies of aboriginal peoples deprived of their natural diets have shown (see Taubes for all the citations you could ever digest) replacing fat with carbs over the long haul leads to obesity, diabetes, and various other degenerative conditions. Farley Mowat has much to say about this in his book People of the Deer; a good summary can be found here. The original diet of most northern aboriginal peoples consisted of meat and fat. Grains and sugar were basically absent.
I’ll have to come back to the issue of whether or not total caloric input matters, and how much–the research there is divided and contentious–but I will freely admit that I eat less than most people do. The key is that eating fat keeps me from getting hungry, so I’m less tempted to binge on starches. Maybe it won’t work that way for you, but granting that we’re all different biochemically (to the extent that I wonder sometimes if we’re all one species!) there seems to be a trend in this direction. Dump the Honey Bunches of Oats and fry an egg in butter for a month instead and see what happens. You may be surprised.
Odd Lots
- I was pleased to see this writeup on the XB-70 Valkyrie, which I consider the coolest and most intimidating aircraft ever created by any nation, anywhere, even though the article is lightweight and the author is unsure what a “ballistic missile” is. Click to it for the photos and videos.
- Runner-up, of course, is the A-10 Warthog, which is a lot more intimidating if you happen to be in its gunsights, in which case your ace (our ace, actually) kisses you goodbye.
- There are iceberg cowboys, and every now and then they rope a really odd one. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Pertinent to yesterday’s post, Pete also sends a link to a toy Triceratops that apparently comes pre-shredded.
- This list of the most-pirated ebooks of 2009 is now 18 months old, but it may still say something about your average ebook pirate: sex trumps almost eveything else, except possibly Photoshop.
- On a whim, I went up to the Pirate Bay just now, and discovered that, 18 months later, sex and Photoshop still trump everything else, at least in terms of pirated ebooks. (And Photoshop is, by a factor of 2.5, the most popular Windows app on Pirate Bay.)
- The magazine guy in me mourns, but the magazine guy in me whispered that this was going to happen before it even started: Magazines sold in iPad versions started out strong but went into steep decline after a few months. Read the comments: The electronic Wired is 5X more expensive than the paper one, which just maybe possibly might (d’ya think?) have a little tiny bit of something to do with it.
- As a book lover of long standing (read ’em, write ’em, publish ’em) I declare this little invention freaking brilliant.
Tripwander: The Ghost of Christmas Presents
Christmas in Chicago is always aerobic, and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and gather impressions, now that we’re packed and ready to hop a plane. In seven short days I chauffered, shopped, entertained small girls, repaired a planter that needed deck screws and Plastic Wood, fixed computer problems, wrapped innumerable presents, unwrapped (different) innumerable presents, and ate far, far too much sugar.
First bit of advice? Don’t mess with small white dogs. The Pack has been with Jimi this trip, but Carol’s sister Kathy has a ten-pound Maltese, and Wrigley received two dog toys for Christmas. One was a stuffed squeaky dinosaur that was all but guaranteed by its maker to be unshreddable by dogs. The other was a Christmas Kong snowman toy made of the same stuff that luggage straps are made of, and certainly looked like nothing short of a machete would take it down.
Ha! I use the word “was” deliberately and with emphasis. It took Wrigley less than 24 hours to chew the squeaker out of the unshreddable dino, leaving a hole that suggested an alien bursting its way out from the vicinity of the poor thing’s kidneys. The Kong snowman lasted a little longer, but 36 hours post-Christmas, its squeaky plastic core lay exposed, and Carol had to remove its innards to keep Wrigley from swallowing them.
We did a lot of visiting and probably more eating than we should have. On the way to see our nephew Matt’s flashy new apartment, I drove past my high school (Lane Tech) for the first time in over twenty years. The building itself hasn’t changed since I graduated in 1970, but the neighborhood is now almost unrecognizable. The “tech supply” stores where we bought drafting paper and bow compasses are gone, perhaps because Lane is less technical than it used to be, or perhaps because French curves are now draggable splines in a CAD document. The legendary Riverview amusement park (behind Lane Tech and still in operation until my sophomore year) is now a drab retail center.
Sic transit, and all that.
Transit? Uggh. The weather was hideous (clearly due to anthropogenic global whining, or perhaps unsustainable xenon dioxide emissions) and I had a rental car peculiarly unsuited to snow and ice: a lumbering Nissan Altima with rear wheel drive, grabby brakes, and a keyless key fob with an un-guarded panic button that will go off if left in your pocket with anything stiffer than a glob of rice pudding.
My nieces gave me a Pillow Pet shaped like a penguin, which I suspect will be useful for leaning on while I mark up manuscripts, or simply as a laptop cushion for a lap that doesn’t have much inherent cushioning. I can see it parked on the back of my big reading chair, staring down at QBit, but therein lies some danger: QBit, like Mr. Byte before him, doesn’t like artifacts with eyes, and we’re going to have to be careful that he doesn’t drag the plush creature off to his lair to shred at leisure. (At least the penguin doesn’t have a squeaker.) Like I said, don’t mess with small white dogs.
It was abundantly good to see family again, and partake of vigilia on Christmas Eve with my sister, Bill, and her girls, complete with piles of pierogi and Manischewitz sweet wine, just like we did it in the Sixties. Christmas Day at Kathy’s brought us cookies, key lime pie, ham, Hawaiian salad, potato bake, bean salad (which I heard was very good) apple and pecan pie, and much more.
It’s a little late, but better late than never, and no less sincere for that: Merry Christmas to you and yours from Carol and me and the Pack. There’s much to be said and done in the coming year, if we can get past this bruiser of a winter and remember what really matters: freedom, family, and friendship. I’ll give it my best shot if you’ll give it yours!
Daywander: The Night Before the Night Before Christmas
I spent an hour and a half this afternoon walking around the business district of a small town. Which small town doesn’t matter, but it was a decent size for a small town, with about sixty retail establishments running along four intersecting streets. I was pleased to see only five or six vacant storefronts, and I had to park on the far edge of things to get a spot at all.
But I don’t mind. I like small towns, ever moreso as flyover country is left behind by gigalopolises swelling toward some looming urban Chandrasekhar limit. There was bustle but not asphyxiation, and nobody seemed afraid of actually saying the word “Christmas.” As in most small town centers, national franchises are exiled to the margins. Down in the middle it was all small, locally owned businesses, so as gray as the day was, it felt good to be walking around, sniffing out the culture and picking up a few late items for the season before it got dark.
The owner of the local used bookshop was beaming: There was a line at the checkout, and everybody seemed to have six or eight books in hand to slap on the counter. I waited for things to quiet down again before asking her if she had any of Debbie Macomber’s Christmas angels books, starring angels Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy, who follow hapless heroines all the days of their lives, or at least until the happy ending. It’s a wonderfully droll piece of punwork, though I wonder if you have to be over fifty to get the joke.
“I have three of them!” she announced triumphantly, and sprinted for the Great Wall of Romance Novels, from which she instantly pulled two. The third seemed to have gone missing, until she remembered that it was part of the Christmas window display. She took a three-foot-long thing-grabber from behind the counter and plucked the book out from amidst a gathering of plastic angels, elves and Santa Clauses, knocking over a small pile of Sue Grafton (U is for Ubiquitous) and bringing along an inadvertent divot of white fuzz. Bang! Four thousand-odd books in the store, and the owner zeroed in on three of them in less than sixty seconds. What we lose when we lose small bookshops is people who know what books are in stock and precisely where to find them, people who not only love books but still read them.
There were two barbershops in town. Both were open, and both had guys sitting along the wall waiting for haircuts, not reading Playboy but hanging out, laughing and BSing and having a good time, so much so that I ached to have hair again, just to be in there with them enjoying the moment. I find it interesting that all barbershops are basically identical, no matter where they are, and that they’ve barely changed at all since my father first dropped me into one of those enormous chairs (on an upholstered elevator seat that was basically a piece of 2X8 covered with dark green leather and stuffed with something lumpy) when I was four or five, and let Louie the Barber have at my unruly mop.
I didn’t expect to find a Catholic store in such a small place, but there it was, complete with a life-size cardboard figure of Good Pope Bennie with his hand raised in blessing. Christmas cards were on sale and I bought some after a quick scan through the books and holy cards. Catholic stores are invariably conservative, often reactionary, full of short books with bland covers that might be paraphrased as “Sex is good…as long as you don’t think too much about it.” It occurred to me briefly that I was behind enemy lines, but only when I was close enough to the shelves of books to read the titles. As my research of these past fifteen years has shown, there is far more to Catholicism than just words. Rome may no longer be my church but Catholicism remains my tradition, and advent candles (also on sale) have dimensions of meaning that cannot be fully captured in text.
And so it went. I plunked out a tune on a thumb-harp in a music store, checked out the flavors in the ice cream parlor (all home-made!) lest something with malt in it slip past unseen (alas, no luck) and grinned at the dusty display of Seventies shoes in the window of a tiny shoe repair shop that had been there long before those shoes had been abandoned by their owners in the Decade of Ugly. Lamps, lounge chairs, lingerie–American life summarized in store windows, writ large enough to feel prosperous but small enough to be graspable at strolling speed. Woodfield Mall is downright intimidating, but this…well, I can live with life at small-town scale. A police car rolled by as I waited to cross the street, and the cop inside waved. To me. A stranger, an out-of-towner, nobody special but still someone important enough to treat with courtesy and welcome.
It’s been a bum year in a lot of ways, some I’ve written about here, and some I’m keeping to myself. Time has seemed out of joint. (Has it been Halloween already?) But now–yeah, now things are back in focus, with time running at its comfortable one-second-per-second pace. I think I’m (finally) ready for Christmas!
Odd Lots
- I’ve been maxed out for the last week or ten days on numerous things, not excluding Christmas, which is why you haven’t heard from me here. So even if the Odd Lots file is a little short this time (who’s had time to wander online in search of Interesting Things?) it’s the best I can do for the moment.
- There is a very-close-to-optimal total lunar eclipse tonight, with totality beginning at 11:40 Pacific Standard Time, 12:40 Mountain, 1:40 Central, and 2:40 Eastern. Totality lasts for 72 minutes. Because we’re at the Winter Solstice, the eclipsed Moon will be as high in the sky for North Americans as it ever gets; you will be looking very close to straight up, especially if you’re on the West Coast. Here’s the NASA page on the eclipse. I don’t boggle at this kind of trivia anymore, but we haven’t seen a total lunar eclipse on the WInter Solstice since 1638. (I believe there will be another, however, in 2094.)
- In other astronomy news, the Sun is dead quiet again, and we are in our second day without sunspots at all on its visible face, at a point in the sunspot cycle when the sunspot number should be at least 30 or 40 at minimum. With the solar magnetic field continuing to drop, suggestions that we are in for another Dalton-scale solar minimum seem less outlandish than they did a year or so ago. So much for 10M DX.
- I’m still trying to determine if this is a hoax or not. If not, I might order some to calibrate my still-incomplete (if haltingly functional) Geiger counter. Don’t skim past without reading the first comment: 4,182 of 4,252 people thought it was useful!
- Apple is keeping certain iBooks layout features to itself, sharing them (under NDA and perhaps at a high price) with large publishers only. WTF? How can this possibly help them?
- Perhaps (finally!) realizing that annoying your honest customers is a dazzlingly stupid thing to do, Microsoft has quietly retired its Office Genuine Advantage program, which required users to verify the propriety of their copies of Office before allowing them to download templates and so on. This does not mean that Office activation has been abandoned, only that MS will no longer give you the third degree for existing Office installations, especially 2000 and 2003.
- The term “non-Newtonian fluids” makes them sound a lot more exotic than they really are, but as materials go, they’re pretty cool. I borrowed the concept (which I read about years ago) for a bullet-proof cloak in my in-progress short novel Drumlin Circus, but it looks like that idea may become real-life at some point. (Hey, doesn’t “Bullet-Proof Custard” make a great imaginary band name?)
- Not sure what to think about an assertion that C. S. Lewis is the Elvis Presley of Christian publishing.
- Don’t have a Chester A. Arthur bobble-head? Want one? Grab some old photos online and send them to Sculpteo, and get a hand-painted bobbler of the guy and his muttonchops. Not cheap–$80 to $100–but we’re seeing the first wave of commercial 3-D printing apps here. Why not be an early adopter?
Odd Lots
- I got an email recently from ABEBooks inviting me to their Weird Book Room. They were telling the truth, and I was not disappointed. I was a little surprised that I only own two of the titles on the list (guess which ones!) but I’ve already ordered another: How to Be Pope by Piers Marchant. I mean, c’mon, how could I not?
- I complain a lot about pocket camera latency, but check this one out: A seminal 1990 digital camera from Leica took three minutes to grab a shot. Those handles are cool, sure, but I’ll guess that a tripod works better.
- Think of Constantine at the Milvian Bridge for a moment: “In This Sign, Conquer.”
- Various party poopers emailed me this story about an Antarctic cruise ship that lost an engine and got pounded by 45-foot waves somewhere in the Drake Passage. Yes, I feel better already, thanks.
- Don’t forget the Geminids meteor shower late Monday night/Tuesday morning early. It’s probably cold where you are, but the show might be worth it.
- There will also be a total lunar eclipse the night of December 20/21.
- I used to pick up The Fortean Times at the Village Green Bookstore in Rochester, NY in the early 80s, and it was fine bathroom reading. I’m delighted to report that their Web site is still good, albeit less convenient in the bathroom. I wasn’t aware that no viable peas were found in King Tut’s tomb, but that sort of ignorance is easily corrected. Ditto the feral parrots of London, which have been there long before Jimi Hendrix made the scene and felt that it needed some color. Hey, paint’s cheaper, and it doesn’t poop on you when you’re sitting under a tree.
- I guess the primary virtue of The 100 Best Movie Spaceships is that 100 spaceships is a lot of spaceships, so just about everybody gets in. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- David Stafford provides a link to a functional re-creation of the Antikythera Device…in Lego! (I’m guessing that it’s also been done in Meccano, but I’ve not gone looking.)
- Here’s a remarkably long and detailed (for attention-challenged io9, at least) essay on the biological effects of sudden exposure to vacuum, a la Dave Bowman in 2001. As a bonus, author Geoff Landis explains (with equations) how quickly your spacecraft will lose atmosphere if punctured. I’d read this site more frequently if there were more of that and less of this.
- My old friend Neil Rest is right: These are about as cool as artistic representations of cities get. And they’re all made of techie castoffs, including cardboard. Wow! (And in the comments is a link to a chess set made of various coax connectors. Way wow!)
- I wouldn’t have thought of this: Coat a few bazillion tobacco mosaic viruses with conductive material, and you can use them make batteries with ten times the capacity of lithium-ion tech. Well, with the ongoing decline in smoking, what else are all those poor unemployed tobacco viruses gonna do? (Thanks to Roy Harvey for the link.)
- From David Stafford comes a pointer to instructions on how to determine either the speed of light or the operating frequency of your microwave oven by tormenting marshmallows.
- With that, I think I’m caught up on the Odd Lots file. More as they come in.
