- 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
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.
Akismet
I didn’t get much comment spam the first year or so that the main Contra instance was on WordPress. (The LiveJournal instance is a mirror.) I moderate all comments from new commenters, and now that the daily comment spam rate has crept from three or four up past thirty or forty, I figured it was time to do something.
So yesterday morning I installed Akismet, a server-side comment-spam detection plug-in for WordPress that applies a Bayesian signature scheme to incoming comments, and bins the ones it considers spam. Installing it was effortless, and for personal blogs like mine it’s free. (For commercial entities the Akismet service is $60/year.) So far, in about thirty hours it’s identified 80 spammy comments, which remain in the bin so you can scan for false positives if you want. Everything Akismet has fingered so far has proven to be spam. However, I’ve gotten no genuine comments on my WordPress instance since installing it. If you posted (or tried and failed to post) a comment on my WordPress instance today or yesterday, let me know. If nothing is in fact interfering with legitimate comments, this thing is a godsend, and if I sound a little nervous, it’s only that it feels maybe a little too good to be true!
[UPDATE 12/10:] Well, four comments successfully posted, and nothing spammed that shouldn’t be (or not spammed that should have been) suggests that Akismet is a win and I should stop worrying.
Odd Lots
- Needles to say, at 70 cents a minute I wasn’t going to be doing much Internet research while we were on our recent cruise. So most of today’s Odd Lots are from my tireless friends, whose efforts are very much appreciated. (Hey, next year let’s all get together on a cruise, and experience Internet withdrawal around the stern pool with mojitos in our hands!)
- During mealtime cruise ship chitchat, we learned that an enormous new cruise ship was so big it had a hard time getting under a bridge that blocked its maiden voyage from the shipyard in Finland to the sea. Aki Peltonen sent a nice news item on Allure of the Seas, which holds 8,500 people. The 200+ foot high boat cleared the bridge by one foot. Clearly, Allure might be considered a…brinkmanship.
- My cell contract comes up next year, and just in time, Consumer Reports has published its January 2011 cover story on cell phones and (more significantly) cell providers and plans. Well worth buying the print magazine for. Right on the cover is the money quote: “Sorry, AT&T.” (And guess which provider I have now? Changes are acumen in…)
- Don Lancaster has released his TV Typewriter Cookbook as a free PDF. And speaking as I was of memoir the other day, here’s a bio sketch Don sent me, Yes, he’s a few years older than I am, but it’s uncanny how much his story aligns with mine, right down to the planetarium, the acorn tube radios, Carl & Jerry, and much else.
- Pertinent to my entry of November 30, 2010, there is apparently a term for memoirs written without the intent to publish generally: legacy writing, which is writing one’s life story for recreational, family, or therapeutic purposes. The definition comes from this article, sent to me by Pete Albrecht.
- Also pertinent to that same entry: A longish but very good article from Smithsonian about how memories form in the brain, and why they sometimes don’t reflect precisely how reality happened. (Thanks to Dave Lloyd for the link.)
- From the FB In The Original Sense File: Popular Mechanics mailed a box containing a thermometer and a three-axis accelerometer, both feeding a data logger, to see how much trauma a package would undergo from each of the major courier services. Summary here. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- I’ve heard rumors of this, but now it’s official: Borders is going to try to acquire Barnes & Noble. So we’ll soon be down to one major national book retailer. Dare we hope that the doors will re-open to the knowledgeable one-off shop or local chain? Owned and run by people who actually read books? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Neat short article on other approaches to manned moon landings considered in the 1960s, some of which would have been cheaper and perhaps more sustainable than our historical use of the Saturn V stack. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- From the With Delegates Like These, Who Needs Skeptics? Department: A group of college students attending the UN’s COP 16 climate change conference in Cancun this week circulated a hoax petition calling for the banning of dihydrogen monoxide, a widely used industrial solvent that, while harmless in liquid form, contributes strongly to greenhouse heating as a vapor. Video of delegates cheerfully signing the petition here. (Don’t those people watch Penn & Teller?)
Tripwander: Cruise Wrapup
Prior to our cruise, I hadn’t had a drink in a couple of months, mostly because alcohol and Tylenol don’t mix, and I was scarfing those to keep myself sane until the shingles rash on my back went away. So this trip I rediscovered the delights of a good pina colada, which really depends on two things: 1) ice crushed fine enough in the blender, and 2) enough but not too much booze. Holland America does a lot of things well, and one of them is the festive and yet humble pina colada. First rate.
The food, as on most cruise lines, was excellent, and I noticed something else: The portions were smaller. I’m more than fine with that, since I’d rather have a smaller quantity of really good food and not bring it home on my waistline.
Way back in the summer, when we still thought we were going to Hawaii in October for our anniversary, I bought a clever thingie on eBay called a Dicapac WP-110. It sounds like an over-the-counter nausea remedy (nausea remedies were much on my mind last week) but it is in fact a heavy duty resealable plastic bag sized for various digital cameras. Sounds dicey, but for something so much cheaper than an underwater hard case ($25 vs. $175) it worked pretty well. There are many models, all the way up to the big ‘un for SLRs. Make sure you check which model fits which cameras.
Testing it was a challenge. We had hoped to bring home pictures of fish and coral and such, but as I’d mentioned earlier, both of our snorkel trips were canceled due to rough water and high winds. Our last day at sea, I put my beat-to-hell spare Kodak V530 in the bag and dunked it in the midships pool. Fish were scarce, but I did get a good shot of Carol’s ankles, and, more to the point, no water got into the bag with the camera.
Framing the shot was hard because of reflective effects; you have to be looking square at the LCD display or optical weirdness will occur. Pushing the camera buttons is a challenge, and early practice (both above water and in something easy like a pool) will be a great help. I guess the really big issue is to make sure the seal is sealed. It’s a ziplock plastic bag, after all, and if you “cross-thread” the meshing plastic tracks, you’ll flood the bag and probably lose the camera.
Perhaps because of its older demographic, Holland America is not as informal as other lines like Carnival. On 7-day cruises there are still two nights where dinner is formal, and to avoid packing a suit I rented a tux from the ship. The cost was not outrageous, and apart from a little tightness in the shirt collar (fixed with a cheap plastic collar extender, of which I always keep a few in my travel bag) the tux fit perfectly.
In summary, we had a great time not doing much (well, ok, I read three books) and escaping a winter that is descending far too quickly. We hadn’t gotten out on the open seas like this since 2004, and (seasickness notwithstanding) it was long past time.
Tripwander: Cruise Retrospective
Broadband on the high seas isn’t very broad. It also costs a fortune, so I made a conscious decision not to blog in real time about our recent seven-day, much-delayed 34th wedding anniversary cruise. I bought some “Internet minutes” (at 70c each, egad) to flush my spam every couple of days so my primary mailbox wouldn’t fill up, and posted a previously written Contra entry partway so it wouldn’t look like I’d sailed off the edge of the Earth.
In truth, we stayed well away from the edge of the Earth (besides, they’d just painted the guardrails) and instead sailed from Tampa back to Tampa by way of Key West, Jamaica, Grand Cayman, and Cozumel. The point of the cruise wasn’t to go to any of those places in particular so much as to just get the hell out of here, since winter began early again and between my shingles and Carol’s pancreas it had been a lousy couple of months for us. Cruise vacations have been cheap lately because of the recession, and Carol got us smoking deal on a larger cabin with its own balcony overlooking the bounding main. The bed was comfortable, the bathroom could be turned around in, and there was a lot less claustrophobia to be had than on our earlier cruise adventures. On the whole, we heartily recommend Holland America cruises, especially if you’re over 50. The service is spectacular, the ships squeaky clean and not enormous (1200 people, not 5,000 like some of the newer boats other carriers are fielding) and the food abundantly good, if at times a little too abundant.
The main was bounding quite a bit this cruise, to the extent that both of our snorkel trips (in Grand Cayman and Cozumel) were canceled and refunded by the tour providers. We hit Seven Mile Beach on Grand Cayman instead and slopped around amidst the eight-foot waves near the Royal Palms Beach Club. Disappointed as I was by losing our snorkel trip, I got tossed around enough on the beach by the breakers (including being dragged along the bottom and almost relieved of my trunks) to figure it would have been a short and unsettled outing anyway. (It definitely cleaned out my problematic sinuses, though.) Grand Cayman has no cruise dock so people “tender in” on lifeboats, and the water was so choppy people were falling down while trying to board and disembark. During the school year the median age for cruises like this is probably 70, so falling was a serious issue, and certainly made the disembark/re-embark lines longer.
Once you get a block away from shore, Key West is mostly bars, and from the sheer quantity of Mardi Gras beads hanging from the overhead power lines, I’d guess the street parties there are something to see. Key West has feral chickens the way some places have squirrels, and you can buy killer-rich key lime pie slices from street vendors. We visited the Key West Butterfly & Nature Conservatory, where I snapped a great many photos of foliage where butterflies had been sitting only moments before. I’ll gladly trade several megapixels for less latency, but pocket camera manufacturers don’t seem to be interested.
We met a lot of interesting people from several different countries, including a retired Welsh sea captain and a couple who were celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary. I sure hope I look as good–and more to the point, function as well–as those two when I’m 88! At the first meal in the formal dining room at the ship’s stern, I found myself seated next to another writer, Dottie Billington, Ph.D., who wrote her first book at age 50 and exhorted me not to give up before I become a best-selling SFF author.
Carol and I have been on several cruises before and eat carefully, wistfully avoiding the dessert bars and keeping carbs to a minimum generally. As best I can tell, I brought less than four pounds home that I didn’t leave with, and intend to lose them before Christmas gets into full roar.
More tomorrow.
Memory and the Need to Explain
I’ve been writing my memoirs for a couple of years now, little bits here and little bits there as time allows. I don’t intend to publish them, though I may give them to people who request them. But having researched and meditated on the fluky nature of human memory, I want to record what I remember now, against the strong possibility that the remembering will not get any better.
One of my friends (who knows about my memoir-ing because she’s in my memoirs) asked me if it was a painful process. That’s a good question that I hadn’t considered; after all, I was trying to remember and record as much as I could, the bad along with the good. So was writing about the occasional tragedy in my life painful? Remarkably, no. In fact, the more I write about my life, the better I feel about it. I’ve always attributed this to the value of emotional release (especially of suppressed emotion) as documented by James W. Pennebaker in his book, Opening Up. But earlier today, while reading Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, I came across another possibility: That explaining personal tragedy, even in a purely intellectual way, feels good and is healing in and of itself. There is, however, a bit of intriguing weirdness in it: It appears to work even if your explanation is bogus.
The human mind seems to like a coherent narrative, and when coherence is in short supply will manufacture as much as it needs. This may be one reason that we discover faulty memories of our past, as I’ve documented here: We value continuity over accuracy, and abhor blank spots. So when we’re telling a remembered narrative and come across something we don’t remember or don’t understand, it’s very tempting to guess and then build the guess into the narrative. (This can be and I think often is an unconscious process.)
I noticed this process at work some months back, when I was writing an account of my early relationships. Girlfriends #2 and #3 very clearly and explicitly rejected me because of my eccentricity. (I married Girlfriend #4.) Weirdly, what happened with Girlfriend #1 I simply don’t recall. I remember when the end came (August 1968) and I remember being miserable about it. I just don’t have the slightest idea what the issue was.
When I wrote about it, my first draft was the honest one: “I no longer remember why Judy and I broke up.” I didn’t like admitting that, but further thought brought no new memories to light. I do remember arguing with her and being a jerk about it. I just don’t remember what we were arguing about.
So for my second draft, I added speculation: “I no longer remember precisely why Judy and I broke up, but considering my later experiences with girls, I’m pretty sure my eccentricity had begun to wear on her after ten months of being inseparable.” That sounded a lot better to me, even though there’s not a lick of memory to back it up.
It is, however, a much better story. It ties in with my later experience and clearer memories. It just isn’t true. (I will admit that it’s a reasonably good guess.) Alas, I think that if I told the story often enough, the fact that this was simply a guess would get lost, and the guess would melt into my personal history and absorb credibility from everything else I’ve written. I wonder now how much of this has already happened.
Bottom line: Our memories may not decay naturally. We may unconsciously corrupt them by trying to knit them together into a coherent narrative, inventing or reshaping facts where facts either don’t fit well or don’t exist. That done, we convince ourselves that our guesses are true, at least until we encounter independent evidence that they’re not.
I don’t think it’s an honesty issue. If it were, you’d think it would feel better to just admit ignorance than tell a tall tale, especially when the tall tale puts the teller in a bad light. To the contrary, I think that devising narratives is a basic human need, and even when we don’t have to, some of us do it anyway, simply because it feels good. (This is how novels happen.)
Memoirists: Admit your ignorance. Label guesses honestly. The better a story your memoirs tell, the less likely it is that they really happened. (I’ll do my best to take my own advice here. Corrections gracefully accepted.)
Smoking Jackets
Apropos of nothing in particular (other than that it came to hand unexpectedly a few weeks ago) I present a caricature of me by Chris Cloutier, a very talented artist/cartoonist who was a friend of mine in the 80s, during the peak of my involvement with the SF fan organization General Technics. The cartoon did me a service, because I thought I grew that slightly ridiculous foliage in 1983, but from the date it looks like I already had it in 1981.
I have never entirely understood smoking jackets, which are fragile, thin, very expensive silk robes used to keep your tobacco ashes from damaging or soiling whatever you had on underneath. As a lifetime nonsmoker I’ve never had that problem, admitting that I have burned holes in my polyester shirts by dropping molten solder gobs or occasionally red-hot lathe chips on them. I therefore wear a sort of retro-techie smoking jacket downstairs in my shop: It’s a dark gray plaid mackinaw, and its job is to keep my other clothes from smoking. Works good, too.
Odd Lots
- Maxwell’s Demon as Web comic. (Thanks to GMcDavid for the pointer.)
- Here’s a tutorial on adding a MicroSDHC card to the Nook ebook reader. Looks like a mechanically touchy business (be careful!) and nothing substantive is said about sideloading content on the inserted card. Sideloading of content is something I’m less and less willing to compromise on, as I do not want a censor between my slate and material that I want to read.
- I’m due-ing diligence on the very impressive, Android-powered Nook Color, but the frontrunner in the Great Jeff Slate Project continues to be the Galaxy Tab, especially since Samsung is offering this keyboard dock. That said, Nook Color is the right idea for ebook freaks: Approach a general-purpose slate from the ebook side, starting with a killer ebook store and working toward everything else. (Supposedly, V2.2 and access to the Android app store is coming soon.) My view: Dedicated e-readers like Sony’s and even Kindle will eventually give way to more general-purpose slates of similar size, though slates may “lean” toward one enthusiasm (like ebooks) or another.
- Back in 1983 and 1984, I did about 10,000 words on a since-abandoned novel that included a species of road surface that charged your car’s batteries as the car moves over the road. A pickup called the “board” (after surfboard) was suspended beneath a vehicle and hovered over the road surface via maglev to generate current like a linear alternator. I was pleased to see that Wired posted a news item on some guys in New Zealand who are developing almost precisely that. Not sure how well the math works out (especially with respect to infrastructure costs) but it’s a cool idea. I added another small touch: Ohmic losses in the “voltway” surface kept it snow-free in winter.
- Pope John Paul II was an idealist. Pope Benedict XVI is a pragmatist. My SF prediction: As he grows older and sees the problems besetting the Church getting no better and possibly worse, he will begin considering other reforms that his uncompromising predecessor would have considered impossible. Hey, Bennie! How ’bout Vatican 3!
- People who have lots of moles have longer telomeres. Or at least look younger than they are. Carol and I are both so blessed, mole-wise, but I think it worked better on her than on me.
- If you spend a lot of time in the car but off the Interstates, take a spin through RoadsideAmerica, a bemused compendium of eccentric stuff you can see on road trips. I liked the entry on smiley-faced water towers, since we pass one in Adair, Iowa every time we blast back and forth to Chicago. And Adair is far from the only one.
- From the above site: When we left Arizona seven years ago, some people nodded and said, Cool! Colorado isn’t as crazy as Arizona. Well…I’m not sure that’s true.
Kiddie Phonographs, the Speed Lever, and the Nutty Squirrels
My sister complained a year or two ago that most of Katie’s and Julie’s toys talk. Some talk and sing songs, though a few–I remember a circus train that was one of Katie’s first toys–actually play classical music. When most of your day is spent in the company of toddlers and their toys, I’m guessing silence is in short supply, because when the toddlers aren’t make noise themselves, their toys pick up the slack.
Which brings me back to 1957. My parents had a record player, though it was old and cranky and built into a piece of furniture. I’m sure they didn’t want me messing with it, so they bought a small, portable kiddie phonograph of my own. I had a few kid records, some that told stories, some that played songs, and some–like the Maury Bunin Puppets’ “Foodini’s Trip to the Moon” that did both. (Alas, none that I recall played classical music.) I enjoyed the phonograph a lot, and given that the single active component was a 117L7 tube (capable of 0.85 watts into a 4,000 ohm load) it didn’t generate enough volume to bother my folks much–until I discovered the speed lever.
Like most record players in that era, it could do 33 1/3, 45, and 78 RPM. Most of my records were 45s. (The older ones, including Foodini, were 78s.) Playing a 45 at 33 1/3 was interesting for a moment but ultimately boring: Small children run at inherently higher clock rates than adults, and slow music is not a big draw. 78, now: I had a Disney extended-play 45 containing music from the 1955 “Lady and the Tramp” and I loved it a lot. One cut in particular was my favorite: “Lady,” the instrumental theme for the female cocker spaniel lead. It was bouncy (like me) and I quickly learned how to pick up the needle and drop it again at the beginning of the track, playing it again and again. And when that got boring, I nudged the speed lever up to 78.
Nirvana! I still remember the sped-up recording clearly, and I think it may well beat Khachaturian’s “Saber Dance” as the most manic single piece of music in my experience. I got bored with the item before my parents could sell me to the gypsies (maybe–I wonder if the 45 simply disappeared one day) but I continued my experiments with the speed lever.
We had the 45 of David Seville’s “The Chipmunk Song” (1958) and when I cranked the lever down to 33 1/3, I realized to my six-year-old astonishment that it wasn’t chipmunks at all, but ordinary guys singing the song reeeeeeeeeeeal slow. My cousin Diane had another similar 45, of The Nutty Squirrels doing a scat song called “Uh-Oh.” Same deal: Dial down the speed and it was just a couple of guys singing slower than I could imagine–or tolerate.
This was a fad in the late 1950s, starting with Sheb Woolley’s “Purple People Eater,” which had a couple of sped-up spoken vocals (“I wanna get a job in a rock and roll band…”) but no sped-up singing. That was a Seville invention, with his 1958 song “Witch Doctor,” setting the stage for The Chipmunks at Christmas time that year.
The Nutty Squirrels (basically, jazz musicians Don Elliot and Sascha Burland) had their own TV cartoon show, which came out about the same time as Rocky and Bullwinkle but was not as brilliantly silly and by now is mostly forgotten. Their music was better, and not as kid-centric as the Chipmunks always were, which I’m sure doomed them.
I’ve often wondered how one learns to scat-sing at half-speed without muffing the tempo for the sped-up version. Of all the peculiar and now-forgotten human skills that you might name, that may be the most peculiar of all.
