{"id":1032,"date":"2009-12-04T14:29:36","date_gmt":"2009-12-04T18:29:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1032"},"modified":"2009-12-04T14:29:36","modified_gmt":"2009-12-04T18:29:36","slug":"odd-lots-92","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1032","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>We broke a new cold record for December 3 last night, when it went down to -3 here. (The previous record was +3, so that&#8217;s a significant margin.) Cheyenne Mountain is covered with snow, and it&#8217;s a wonderful wintry-Christmasy scene out my office windows, though I have to get out there and clear the walks when the temps eventually get up into double digits.<\/li>\n<li>My prediction: We will not <em>quite<\/em> break 2008&#8217;s record for sunspotless days this year. Why so sure? Well, we&#8217;re already at 255 days (and just passed <a href=\"http:\/\/icecap.us\/images\/uploads\/SSLESSDAYS2008.jpg\">1912&#8217;s count of 253<\/a>) but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceweather.com\/\">a sunspot appears to be forming on the back of the Sun<\/a>, and it will rotate around the far side and come into view in about a week. If it&#8217;s a big enough spot, it may be visible for the rest of December. So add 7 to our current 255 and you get 262, which is in cigar territory for 2008&#8217;s 266 sunspotless days, but not quite lit. Of course, if the spot lives and dies over the next week or so (which I&#8217;ve seen happen for smallish spots) we may still beat 2008. Either way, we&#8217;re in the thick of the deepest solar minimum in 150 years.<\/li>\n<li>I just ordered a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbook, after spending some quality time with <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.boyet.com\/\">Julian Bucknall<\/a>&#8216;s slightly older and smaller Dell netbook at the Meetup-less Delphi Meetup last night. The keyboard is surprisingly usable, and I don&#8217;t expect to be writing any 180,000-word computer books on it. I was looking for compactness, not cheapness (there&#8217;s a larger toy budget this year, much thanks to <em>Assembly Language Step By Step<\/em> and other things) and so I loaded up with a GPS receiver, higher-res display, faster CPU, and (obviously) a bigger battery. All that, and it still runs XP. Windows 7 was an option, but why burden a pocket machine any more than it&#8217;s already burdened by just being a pocket machine?<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pcper.com\/article.php?aid=825\">Intel has unveiled a novel 48-core x86 processor<\/a>, arranged as 24 dual-core CPUs communicating through a mesh network with up to 256GB\/s bandwidth. Cores no longer need hardware <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cache_coherence\">cache coherence<\/a> machinery, which cuts the complexity and power consumption of the (huge: 567 mm2!) part. I&#8217;m still wondering howinhell we&#8217;re gonna program these things.<\/li>\n<li>Does anybody my age or older remember the TV series <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Men_Into_Space\">Men Into Space<\/a><\/em>? It ran for one season in 1959-1960, and was created by <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ziv_Television_Programs\">Ziv TV<\/a>, the firm that also did <em>Science Fiction Theater<\/em>, <em>Sea Hunt<\/em>, and <em>Highway Patrol<\/em>. Remarkably, I don&#8217;t remember it at all, even though Broderick Crawford&#8217;s iconic &#8220;10-4!&#8221; is crystal clear in my head. There was supposedly some Bonestell backdrop art in the show, and a solid attempt at factual accuracy, within the limits of weekly TV production of the time. Thanks to Roy Harvey for the link.<\/li>\n<li>People who are familiar with my novel <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Cunning-Blood-Jeff-Duntemann\/dp\/0975915622\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1259950548&amp;sr=8-1\">The Cunning Blood<\/a><\/em> should take a look at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skytopia.com\/project\/fractal\/mandelbulb.html\">these 3-D renderings of the Mandelbulb<\/a>. This is almost <em>precisely<\/em> what I had in mind when imagining Magic Mikey&#8217;s views of chaos signatures using the Femtoscope. (Chapter 12, p.196ff.)<\/li>\n<li>In a dance-around-it sort of way, Slate admits that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2236143\/\">there&#8217;s no compelling reason to use Office 2010<\/a>&#8230;or 2007&#8230;or any version past the one that meets all your needs. Duhh.<\/li>\n<li>From Neil Rest comes a pointer to <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/12\/the_bohr-einstein_debates_with.php\">a puppet show dramatizing the Bohr-Einstein debates<\/a> over spooky-action-at-a-distance. Einstein is played by a stuffed bichon. (What else? You&#8217;d cast a Chihuahua?) BTW, this is for real; it&#8217;s not a parody but an actual physics lesson.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052748704013004574518023648503540.html\">Borders is closing about 200 of its Waldenbooks mall stores<\/a> in January. Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/media.bordersstores.com\/content\/mediarelations\/BSRClosinglist.pdf\">a PDF list of stores to be closed<\/a>. I&#8217;ll admit that I haven&#8217;t bought anything at a Waldenbooks store for many years, simply because they don&#8217;t have the selection of the &#8220;big&#8221; Borders stores. (I also don&#8217;t go to shopping malls that often.) This may be good news, if it means that fewer of the big stores will have to go down too.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We broke a new cold record for December 3 last night, when it went down to -3 here. (The previous record was +3, so that&#8217;s a significant margin.) Cheyenne Mountain is covered with snow, and it&#8217;s a wonderful wintry-Christmasy scene out my office windows, though I have to get out there and clear the walks [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[41,33,15,54,18,14,31],"class_list":["post-1032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-books","tag-hardware","tag-science","tag-sf","tag-software","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}