{"id":1613,"date":"2010-12-20T13:47:54","date_gmt":"2010-12-20T20:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1613"},"modified":"2010-12-20T13:51:40","modified_gmt":"2010-12-20T20:51:40","slug":"odd-lots-139","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1613","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;ve been maxed out for the last week or ten days on numerous things, not excluding Christmas, which is why you haven&#8217;t heard from me here. So even if the Odd Lots file is a little short this time (who&#8217;s had time to wander online in search of Interesting Things?) it&#8217;s the best I can do for the moment.<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;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&#8217;re on the West Coast. Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/science-news\/science-at-nasa\/2010\/17dec_solsticeeclipse\/\" target=\"_blank\">the NASA page on the eclipse<\/a>. I don&#8217;t boggle at this kind of trivia anymore, but we haven&#8217;t seen a total lunar eclipse on the WInter Solstice since 1638. (I believe there will be another, however, in 2094.)<\/li>\n<li>In other astronomy news, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceweather.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">the Sun is dead quiet again<\/a>, 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2010\/12\/20\/a-dalton-minimum-repeat-is-shaping-up\/\" target=\"_blank\">we are in for another Dalton-scale solar minimum<\/a> seem less outlandish than they did a year or so ago. So much for 10M DX.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m still trying to determine <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Images-SI-Inc-Uranium-Ore\/dp\/B000796XXM\/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1292040218&amp;sr=8-5&amp;tag=533633855-20\">if this is a hoax<\/a> or not. If not, I might order some to calibrate my still-incomplete (if haltingly functional) Geiger counter. Don&#8217;t skim past without reading the first comment: 4,182 of 4,252 people thought it was useful!<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com\/2010\/12\/apple-disses-ebook-developers-at-their.html\">Apple is keeping certain iBooks layout features to itself<\/a>, sharing them (under NDA and perhaps at a high price) with large publishers only. WTF? How can this possibly help them?<\/li>\n<li>Perhaps (finally!) realizing that annoying your honest customers is a dazzlingly stupid thing to do, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zdnet.com\/blog\/bott\/microsoft-quietly-shuts-down-office-genuine-advantage-program\/2798?tag=nl.e550\">Microsoft has quietly retired its Office Genuine Advantage program<\/a>, which required users to verify the propriety of their copies of Office before allowing them to download templates and so on. This does <em>not<\/em> 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.<\/li>\n<li>The term &#8220;n<a href=\"http:\/\/io9.com\/5715076\/non+newtonian-fluids-the-weirdest-liquids-youve-ever-seen\" target=\"_blank\">on-Newtonian fluids<\/a>&#8221; makes them sound a lot more exotic than they really are, but as materials go, they&#8217;re pretty cool. I borrowed the concept (which I read about years ago) for a bullet-proof cloak in my in-progress short novel <em>Drumlin Circus<\/em>, but it looks like <a href=\"http:\/\/io9.com\/5583451\/would-you-trust-your-life-to-a-vest-made-with-bullet+proof-custard\" target=\"_blank\">that idea may become real-life<\/a> at some point. (Hey, doesn&#8217;t &#8220;Bullet-Proof Custard&#8221; make a great imaginary band name?)<\/li>\n<li>Not sure what to think about an assertion that <a href=\"http:\/\/io9.com\/5715123\/why-cs-lewis-endures\">C. S. Lewis is the Elvis Presley of Christian publishing<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t have a Chester A. Arthur bobble-head? Want one? Grab some old photos online and send them to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sculpteo.com\/en\/?gclid=CKrJxte76aUCFSdtgwodp1HY1w\" target=\"_blank\">Sculpteo<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/gadgetlab\/2010\/12\/vanity-minifigs-3d-printed-from-your-photos\/\" target=\"_blank\">get a hand-painted bobbler<\/a> of the guy and his muttonchops. Not cheap&#8211;$80 to $100&#8211;but we&#8217;re seeing the first wave of commercial 3-D printing apps here. Why not be an early adopter?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been maxed out for the last week or ten days on numerous things, not excluding Christmas, which is why you haven&#8217;t heard from me here. So even if the Odd Lots file is a little short this time (who&#8217;s had time to wander online in search of Interesting Things?) it&#8217;s the best I can [&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":[41,17,54],"class_list":["post-1613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-ebooks","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1613","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=1613"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1614,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1613\/revisions\/1614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}