{"id":181,"date":"2008-09-12T11:31:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-12T15:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=181"},"modified":"2009-01-15T01:03:59","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T05:03:59","slug":"odd-lots-12","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=181","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Greg Singleton sent me a pointer to an English translation of                 <a href=\"http:\/\/community.livejournal.com\/scans_daily\/5408800.html\">a                 Russian short story done in comics format<\/a>. I&#8217;m not a huge                 fan of comics, but the wizardry in this piece is mostly in the                 drawings: When I saw the large pane in which the man stands behind                 the boy he once was, reading the same Jules Verne book against                 the backdrop of Captain Nemo&#8217;s ocean\u2014<em>the very same exact                 copy of the same book<\/em>\u2014I shivered.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceweather.com\/\">Another sunspot, albeit                 a very small one, has appeared<\/a>, so we&#8217;re not likely to break                 the 1913 record of the longest time without an observed sunspot                 any time soon. Also note the article on Martian dust devils, which                 have been dancing around the Phoenix lander and have been caught                 on video.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/news.zdnet.com\/2424-9595_22-217501.html?tag=nl.e550\">This                 article on Intel&#8217;s current research into programmable matter<\/a> (but not the quantum dot kind, fortunately) qualifies as the worst-edited                 Web article I&#8217;ve seen in a month. Don&#8217;t these people proof their                 work before they post it?<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/news\/2008\/09\/080910-collider-success.html\">The                 Large Hadron Collider went live the other day<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesonline.co.uk\/tol\/news\/world\/article4727903.ece\">people                 died<\/a>. Strange physics has <em>nothing<\/em> on strange psychology.<\/li>\n<li>Particle Accelerators of Unusual Size (PAUSes) loom large in                 a number of apocalyptic SF novels, and <a href=\"http:\/\/cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com\/archive\/2008\/09\/08\/1360189.aspx\">here&#8217;s                 a summary collection<\/a>, courtesy Frank Glover.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s another reason I rather like Good Pope Benny: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesonline.co.uk\/tol\/comment\/faith\/article4739281.ece\">He&#8217;s                 cracking down on nutcase apparitions of the Blessed Mother<\/a>,                 which have gotten weirder and weirder and fuller of God-stomps-the-shit-out-of-everybody                 apocalypticism in the last sixty or seventy years, and are making                 the whole idea of Catholicism look bad.<\/li>\n<li>And to round out this this discussion of Apocalypses of Unusual                 Stupidity, I give you <a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesonline.co.uk\/tol\/comment\/faith\/article4717864.ece\">a                 list of thirty ends-of-the-world that never happened<\/a>. Here&#8217;s                 hoping that the New Agers will become so dispirited when nothing                 happens on December 26, 2012 that they will take up a more productive                 hobby, like woodburning, or breeding planaria worms.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Greg Singleton sent me a pointer to an English translation of a Russian short story done in comics format. I&#8217;m not a huge fan of comics, but the wizardry in this piece is mostly in the drawings: When I saw the large pane in which the man stands behind the boy he once was, reading [&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":[41,67,42,72],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-comics","tag-religion","tag-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","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=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":507,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions\/507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}