{"id":2356,"date":"2012-03-09T16:48:37","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T23:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2356"},"modified":"2012-03-09T16:48:36","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T23:48:36","slug":"odd-lots-185","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2356","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I was wrong about Diesel engines being easy to make, as I suggested in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2349\" target=\"_blank\">my entry for March 5, 2012<\/a>. Fuel injection, as it turns out, is a bitch. You&#8217;re trying to divide oil into a multitude of very small droplets of (reasonably) consistent size. Gasoline carburetion, by comparison, is a snap. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht, an automotive engineer, for the reminder.)<\/li>\n<li>I suspect it&#8217;s easier to produce <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wood_gas\" target=\"_blank\">wood gas<\/a> (AKA &#8220;producer gas&#8221;) at a small scale than gasoline. In a future where large-scale oil refiners are no more, a Dieselpunk society could power internal combustion engines with wood gas. This has been done a lot around the world, especially during WWII when oil supply channels were disrupted.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gadgets\/news\/2012\/03\/old-maps-online-lets-you-find-your-way-around-17th-century-holy-roman-empire.ars\" target=\"_blank\">This has little or nothing to do with the Holy Roman Empire<\/a>, but if you&#8217;re a map freak, boy&#8211;budget a day for it. Wow.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Strange-Divisions-Alien-Territories-Sub-Genres\/dp\/0230249671\/\" target=\"_blank\">This looks like a good book<\/a>, especially if you&#8217;re finding it hard to keep track of genre mutation within SFF. Will order and report after reading. (Thanks to Trudy Seabrook for pointing it out.)<\/li>\n<li>We found one of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/imgres?um=1&amp;hl=en&amp;safe=off&amp;sa=N&amp;biw=1600&amp;bih=990&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbnid=_X8IKqiLRwAb3M:&amp;imgrefurl=http:\/\/www.ivorys.com\/sheep_shearing_hand_shears.htm&amp;docid=hljCA_vW2nlk9M&amp;imgurl=http:\/\/www.ivorys.com\/images\/B.B.N. 5 or 6 in Sheep Hand Shear Lg.jpg&amp;w=486&amp;h=183&amp;ei=HH1ZT4b8G-P2sQKJyMDBDQ&amp;zoom=1\" target=\"_blank\">these<\/a> in a drawer in my late grandfather&#8217;s workbench after my grandmother died in 1965 and we had to sell their house. I never knew what it was until it made <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052970203370604577266150012936434.html\" target=\"_blank\">the A-head story on the front page of yesterday&#8217;s <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a> , in an article about&#8230;olympic sheep shearing. My grandfather lived a quiet life in a modest house on a tiny lot on Chicago&#8217;s north side. There wasn&#8217;t a sheep for miles. (I hope he didn&#8217;t use it to cut my father&#8217;s hair.)<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve noted some confusion about this: &#8220;Retina display&#8221; is not an Apple trademark, but a technical term: a display with such high resolution that the eye can&#8217;t make out individual pixels at typical reading distance. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tuaw.com\/2012\/03\/01\/retina-display-macs-ipads-and-hidpi-doing-the-math\/\" target=\"_blank\">Here&#8217;s a good explanation<\/a> of the whole retina display concept. The new iPad certainly qualifies, but it wasn&#8217;t the first. <a href=\"http:\/\/eee.asus.com\/eeepad\/transformer-prime\/features\/\" target=\"_blank\">Asus&#8217; Tranformer Prime<\/a> was there some time ago. Retina-quality displays are made by several vendors, and will eventually appear in other high-end tablets.<\/li>\n<li>The Lytro camera has been mentioned in a lot of places, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2012\/03\/08\/lytro-camera-review\/\" target=\"_blank\">here&#8217;s the first in-depth description I&#8217;ve seen<\/a>. A camera that allows you to fiddle with the focus after the shot is taken is FM, if you know what I mean. I ditch about a third of my digital photos (mostly taken in bad light) for focus problems. It&#8217;s an awkward form factor, but if it&#8217;s the first of it&#8217;s kind, I&#8217;ll assume the next one will fit the hand a little better.<\/li>\n<li>The mad scientist in me cried out when I saw <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencetech.technomuses.ca\/english\/collection\/Switchboard_Panel.cfm\">this<\/a>. I need a castle. I need a kite. I need a monster.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was wrong about Diesel engines being easy to make, as I suggested in my entry for March 5, 2012. Fuel injection, as it turns out, is a bitch. You&#8217;re trying to divide oil into a multitude of very small droplets of (reasonably) consistent size. Gasoline carburetion, by comparison, is a snap. (Thanks to Pete [&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":[121,15,44,51,18,101,110,20],"class_list":["post-2356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-dieselpunk","tag-hardware","tag-history","tag-photography","tag-sf","tag-steampunk","tag-tablets","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2356","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=2356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2357,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2356\/revisions\/2357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}