{"id":2475,"date":"2012-05-16T16:37:25","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T22:37:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2475"},"modified":"2012-05-16T16:37:31","modified_gmt":"2012-05-16T22:37:31","slug":"odd-lots-191","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2475","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/science-news\/science-at-nasa\/2012\/15may_sunday\/\" target=\"_blank\">Don&#8217;t forget the annular solar eclipse<\/a> that will touch the Southwestern US this Sunday, May 20.<\/li>\n<li>From the Words-I-Didn&#8217;t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: <em>Ignorosphere<\/em>, the region from about 120,000 feet altitude to the lowest stable orbit. (It&#8217;s a flip term for the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mesosphere\" target=\"_blank\">mesosphere<\/a>.) It&#8217;s too high for winged aircraft or balloons, and not empty enough for orbiting spacecraft. Sampling it is difficult (one-shot sounding rockets are all we have in terms of tools) and we know less about it than any other region of near space.<\/li>\n<li>After a long conversation on the subject with mobile developer David Beers the other day, I stumbled on an article that drives home the problematic nature of Android app development: <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gadgets\/2012\/05\/android-fragmentation-one-developer-encounters-3997-devices\/\" target=\"_blank\">There are actually four thousand different Androids<\/a>. (Maybe more.)<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m seeing more and more videos in, um, <em>bad taste<\/em> being posted to my friends&#8217; Facebook feeds by something called Socialcam. The suggestion is that those who post have actually viewed the videos, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/roberthof\/2012\/04\/30\/why-i-hate-socialcam-even-if-it-might-be-the-next-instagram\/\" target=\"_blank\">that&#8217;s not true<\/a>. <em>Socialcam reserves the right to post stuff to your Facebook feed that you have not viewed and have no knowledge of<\/em>. Tear that damned thing out by the roots.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/boingboing.net\/2012\/05\/11\/glass-gem-corm.html\" target=\"_blank\">This<\/a> certainly makes me wish that I liked corn more than I do.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/news.sciencemag.org\/sciencenow\/2012\/05\/is-your-alarm-clock-making-you.html?ref=hp\" target=\"_blank\">An interesting study here<\/a> adds fuel to the fire over suggestions that keeping a consistent sleep schedule helps you lose weight. I.e., don&#8217;t try to &#8220;make up&#8221; lost sleep on the weekends. Doesn&#8217;t work. I&#8217;ve been saying this for years, based on a lecture series I took at the Mayo Clinic: Getting five hours of sleep a night will make you fat and kill you before your time. People get angry at me for suggesting that they be in bed, lights-out, between 9:30 and 10 PM if they have to get up at six to get to school or work, but that&#8217;s probably what it takes. A handful of people may be able to get by on five or six hours a night. The usual human-traits bell curve suggests that you are almost certainly not one of them.<\/li>\n<li>If you remember <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1387\" target=\"_blank\">a speculation I made some time back<\/a> about dogs and human origins, well here&#8217;s another: That <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2012\/05\/humanitys-best-friend-how-dogs-may-have-helped-humans-beat-the-neanderthals\/257145\/\" target=\"_blank\">dogs helped us drive the Neanderthals to extinction<\/a>. I&#8217;m dubious. My sense is that their <em>lack<\/em> of dogs allowed the Neanderthals to drive <em>themselves<\/em> to extinction via dawn raids. Dogs made dawn raids difficult, and so we failed to wipe our own species out. (I haven&#8217;t seen any evidence yet that Neanderthals kept dogs, but of course I&#8217;m still looking.)<\/li>\n<li>If you don&#8217;t know what a &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Zoetrope\" target=\"_blank\">zoetrope<\/a>&#8221; is, go look it up before you behold the <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.makezine.com\/2012\/05\/15\/the-pizzoetrope-how-to-recreate-an-animated-gif-on-a-pizza\/\" target=\"_blank\">pizzoetrope<\/a>, which is essentially an edible animation created by spinning a pizza. Sounds loopy (as it were) but it works.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Don&#8217;t forget the annular solar eclipse that will touch the Southwestern US this Sunday, May 20. From the Words-I-Didn&#8217;t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Ignorosphere, the region from about 120,000 feet altitude to the lowest stable orbit. (It&#8217;s a flip term for the mesosphere.) It&#8217;s too high for winged aircraft or balloons, and not empty enough for orbiting spacecraft. [&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":[41,38,37,15,39,14,96],"class_list":["post-2475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-dogs","tag-food","tag-hardware","tag-health","tag-software","tag-words"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2475","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=2475"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2476,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2475\/revisions\/2476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}