{"id":4004,"date":"2018-01-22T15:17:36","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T22:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4004"},"modified":"2018-01-22T15:20:25","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T22:20:25","slug":"odd-lots-314","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4004","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.hayworth-miller.com\/obituaries\/Robert-Bruce-Thompson?obId=2906724#\/obituaryInfo\" target=\"_blank\">I regret to report that Robert Bruce Thompson has left us<\/a>, at age 64, of heart problems. He&#8217;s best-known for his books <em>PC Hardware in a Nutshell<\/em> and <em>Building the Perfect PC<\/em>, but he&#8217;s also written several books on astronomy and telescopes that I much admire, as well as several books on home-lab chemistry. He was one of the best technical writers of his generation, and has been blogging as long as I have, which later this year will have been 20 years.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gadgets\/2017\/12\/source-code-for-apples-historic-lisa-os-to-be-made-available-in-2018\/\" target=\"_blank\">Apple will be releasing the source code for the Lisa OS this year<\/a>. The machine came out in 1983 and didn&#8217;t sell well due to its $10,000 price tag. (That would be almost $25,000 today.) I&#8217;m interested because Lisa OS was written in&#8230;Pascal! I&#8217;ve heard rumors from the FreePascal community that a port to the Raspberry Pi is likely and might not even be especially difficult. Imagine the OS from a $25,000 machine running on a computer costing $35. I&#8217;d do that just to say I did.<\/li>\n<li>I didn&#8217;t know anything about ArcaOS until a few days ago, but <a href=\"https:\/\/www.arcanoae.com\/arcaos\/\" target=\"_blank\">it&#8217;s basically a continuation of OS\/2 Warp, based on Warp 4, MCP2<\/a>. Legal, not free, but also not hideously expensive, and supported to boot. If you ever used OS\/2 and liked it, take a look.<\/li>\n<li>Back before we truly understood the dangers of nuclear radiation, scientists experimented with nuclear fission by moving neutron reflectors around a softball-sized core of PU-239 <em>by hand<\/em>, and recording the nuclear reaction&#8217;s strength from Geiger counter readings. This was called &#8220;tickling the dragon&#8217;s tail,&#8221; and when done clumsily, led to the death of several researchers and shortened the lives of others. <a href= \"http:\/\/www.neatorama.com\/2011\/11\/28\/the-curse-of-the-demon-core\/\" target=\"_blank\">Here&#8217;s a good summary<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>The last house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright before his death in 1959 is in Phoenix, and <a href= \"http:\/\/www.cowboysindians.com\/2018\/01\/on-the-market-frank-lloyd-wrights-last-house\/\" target=\"_blank\">it&#8217;s for sale<\/a>. Got $3.25M in your wallet? You&#8217;re set! (Thanks to my own Carol for the link.)<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/information-technology\/2018\/01\/we-test-the-worlds-first-amazon-go-watch-you-shop-grocery-store\/\" target=\"_blank\">Here&#8217;s an excellent long-form piece on Amazon Go<\/a>, the online retail behemoth&#8217;s experiment in checkout-free B&amp;M retailing. Take if off the shelf, toss it in your bag, and when you&#8217;re done shopping, just leave. You need an Amazon account and ideally a smartphone, but with that you&#8217;re in business. No word on when the concept will move beyond Seattle.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fathomevents.com\/events\/the-dark-crystal\" target=\"_blank\"><em>The Dark Crystal<\/em> is coming back to movie theaters in February<\/a>. That was a butt-kickin&#8217; movie, and I will probably hand over the $14 ticket price without a great deal of grumbling. A really big screen <em>is<\/em> worth something!<\/li>\n<li>IO9 <a href= \"https:\/\/io9.gizmodo.com\/the-first-cryptic-teases-for-the-setting-of-the-next-c-1822279889\" target=\"_blank\">mentioned some teasers for <em>Cloverfield III<\/em><\/a>. III? Was there a <em>Cloverfield II?<\/em> You guys never tell me anything!<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/nationalinterest.org\/blog\/the-buzz\/the-worlds-longest-sniper-kill-the-enemy-shot-dead-3871-24141\" target=\"_blank\">A Canadian sniper team in the Middle East nailed an ISIS terrorist at 3,871 yards<\/a>. This is about 1,000 yards farther than the previous record for a sniper kill. I have a lot of respect for marksmen (my father was one) and a sense of awe before the skill of snipers at this level.<\/li>\n<li>Every time I crank up Waterfox, it asks me if I&#8217;d like it to be my default browser. Every damned time. Something appears to be redefining my default browser without my permission. <a href= \"https:\/\/support.mozilla.org\/en-US\/questions\/1008285\" target= \"_blank\">This support page hasn&#8217;t been especially helpful<\/a>. Haven&#8217;t cracked this one yet, but I&#8217;ll report here when I do.<\/li>\n<li>Something the AGW crowd should keep in mind: If you say that any hot summer&#8217;s day means global warming, don&#8217;t be surprised if people unroll the syllogism and assume that any cold winter&#8217;s day means global cooling. Climate isn&#8217;t simple, and we know a <em>lot<\/em> less about it than we claim.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I regret to report that Robert Bruce Thompson has left us, at age 64, of heart problems. He&#8217;s best-known for his books PC Hardware in a Nutshell and Building the Perfect PC, but he&#8217;s also written several books on astronomy and telescopes that I much admire, as well as several books on home-lab chemistry. He [&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":[70,71,34,90,128,54,14],"class_list":["post-4004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-architecture","tag-eulogies","tag-movies","tag-pascal","tag-rpi","tag-science","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4004","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=4004"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4006,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4004\/revisions\/4006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}