{"id":563,"date":"2009-02-03T12:30:10","date_gmt":"2009-02-03T16:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=563"},"modified":"2009-02-03T12:30:10","modified_gmt":"2009-02-03T16:30:10","slug":"odd-lots-53","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=563","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciam.com\/article.cfm?id=us-becomes-top-wind-producer\">The United States has overtaken Germany as the world&#8217;s lead producer of wind energy<\/a>, measured in total kilowatts. Way to go&#8211;keeping in mind that Germany still beats us all hollow with kilowatts per capita. I&#8217;m a big believer in NWS, in that order, and part of the reason N comes before W is that over the past few years, when Carol and I have passed giant wind turbines along I-80 on our way to and from Chicago, they were only turning about a third of the time. Wind energy is great, but <em>it does not stand alone<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/01\/27\/health\/27brod.html?_r=2&amp;no_interstitial\">Small children should be allowed to get dirty as a way of building their immune systems<\/a>. I was digging in the back yard since before I can remember, and never had much trouble with allergies. There may be a downside to our dirt- and germ-averse culture that has nothing to do with the risk of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. (With Gretchen&#8217;s approval, I think I&#8217;m going to buy our nieces a couple of garden trowels next Christmas&#8230;)<\/li>\n<li>Few people today remember that Apple Computer was once a Pascal shop, and had <a href=\"http:\/\/pascal-central.com\/pascal-syntax.html\">a promo poster in the late 70s incorporating a classic &#8220;railroad&#8221; diagram<\/a> of Pascal language syntax. Yes, the 70s really did look like that. (At least it wasn&#8217;t all done in Harvest Gold.) Thanks to Paul Santa-Maria for the link. Paul created his own version of the poster in black and white, which I hope he makes available at some point. The Waite Group sold (or gave away; not sure if it was a boom promo) a similar card in the same era, but it&#8217;s long since vanished from my collection.<\/li>\n<li>Has anyone here ever read any of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oup.co.uk\/general\/vsi\/\">Very Short Introduction<\/a> books from Oxford University Press? Are they useful? I just ordered several, and I&#8217;m curious as to the quality of the series. I&#8217;ll report here once the books show up and I&#8217;ve had a chance to read them. There are many subjects I&#8217;m interested in sufficiently to read 150 pages on, but not 600 pages.<\/li>\n<li>A German publisher wrote an article claiming that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mobileread.com\/forums\/showthread.php?t=37774\">cheaper ebooks will put them out of business<\/a>. (The article is in German; take what you can from the English summary or if you know the language, click through to the original.) The gist is that there are special costs associated with e-publishing that more than balance the special costs associated with print publishing. My take: If true, it&#8217;s only until we get up to speed. (I also think it may be true that many publishers don&#8217;t really understand all the forces that bear on how they make their money. Many things lead up to the cash-register&#8217;s beep, not all of them obvious.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m a lot less sanguine about the OLPC than I used to be, but the recent unveiling of future designs intrigues me: <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.laptop.org\/go\/Hardware\">The next-gen OLPC<\/a> will have two displays, and can be held and read portrait-style, like a book. When a keyboard is needed, rotate the device 90, and one of the two displays becomes a keyboard. Very cool, and something like that should be sold worldwide by every electronics retailer. (Their peculiar distribution mechanism will eventually be the end of them.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The United States has overtaken Germany as the world&#8217;s lead producer of wind energy, measured in total kilowatts. Way to go&#8211;keeping in mind that Germany still beats us all hollow with kilowatts per capita. I&#8217;m a big believer in NWS, in that order, and part of the reason N comes before W is that over [&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":[33,17,75,15,39,16],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-books","tag-ebooks","tag-energy","tag-hardware","tag-health","tag-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","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=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}