{"id":746,"date":"2009-05-29T09:07:24","date_gmt":"2009-05-29T13:07:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=746"},"modified":"2009-05-29T09:50:16","modified_gmt":"2009-05-29T13:50:16","slug":"odd-lots-67","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=746","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/doc\/current\">The Atlantic<\/a><\/em> tells us that a growth industry in NYC and other crowded cities is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/doc\/200906\/bedbugs\">training dogs to sniff out&#8230;bedbugs<\/a>. Dogs who can tell live bedbugs from dead earn as much as $325 an hour, and work for kibble. I got some peculiar bites on one side of my right leg while we were down in Champaign-Urbana last week for Matt&#8217;s graduation, and while I can&#8217;t prove that <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bedbug\">bedbugs<\/a> did it, that side of my right leg is the side that contacts the bed while I sleep (as I nearly always do) on my right side.<\/li>\n<li>From <a href=\"http:\/\/chris-gerrib.livejournal.com\/\">Chris Gerrib<\/a> comes word that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=104644575&amp;ft=1&amp;f=1001\">The Espresso Book Machine has finally been installed in a bookstore<\/a>, where it prints from a selection of half a million books on the attached server. No word on whether these are all out-of-copyright titles or what, but after what seems like decades of screwing around (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.duntemann.com\/july2001.htm#07-12-2001\">I first reported on the Espresso Book Machine, originally called the PerfectBook 080, in 2001<\/a>) we&#8217;re finally getting somewhere.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve heard tell recently that Vista doesn&#8217;t play nice with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xen.org\/\">the Xen hypervisor<\/a>. Anybody had any crisp experience there?<\/li>\n<li>William Banting&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.archive.org\/details\/letteroncorpulen00bantrich\"><em>Letter on Corpulence<\/em><\/a> is now available from the Internet Archive, and it&#8217;s interesting as the very first detailed description of the effects of low-carb diets. Way back in 1864 Banting lost weight by eating protein and fat, and seemed surprised enough by his results to write up his experiences in detail. The more I research this, the more I&#8217;m convinced that carbs are what&#8217;s killing us, and this is <em>not<\/em> new news.<\/li>\n<li>Lulu recently cut some kind of deal with Amazon to put all their books (I think; it certainly includes all of mine) in the Amazon database. However, they added five or six bucks to the cover price. Will people buy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Carl-Jerry-Their-Complete-Adventures\/dp\/B00262XXW2\/\">Carl &amp; Jerry books for $21<\/a>? Don&#8217;t know, but somehow I doubt it.<\/li>\n<li>Machines can often see things that we can&#8217;t (which is one reason that we build machines) and <a href=\"http:\/\/apod.nasa.gov\/apod\/ap090526.html\">they&#8217;re willing to share what they see with us<\/a>. Sure don&#8217;t look like this in an 8&#8243;&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Ars Technica published a good article on how <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/news\/2009\/05\/landmark-study-drm-truly-does-make-pirates-out-of-us-all.ars\">DRM actually makes the piracy problem worse<\/a>&#8211;an insight I had years ago, and a painfully obvious one after thinking about it for a nanosecond or two.<\/li>\n<li>No rest for the weary; several people wrote to ask what I would be writing next. Not sure. I still have to get our butts back to Colorado, but once I do, I want to finish my second SF story collection, and work on <em>Old Catholics<\/em>. You can bet that I&#8217;ll be posting more on Contra too, if that counts. Further than that I won&#8217;t venture, though I think I&#8217;ll be leaving computers alone for a little while.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Atlantic tells us that a growth industry in NYC and other crowded cities is training dogs to sniff out&#8230;bedbugs. Dogs who can tell live bedbugs from dead earn as much as $325 an hour, and work for kibble. I got some peculiar bites on one side of my right leg while we were down [&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":[41,33,38,39,16,14],"class_list":["post-746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-books","tag-dogs","tag-health","tag-publishing","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746","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=746"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":752,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions\/752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}