{"id":893,"date":"2009-09-12T10:44:44","date_gmt":"2009-09-12T14:44:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=893"},"modified":"2009-09-12T10:49:13","modified_gmt":"2009-09-12T14:49:13","slug":"odd-lots-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=893","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>What the Hell: Some researchers at the University of Michigan have created <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.makezine.com\/archive\/2009\/09\/claims_of_pnuematic_processor_full.html\">an 8-bit processor incorporating pneumatic gates<\/a>, pointing toward a computer that doesn&#8217;t require electricity at all. Make sure you watch the videos. It&#8217;s not going to beat your local Beowulf cluster on the speed side, but if you find yourself on a planet where nanomachines eat electrical conductors (as they did in my novel <em>The Cunning Blood<\/em>) such a machine might well come in handy.<\/li>\n<li>The Make Blog aggregated probably <a href=\"http:\/\/rp181.110mb.com\/index.php?p=1_28\">the best writeup of a homebrew railgun that I&#8217;ve ever seen<\/a>. Make sure you prowl around the site, and make <em>double<\/em> sure you see the pictures and watch the videos!<\/li>\n<li>Bill Cherepy sent me a link to a short writeup on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.liliputing.com\/2009\/09\/more-details-on-the-asus-ebook-reader.html\">the still-hypothetical Asus 2-screen ebook reader<\/a>. You can use it as a netbook, with one screen doubling as a touch keyboard, or you can use it as a facing-pages ebook reader display. Now, displays are probably the most expensive part of devices like this, so I doubt a 2-screen model will be the low cost leader. Still, it&#8217;s an idea that&#8217;s well worth a try. (And please, guys, make the card slot <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mobilecomputermag.co.uk\/200908041384\/toshiba-announces-world-s-largest-smallest-xdhc-memory-card.html\">XDHC<\/a> compatible, ok?)<\/li>\n<li>If you ever loved whole milk and wish you could go back to it, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.experiencelifemag.com\/signs-of-life\/2009\/02\/the-science-supporting-whole-milk.html\">read this<\/a>. And then go back to it. No guilt. No apologies. And yes, no heart attacks.<\/li>\n<li>Back in the &#8217;50s there was a product called Siz that was (I kid you not) <em>foaming Napalm in a spray can<\/em>. It was for starting charcoal. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lileks.com\/institute\/gallery\/bbtrix\/4.html\">Lileks does a wonderful riff on it<\/a>. (They had such indescribably cool toys in the &#8217;50s.)<\/li>\n<li>On the other hand (with Lileks always there to remind us) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lileks.com\/institute\/gallery\/sevenup2\/10.html\">they did some ungodly weird stuff in the &#8217;50s too<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li>When I was a kid, Verne\/Wells films were all the rage, and by far my favoriate was <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0052948\/\">Journey to the Center of the Earth<\/a><\/em> . Small boys aren&#8217;t equipped to appreciate Arlene Dahl, but I was quite the fan of James &#8220;Nemo&#8221; Mason, and was willing to tolerate Pat Boone even though my older cousin Diane thought he was &#8220;dreamy.&#8221; The film was dazzling in 1959, especially the &#8220;cave of crystals,&#8221; which flooded out when dreamy Pat Boone got too agressive with a geologists&#8217; pick. Well, some years ago Mexican miners discovered a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceweather.com\/swpod2009\/09sep09\/George-Kourounis4.jpg?PHPSESSID=17eu90u4f99a04fu09ohhge1q5\">real<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceweather.com\/swpod2009\/09sep09\/George-Kourounis3.jpg?PHPSESSID=17eu90u4f99a04fu09ohhge1q5\">cave<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceweather.com\/swpod2009\/09sep09\/George-Kourounis2.jpg?PHPSESSID=17eu90u4f99a04fu09ohhge1q5\">of<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceweather.com\/swpod2009\/09sep09\/George-Kourounis1.jpg?PHPSESSID=17eu90u4f99a04fu09ohhge1q5\">crystals<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stormchaser.ca\/Caves\/Naica\/Naica.html\">1200 feet beneath Naica, Mexico<\/a> that makes those old 1959 movie sets look sick. National Geographic has <a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/news\/2007\/04\/070406-giant-crystals.html\">more textual coverage<\/a>, and it&#8217;s worth noting that the cavern is unliveable without life support suits, being at a constant 122 degrees and 90% humidity, which is worse than Houston, if that were possible.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What the Hell: Some researchers at the University of Michigan have created an 8-bit processor incorporating pneumatic gates, pointing toward a computer that doesn&#8217;t require electricity at all. Make sure you watch the videos. It&#8217;s not going to beat your local Beowulf cluster on the speed side, but if you find yourself on a planet [&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":[37,15,39,43],"class_list":["post-893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-food","tag-hardware","tag-health","tag-humor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893","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=893"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":894,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893\/revisions\/894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}