{"id":923,"date":"2009-09-29T19:29:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-29T23:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=923"},"modified":"2009-09-30T11:39:40","modified_gmt":"2009-09-30T15:39:40","slug":"odd-lots-83","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=923","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Here is the entire sky projected on a plane, and zoomable.\u00a0 (LINK REMOVED&#8211;SEE COMMENTS.) That doesn&#8217;t do it anything like justice. Cruise the image a little and gasp. (Give the site time to refresh; it&#8217;s newly slashdotted.) Read the rest of the page too&#8211;it&#8217;s fascinating, and full of great photos. Chile looks a great deal like Mars in some places.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/view\/generic\/id\/47580\/title\/Alzheimers_linked_to_lack_of_Zzzzs\">There is apparently a correlation between sleep loss and amyloid tangles in the brain<\/a>, which are a key element in Alzheimer&#8217;s Disease. Causation is still a little unclear, but I find it significant that in our era of Anything But Sleep, the incidence of various dementias is exploding. Be in bed by 10:00PM and keep your brain. Now there&#8217;s a deal I can live with.<\/li>\n<li>Wired has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/gadgetlab\/2009\/09\/tablet-taxonomy\/\">an interesting retrospective on tablet computing<\/a>, which I found worthwhile mostly for the mention of a steampunk-era electromechanical handwriting encode-and-transfer device, which ferdam sounds like what Sherlock Holmes would use to IM Watson.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2229391\/pagenum\/all\/\">another worthwhile perspective on the Google Books Settlement<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>A chap who calls himself the Jolly Pirate wrote to tell me that the Pirate Party is alive and well in the US (I was under the impression that it was a European thing) and some interesting links may be found on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pirate-party.us\/\">its site<\/a>, many of which have nothing to do with piracy. Now, would an American instance of the Pirate Party lean left or right? (Or would it be port and starboard?) I&#8217;ll be damned if I can decide&#8230;<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2229518\/pagenum\/all\/\">It&#8217;s been a bad season for big-time wine critics<\/a>, who can&#8217;t seem to find a business model and keep getting busted in conflict-of-interest scandals. The Internet allows the crowdsourcing of critique of all sorts of things&#8211;why should wine be any different?<\/li>\n<li>Pertinent to the above: What we need is the wine implementation of the &#8220;People who liked this also liked&#8230;&#8221; mechanism I see (and use) in the book world. I very much like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnekowwinery.com\/ourwines\/campusoaks\/oldvinezinfandel\">Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel<\/a>, though the 2007 vintage now in stores is a pale shadow of 2005. What would be a wine similar to that? (If you know of such a system for wine, please share.)<\/li>\n<li>There are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nostalgiccandy.com\/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&amp;ProdID=613\">candy Legos<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>The charger for my Kodak pocket camera is a thin little slab with two 110V power plug pins that swivel out to plug into the wall, and then swivel back into hiding when they&#8217;re not needed. Why can&#8217;t they build that mechanism right into the back of an ebook reader? (I was without my Sony Reader for a couple of months after I lost the charger.)<\/li>\n<li>After an unexplained absence of several weeks, Fort Carson&#8217;s cannon is back. (See my entry for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=898\">September 15, 2009<\/a>.) Maybe the cannon was broke and they had to send it back to the factory for repairs&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here is the entire sky projected on a plane, and zoomable.\u00a0 (LINK REMOVED&#8211;SEE COMMENTS.) That doesn&#8217;t do it anything like justice. Cruise the image a little and gasp. (Give the site time to refresh; it&#8217;s newly slashdotted.) Read the rest of the page too&#8211;it&#8217;s fascinating, and full of great photos. Chile looks a great deal [&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":[41,37,15,39,87,13],"class_list":["post-923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-food","tag-hardware","tag-health","tag-sleep","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923","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=923"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":932,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions\/932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}