{"id":991,"date":"2009-11-01T19:43:58","date_gmt":"2009-11-01T23:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=991"},"modified":"2009-11-01T19:44:19","modified_gmt":"2009-11-01T23:44:19","slug":"odd-lots-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=991","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>The University of Utah has <a href=\"http:\/\/learn.genetics.utah.edu\/content\/begin\/cells\/scale\/\">a fascinating animation demonstrating the relative sizes of very small things<\/a>. Starting at the scale of a coffee bean, you can zoom down by pushing a slider past single cells, various viruses, proteins, until you reach the carbon atom. Won&#8217;t take but a minute, and has plenty of wow factor, especially if you can&#8217;t picture things clearly at nanoscale.<\/li>\n<li>For all the beautiful weather and the fact that school was out, this year&#8217;s Halloween saw no trick-or-treaters here on Stanwell Street until almost 5 PM. Summer from around the corner and her third-grade friends arrived in a mob at 6:30, and Dash got plenty of girl-attention, but that mostly exhausted the supply of local grade-schoolers. A few young teens came by between 7 and 8, but that about was it. The neighborhood has a fair number of teens, but we were told they were all having at-home parties, and we&#8217;re good with that, though I have a mass of Milk Duds here that would probably go critical if placed in a single sufficiently large bowl.<\/li>\n<li>Carol and I went over to our next-door neighbors later in the evening. Carol wore her footie jammies and put her hair up in huge 70s rollers. I cobbled up a Ben Franklin outfit that wasn&#8217;t half bad, and I carried <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/PinkKite500Wide.jpg\">the small pink kite<\/a> tethered to a balloon stick with about two feet of string. When we walked in, the guy down the street commented, &#8220;Lost some weight, huh Ben?&#8221; &#8220;Yup,&#8221; I replied. &#8220;Low-carb and all that.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Want to haunt a house? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2009\/10\/scientifically-haunted-house\/\">Hire a team of scientists and an architect<\/a>. Real ghosts just never show up for work when you need them.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.roytanck.com\/2009\/07\/29\/fit-pc2-review-the-worlds-smallest-desktop-pc\/\">This is the smallest packaged PC I have ever seen<\/a>. Not worthwhile, given that it lacks digital audio out, is Atom-based, and stuck on Ubuntu 8.04 (!!) but it <em>is<\/em> small.<\/li>\n<li>And if you&#8217;ll settle for something only a little bit bigger, <a href=\"http:\/\/global.aopen.com\/products_detail.aspx?Auno=2662\">the AOpen MP45D<\/a> will do a lot more.<\/li>\n<li>I may have linked to this once years ago, but it&#8217;s worth running through again: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lhup.edu\/~dsimanek\/museum\/unwork.htm\">The Museum of Unworkable Devices<\/a>, which is bestiary of perpetual motion machines, with careful explanations of why they don&#8217;t work. Lots of links to even more of the same.<\/li>\n<li>NASA has calculated the &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/apod.nasa.gov\/apod\/ap091101.html\">average color of the universe<\/a>&#8220;&#8230;<em>and it&#8217;s the color of my livingroom walls!<\/em> (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Finally, don&#8217;t forget <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=983\">the contest I posted yesterday<\/a> once it goes down under the fold! Keep those shortie filk schticks coming!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The University of Utah has a fascinating animation demonstrating the relative sizes of very small things. Starting at the scale of a coffee bean, you can zoom down by pushing a slider past single cells, various viruses, proteins, until you reach the carbon atom. Won&#8217;t take but a minute, and has plenty of wow factor, [&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":[41,150,15,43,54],"class_list":["post-991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-daybook","tag-hardware","tag-humor","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991","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=991"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":992,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions\/992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}