- Freedom matters, and in honor of Independence Day here’s an eye-opening report on the “state of freedom” in the fifty American states. I knew a lot of this from my research nine years ago, when Carol and I decided to leave Arizona, but it’s nice to see it all in one free (in the other sense) document.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: draisine, a human-powered device for moving over railroad rails. This is evidently a European term; over here these are called handcars or inspection speeders or rail cycles or a number of other things. Definitely note the hot-pink draisine-built-for-two on the Wikipedia page. (Thanks to Aki Peltonen for dropping the word to me.)
- Although I’m sure that everyone in the civilized galaxy has seen the cartoon, I wasn’t aware that “thagomizer” is now paleobiological jargon. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Here’s a list of somebody’s picks as the ten best hard SF books of all time. I agree with about 50% of the picks, though Robinson’s Mars trilogy was so slow and padded-out that I could barely finish it. (I have not yet read the Egan book cited.) I sense as well that Somebody Doesn’t Like Heinlein’s Politics. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Despite a 500-fold increase in cell phone use in the last 20 years, malignant brain tumor diagnosis is down in that timeframe. This interests me, as three people I knew died of brain tumors (the largest cancer cluster in my circle of acquaintance) and it makes me wonder. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I had just a couple of comic books back in the early Sixties, and one of the most intriguing was an extra-long number from DC called Secret Origins that had the backstory for five or six of the most famous DC superheroes. Oddly, what I remember most clearly was the backstory for Green Lantern, especially the little blue guys on the Planet Without Consonants and (most intriguing of all) a power ring with a flaw that prevented it from working against anything yellow. Trouble is, if you remove the flaw, the ring loses its power completely. Now that’s cool–alas, in what may be the canonical Green Lantern for Dummies page, the yellow gotcha isn’t stated clearly and I wonder if it was just abandoned back in the 1960s.
- Forgot to aggregate this back in January: One of the most bizarre articles I’ve ever read on any major site in recent years. This totally, completely, utterly certain guy is angry at other guys for being totally, completely, and utterly certain–and that about something totally, completely, and utterly trivial. My take: We “know” nothing at all with certainty, and the more certain you are that you’re right, the more certain the rest of us should be that you’re wrong. Nyah-nyah!
- And another Odd Lot that has lain around for some time: Polish troops trained a young bear to carry ammo during the Battle of Monte Cassino. My father was at that battle, working a radio station on the back of a truck, but he never mentioned seeing the bear. The bear is said to never have dropped any munitions, which I’m sure was a good thing for the bear, and possibly my father as well.
- Here’s a bogglingly weird Dickensian artifact that I’d never heard of before: A key gun. It’s a gun built into the key to a (large) prison cell lock. I’m sure if it had worked better I would have seen it before now.
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Strahinja Markovic, the chap who created the very good Sigil epub editor while he was a CS undergrad, now has a master’s, a good job, and…a life. (How dare he? ) In a recent blog post, he’s asked for prospective maintainers of the code (which is open source) to introduce themselves and make a case to him as to why they should be trusted to carry on the work. He doesn’t know me; I’m just spreading the word, because I use Sigil and I want it to continue to evolve.
- We have the same problem with the Kompozer WYSIWYG HTML editor; poor Fabien “Kaz” Cazenave has a new job and very little time to devote to the product. I like Kompozer but it has some rough spots, and I hope someone will take over and keep the wheels turning.
- In the meantime, I’ve installed and am testing BlueGriffon, and so far I like what I see. The editor incorporates the Gecko rendering engine used in Firefox 4, so if it looks good in BlueGriffon it’ll look good in Firefox. It has HTML5 and CSS3 capability, and an interesting business model: The editor is free, and the developer sells various add-ons. That doesn’t bother me at all; the whole suite of 9 add-ons can currently be had for $35 Euros, or about $50US. If BlueGriffon performs well on my existing Web documents, I’d pay that like a shot, even if I don’t use the add-ons.
- As brilliant as the original Turbo Pascal was, it wasn’t alone. From Andrew Stuart comes a link to the deep history of Nick Gammon’s G-Pascal, an enviable piece of assembly-coding work that put a potent Pascal compiler for the Commodore 64 in…16K. If you used G-Pascal back in the 80s, this is a must-see, especially the links at the end, to the sorts of ads and programming newsletters that were the lifeblood of personal programming in the early 80s.
- I don’t know if you’ve ever needed an 18″ USB A-B cable, but I did, and after a great deal of looking around, I finally found them at Other World Computing. It’s mostly a Mac shop, but has the short A-B cables for both USB 2 and USB 3. The cable connects the USB hub on my Dell 20″ monitor to the GX620 USFF machine mounted immediately behind it, and keeps cable clutter down behind the monitor.
- Little things sometimes matter: The Toshiba Thrive has a full-sized SD card slot. Not micro. This means that I can use the SD cards I already have. A mini-USB adapter will also allow me to use my existing thumb drives. Ports and card slots have been the deal-killer so far on tablet after tablet. This one (though it won’t be in stores until July) still has an edge. (Bill Roper reminded me that I needed to post about this.)
- From Smithsonian comes a long and detailed article on what amounts to beer archaeology. (Thanks to Rich Rostrom for the link.)
- For those who asked: Simple Simon’s formal name (from my entry for June 26) is Factory Automation Real-Time Supervisor, and yes, the acronym was highly deliberate. His robotic factory is the Automated Reprographic Fabrication Facility, and (as you’ll learn in the novel) the project had always been a dog.
- WUTZ 4 DINR?
Odd Lots
- After being in the water for as many as four years, a broken camera turns up on a California beach with the SD card still in it…and still functional, complete with a hundred-odd photos taken before the camera was lost. I marvel first at the durability of these cards in a corrosive medium–and then at how little circuit board there actually is inside the SD card itself. Wow.
- There is an ice cream truck that goes down Alles Street here in Des Plaines, playing a midi riff of a familiar old song–and, periodically, a slightly creepy woman’s voice calling, “Hello!” This is evidently pretty common, but judging by some quick online research, the songs are different for almost every ice cream truck out there. (The “Hello” voice appears to be the same.) The truck came by here late yesterday, shortly before the storm rolled in, and I suddenly recognized the song: a bouncy variation on the old Southern hymn “Holy Manna,” often known as “Brethren We Have Come to Worship.”
- And pertinent to the above: I only recognized the melody because Lorie Line played it in a medley with “The Lord of the Dance” on her Heritage Collection Volume 1 CD. She plays it fast, much faster than I’ve ever heard the majestic old hymn itself played in church. (The song is not credited by name on the CD, but it’s there–and the CD is very much worth having.)
- Damned if these don’t look like drumlins. On Mars. (The other kind of drumlins–and yes, I am very familiar with them. More on the naming of alien artifacts in an upcoming entry.)
- I’ll come back to this issue once I’m home and decompressed a little, but Glenn Reynolds posted a case history of a man who had non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (also called NASH in some circles, for Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis) eventually ascribed to eating/drinking fructose. Depending on your genetics and how much you consume, fructose can send you all the way to cirrhosis and death. This article (linked to by Reynolds) is a must-read. This one is worthwhile as well. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for alerting me to the post.)
- And while we’re slogging through the Carb Wars, well, fake fat makes you fat. (More and more research indicates that real fat does not.) And let’s not forget that little issue of “anal leakage,” gurrkh. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Xoom, meet SD slot. SD slot, meet Xoom. You guys have been traveling together for over a year. It’s time to shake hands. In Europe . The problem in the US has to do with the “Google Experience.” Somebody at Google is holding back card slot support, and thus (I’m guessing) a great many sales, including one to me. I smell rentseeking somewhere.
- On the other hand, if all you want is an Android ebook reader, this might be worth a look. $99? Who cares if it’s only Froyo? (Forgive me if I’m skeptical that it’ll ever see retailer shelves at that price.)
- The creator of this device calls it “technofetishism,” and it is. That doesn’t keep it from being amazing, and killer cool. (Thanks to Bill WB4WTN for the link.)
- Finally: How To Make a Mask With Photoshop. I always wondered if that would work.
Odd Lots
- Here’s another take on the EasyBits GO debacle, from a guy who used to work at Easybits. Even if it’s not a trojan, it’s still crapware, and careless crapware at that. The Microsoft connection is intriguing: MS will soon be reviewing the entire Skype ecosystem, and may decide to do some decontamination. I don’t think it will go well for EasyBits.
- Down in the trenches in the Carb Wars, people who yell, “A calorie is a calorie! It’s just the laws of thermodynamics!” don’t understand thermodynamics. I’ve known this for years. Here’s a good explanation. (Thanks to David Stafford for the link.)
- Mike Reith saw a pure white squirrel awhile back, up near Denver. I had never heard of non-albino white squirrels before, but they exist, and appear to be spreading due to evolutionary selection–by humans.
- Maybe it wasn’t us who extinctified the Pleistocene megafauna. (Or at least our paleolithic ancestors.) Maybe it was the Sun. Scary business. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.)
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Last-Week Department: prosopagnosia, the inability to recognizes faces or familiar objects. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for calling it to my attention.)
- From Pete Albrecht comes a link to a video of a train wreck caused by a tornado–with the wrinkle that the wreck is filmed from a security cam on one of the freight cars. Toward the end we see a derailed tanker striking sparks as it’s dragged against the rails. Made me wonder what would have happened had it been full of LP gas…
- Forgive the vulgarity and the pervasive comics/movies influence, but this is a point that needs to be made, and textual fiction is no exception. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- I like sprouts. I haven’t eaten them for ten years. Here’s why. Alas, being organic doesn’t help. (Thanks once again to Pete.)
- Here’s a cogent (and funny) illustration of a great deal of what’s wrong with science these days. Hint: It’s not science. Most of the problem is the butthead festival we call the media. (The rest is the grant system.)
Odd Lots
- Heads up here; this is important: Something called EasyBitsGo.exe appeared in a directory under Documents and Settings/Application Data/All Users this morning about half an hour ago. The executable was already installed and running and wanted permission to install Flash Player. (I do not allow Flash Player on Windows machines, as it’s exploit fertilizer.) The timestamp on the executable’s directory tree indicated that it had been installed no more than a minute before it popped up. There appears to be a Skype connection, and I was using Skype at the time. Be careful. If you see it, close Skype, kill the easybitsgo.exe process in Task Manager to close it, and then nuke that directory. Then go to Add/Remove Programs and uninstall it. Reboot. If Skype did in fact install this thing without asking, it may be the beginning of the end of my own use of Skype.
- Per the above: Launch Skype. Select Tools | Options | Advanced, and un-check Automatically Start Extras. Then reboot again and make sure it’s not still running.
- All RAMmed up and nowhere to go: KingMax has announced a 64GB MicroSDXC card…and there’s almost nothing on the market that will use that much storage in one chunk. If we’ve learned nothing else in the last thirty years, it’s that “barriers” are a mark of either hardware vendor cheapouts, or software vendor incompetence. Are address lines so dear that we can’t raise the barriers to a level at least five years out? (I suggest 256 TB. Ok, six or seven years out.)
- What if Babbage had outsourced tech support to the Pacific Rim? (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the link.)
- Yet another longstanding dietary fetish is now in jeopardy. The case against salt always looked weak to me, in that it was clearly hazardous to people who already had certain kinds of heart disease, but that the case that it caused heart disease was mighty thin and mostly anecdotal. All roads continue to lead back to carbs, and especially sugar. More in coming days as time allows. (Thanks to Carol for the link.)
- If just rooting your Nook Color isn’t quite enough, here’s a description of how to turn it into a complete Android tablet. If it sounds scary to you, well, you may not have the computing experience to do it; but when I read the article I thought, Sheesh, that’s easy. You can even boot from the SD slot to get a sense for the mod before making changes to device memory. The process appears to be reversible, and the mod allows you to use Bluetooth-capable GPS receivers and other Bluetooth devices. Given how cheap the NC is, I’m tempted to try it while I wait for the high-end slates like Xoom to mature.
- We could maybe use a few more of these.
Odd Lots
- I’ve just added a book catalog page to my primary WordPress instance of Contra. There’s a link on the title bar at the top. If you’re using LiveJournal, here’s the direct catalog link. From my WordPress instance you can also go direct to an individual title within the catalog by clicking on one of the cover thumbnails in the right sidebar. It’s a little barebones for now, but it’ll do until I finish getting the Copperwood Press site rehabbed.
- This sounds worse than it probably is: B&N has restricted sideloaded content to only 1 GB of the Nook Color’s internal memory. The NC has become very popular as a somewhat broader device than an ebook reader, and I’m sure B&N is worried that people will fill the little slab up with so much of their own stuff that there’s no room to buy more from B&N. The key is the MicroSD slot, which (for the time being) can hold up to 32GB. If sideloaded content stored on the MicroSD card is completely accessible to the Nook’s machinery, it’s really not a terrible problem. (I don’t have an NC so I don’t know for sure.)
- B&N’s certainly been busy: There’s a new, inexpensive, smaller, lighter e-ink Nook in the pipe called Nook Simple Touch. 6-inch display and two months on a charge (sheesh!) will appeal hugely to commuters who just want to read books and not do seventeen things at once. $139; mid-June arrival.
- Then again, if you want a cheap Nook ($99) and don’t mind the orginal model, go to eBay.
- Here’s an expert’s braindump on ebook creation/formatting, which clearly highlights the appalling nature of ebook formats and ebook creation tools. Mobipocket in particular comes in for some (well-deserved) hard whacks with the baton. None of this crap should be necessary. An epub file is basically a collection of HTML documents with an external TOC, all wrapped up in a ZIP archive. Why is this so hard to do? (My thought: Immature rendering engines, like Web browsers in 1994. We are compensating for bad software.)
- This is the high road toward SSTO, and I hope to hell they can pull it off. The trick isn’t so much getting to orbit as getting back intact. We’ll see.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-March-But-Forgot-Until-Yesterday Department: oneiric; meaning of or pertaining to dreams. Also the adjective in the next Ubuntu animal version code: Oneiric Ocelot, due this November. Not new news, but I forgot to mention it in March. Dreams, sure. But having read some of the fights that the discussion of Ubuntu Natty’s Unity desktop has triggered since then, I also picture an ocelot that lost one ear in a bar brawl.
- Bichons are notoriously hard to housebreak. Carbreak too, evidently.
- From the Painfully Obvious Research Department: A study (PDF) suggesting that when we see people breaking the rules, we assume that they’re powerful. Duh. (One wonders if a lifetime of watching powerful people be abject shitheads could have anything to do with it.)
- And a much more interesting study on the role that some airborne bacteria play in acting as seeds for precipitation. Get a look at that hailstone! (Duck!)
- Amen, brother. (Thanks to John Ridley for the link.)
Odd Lots
- It’s been a rough week here (hence the current post paucity) and I just got Carol on a plane to Chicago to look after some unexpected family issues. As we left the driveway it was snowing like hell again, this on the morning of May 15. Even today, halfway to lunchtime, it’s still gray-grim and 39 degrees. I guess it’s going to be another indoors week. Much planned for coming days, including the ebook release of Cold Hands and Other Stories. Stay tuned.
- I stopped in Denver on the way home from the airport to pick up some Elfa parts to expand the shelf system in the back of our garage. It’s an Erector set for storage, and if you don’t know about Elfa I think it would be worth taking a look. I have a hodgepodge closet in my workshop downstairs that desperately needs to be Elfa-whacked, and it’s on the project list for this summer.
- I used to spend a lot of time poking around in Google Earth, mostly looking for abandoned railroad right-of-ways near where I’ve lived in the past. Since then The Daily Google Earth has appeared, full of interesting things visible from space. Today’s desert triangles post intrigues me, since my parents bought land in that general area in the 1960s and I still own it.
- Carol and I have moved incrementally to CFLs as our incandscents have died, but the can fixtures we have in our ceilings are too narrow to pass the necks of CFL floods. Alas, this promising new technology won’t fix that (the necks are, if anything, wider) but it’s a promising alternative to incandescents and doesn’t contain mercury. As the author suggests, it won’t be long before the Maker community figures out how to focus the output into a beam and perhaps even scan it across the bulb’s face.
- I’m not generally one for weird case mods and exotic custom cases, but this Priarie School item engenders a certain amount of lust. I also realize that I could easily make a case of Stickley-style dark-stained quarter-sawn oak–not that I need another thing to do. Would be killer cool, though.
- As a programmer guy with old roots in embedded systems, I feel a very deep itch to try the Android Open Accessory Kit. Alas, as an SF writer with only so many hours in the day, I may not get to it soon. But I greatly rejoice that it’s even possible.
- The data caps issue has gotten to the WSJ, which probably means that it’s off geek turf and Really Quite Sincerely Real. What few people are talking about with respect to ISP data caps these days is the perverse incentive they present for video piracy: Why pay an additional “bandwidth tax” on your favoite films each time they’re streamed when you can download them once and watch them any time you want without further payment? This has always been the case, but moving to a metered Internet only makes it worse.
- From the ‘Bout-Damned-Time Department: Samsung’s Galaxy line of phones and tablets will be getting its Gingerbread update any day now. We hope. Any day now. Guys, really?
- Bruce Baker sent me a link to sculpture made of books, sculpture as I suspect termites understand it. The last picture made me cringe a little: It’s a carved-up copy of all three volumes of the 1936 New Century Dictionary, which has been my go-to word source now for almost thirty years. What other dictionary (none here!) can show you drawings of a wanderoo and a wanigan on the same page?
- Not all engineering problems are nice and clean and up on top of a well-lit bench. Especially this one.
- If ebook readers ever push print books over the edge of the world, it’ll be due to much higher resolution displays. This one, at 458 DPI, is very close to what you see on mass-market four-color interior printing. At 600 DPI (and we’ll be there in a few years) the war will be over.
- Boy. Here’s a kind-of-a-sort-of-a-thing-a-ma-jigger. A display that hinges in the middle? As a friend of mine once said: “Laugh or lust? Flip a coin.”
- Inevitable: I Can Has Zeppelin.
Odd Lots
- As I write this mid-afternoon on May 2, 2011, we’re in the thick of something approaching a blizzard here on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain. This is probably the coldest spring here since we arrived in April 2003. The beautiful warm weather of May, 2002 (when we first discovered Colorado Springs) might have been a fluke. Or maybe this is. No one can tell me.
- Here’s an interesting take on the value of media images as symbols, and to some extent supports what I said yesterday about Bin Laden’s death: We did our best not to leave images around to be turned into revered icons. That, coupled with the native Muslim caution about idolatry, will limit the man’s future power as a martyr.
- Fascinating bit of Old West history: Bass Reeves, one of the most successful US Marshals of his or any era, was black. (Thanks to Nick Hodges for the pointer.)
- VE3EN is losing his job mid-year, and his marvelous solar data aggregator may go dark. That would be a tragedy, though I’m not sure what can be done.
- I think I’m going to make one of these.
- Would a power-cord tethered high-resolution touchscreen all-in-one make a good armchair ebook reader? A smaller unit like this one could be, and would provide enough resolution to read art-heavy PDF-based ebooks without eyestrain, even with old eyes like mine. Now if they’d just allow us to take the legs off…
- Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter are now visible in the east just before sunrise, and if you look quick you’ll see them all. (Mercury is the tricky one.)
- If you like volcanoes, Oregon State University has a nice aggregator for eruption news. There are some terrific photos here, and scary ones.
- Is this what it means to “sit on your brains”?
Odd Lots
- Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is out, and hardly anybody’s even mentioned it. Could it be that nobody’s really upgrading every six months anymore? (My workaday Linux system is still running 10.04.) I’m not bullish on Unity, and may reconsider Kubuntu when I set up a GX620-based Linux box in coming weeks.
- The formidable Al Williams has a three-part series on DDJ explaining how to use the visual tool App Inventor to create Android apps. I have not used App Inventor yet, but Al’s analysis of the challenges of using it (and of visual metaphors for programming generally) are worth reading. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.
- John Scalzi has written a brand new Fuzzies novel. (Not furries, Fuzzies–tiny aliens created by H. Beam Piper.) Scalzi’s good–this one could be fun. I’ve read all the Fuzzies books (by Piper and others) and truly only like Little Fuzzy (the original) and Fuzzy Bones by William Tuning. Fuzzy Sapiens is so-so, and Fuzzies and Other People is so awful that Piper chose not to submit it for publication after he wrote it in 1962. It was found in a box after he committed suicide in 1964, and not published until the late 1980s.
- Interestingly, most of Piper’s copyrights were not renewed, and a great deal of his work (including Little Fuzzy) is now in the public domain. Go to the “P” author page on Project Gutenberg and scroll down.
- I heard years ago that armadillos are the only other mammalian species that contracts leprosy, but now there’s evidence that virtually all human cases of the disease (which is vanishingly rare these days) were contracted from them. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Illinois is banning trans fats in its schools (with a notable exception for doughnuts, how healthy!) but does anyone dare remind them that there is absolutely no trans fat in unhydrogenated lard? In terms of monounsaturated fat (the good fat) lard comes out better than butter, and both are far better than the vegetable oil spreads we call margarine. Funny how the more animal fat I eat, the more animal fat (my own!) that I lose. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the Illinois link.)
- And the much-reviled Dr. Eades makes the point that Mediterranean people who supposedly take all their foods as olive oil are actually doing a lot of their cooking in animal fats, especially lard. (They export the olive oil to people like us, who think it’s healthier.)
- This gets an award for something. I’m still not sure what.
Odd Lots
- Good Friday — bad weather, at least where I am. When I was in second grade, Good Friday included a whomping thunderstorm that rolled over the Northwest Side about 3PM. It got very dark and scary looking, and (after several days of intensive Holy Week preparation in school, especially about Christ’s death on the cross) it was natural for me to think that Good Friday was always dark and stormy, a reflection of what happened in our Bible stories. Alas, the next year Good Friday happened on a beautiful warm spring day. Lesson: Characterization matters more than setting. Don’t get distracted by the special effects.
- Besides, Friday is, well, Friday. How bad could it get? (Jesus could have died on a Monday.)
- Finally, if you haven’t seen this, do take a look. (2.4 MB PDF but well worth it.) You may miss some of the humor if you don’t know theology-geek things like who Bart Ehrman is, but overall it’s hilarious, and in a weird way rather touching. “Roman Soldier is considering early retirement.” I’ll bet.
- Carl Elkin has given the Jewish Haggadah the Facebook treatment as well. I’m sure I miss most of the humor by simply not being Jewish, but I do like God’s comments.
- This is an old article (2003) but allowing a little for inflation it looks to me like an accurate systematic treatment of the costs inherent in mass-market print book publishing. The takeaway is that print publishers were suffering even eight years ago (they’ve been suffering since midlate 2000, in fact) and that it’s miserable trying to turn a profit on an $8 mass-market paperback.
- The author of the above piece doesn’t talk much about per-book author earnings, but some quick envelope math indicates that (with some variance by contract terms) MM paperback authors get about 35c – 40c per book sold. (Note that I have never sold a MM paperback myself, nor did my company publish them.) This may explain why indie authors are willing to sell ebook novels for 99c: Authors get about the same amount per sale on a dollar ebook as they do on an $8 print book.
- Here is a slightly scary but as best I can tell accurate description of the problems confronting print publishers. From the same author come unsettling hints that traditional publishers are botching the ebook business, and botching it badly. Misfeasance or malfeasance? What’s going on here is unclear, but the situation bears watching. (Thanks to Amy Ranger for putting me on to it.)
- Pointers to this article by Gary Taubes have been coming in from all sides, but Dave Lloyd was the first to send it to me. The question of whether or not sugar should be called “toxic” is far less important than the question of whether sugar makes you fat–and whether some types of sugar (i.e., that ol’ devil fructose) make you fatter faster than others. Sure looks like it from here.
- I don’t know how well this works, but it’s a brilliant concept: Put a pico projector in an unused laptop optical drive bay. Not cheap. Not now, at least.
- How well things work? Wow: I haven’t seen a hardware review this negative in a long, long time. A tablet that won’t do anything useful unless it’s tethered to your Blackberry? WTF?
- Hey guys! Long integers!
