- I got an email recently from ABEBooks inviting me to their Weird Book Room. They were telling the truth, and I was not disappointed. I was a little surprised that I only own two of the titles on the list (guess which ones!) but I’ve already ordered another: How to Be Pope by Piers Marchant. I mean, c’mon, how could I not?
- I complain a lot about pocket camera latency, but check this one out: A seminal 1990 digital camera from Leica took three minutes to grab a shot. Those handles are cool, sure, but I’ll guess that a tripod works better.
- Think of Constantine at the Milvian Bridge for a moment: “In This Sign, Conquer.”
- Various party poopers emailed me this story about an Antarctic cruise ship that lost an engine and got pounded by 45-foot waves somewhere in the Drake Passage. Yes, I feel better already, thanks.
- Don’t forget the Geminids meteor shower late Monday night/Tuesday morning early. It’s probably cold where you are, but the show might be worth it.
- There will also be a total lunar eclipse the night of December 20/21.
- I used to pick up The Fortean Times at the Village Green Bookstore in Rochester, NY in the early 80s, and it was fine bathroom reading. I’m delighted to report that their Web site is still good, albeit less convenient in the bathroom. I wasn’t aware that no viable peas were found in King Tut’s tomb, but that sort of ignorance is easily corrected. Ditto the feral parrots of London, which have been there long before Jimi Hendrix made the scene and felt that it needed some color. Hey, paint’s cheaper, and it doesn’t poop on you when you’re sitting under a tree.
- I guess the primary virtue of The 100 Best Movie Spaceships is that 100 spaceships is a lot of spaceships, so just about everybody gets in. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- David Stafford provides a link to a functional re-creation of the Antikythera Device…in Lego! (I’m guessing that it’s also been done in Meccano, but I’ve not gone looking.)
- Here’s a remarkably long and detailed (for attention-challenged io9, at least) essay on the biological effects of sudden exposure to vacuum, a la Dave Bowman in 2001. As a bonus, author Geoff Landis explains (with equations) how quickly your spacecraft will lose atmosphere if punctured. I’d read this site more frequently if there were more of that and less of this.
- My old friend Neil Rest is right: These are about as cool as artistic representations of cities get. And they’re all made of techie castoffs, including cardboard. Wow! (And in the comments is a link to a chess set made of various coax connectors. Way wow!)
- I wouldn’t have thought of this: Coat a few bazillion tobacco mosaic viruses with conductive material, and you can use them make batteries with ten times the capacity of lithium-ion tech. Well, with the ongoing decline in smoking, what else are all those poor unemployed tobacco viruses gonna do? (Thanks to Roy Harvey for the link.)
- From David Stafford comes a pointer to instructions on how to determine either the speed of light or the operating frequency of your microwave oven by tormenting marshmallows.
- With that, I think I’m caught up on the Odd Lots file. More as they come in.
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Needles to say, at 70 cents a minute I wasn’t going to be doing much Internet research while we were on our recent cruise. So most of today’s Odd Lots are from my tireless friends, whose efforts are very much appreciated. (Hey, next year let’s all get together on a cruise, and experience Internet withdrawal around the stern pool with mojitos in our hands!)
- During mealtime cruise ship chitchat, we learned that an enormous new cruise ship was so big it had a hard time getting under a bridge that blocked its maiden voyage from the shipyard in Finland to the sea. Aki Peltonen sent a nice news item on Allure of the Seas, which holds 8,500 people. The 200+ foot high boat cleared the bridge by one foot. Clearly, Allure might be considered a…brinkmanship.
- My cell contract comes up next year, and just in time, Consumer Reports has published its January 2011 cover story on cell phones and (more significantly) cell providers and plans. Well worth buying the print magazine for. Right on the cover is the money quote: “Sorry, AT&T.” (And guess which provider I have now? Changes are acumen in…)
- Don Lancaster has released his TV Typewriter Cookbook as a free PDF. And speaking as I was of memoir the other day, here’s a bio sketch Don sent me, Yes, he’s a few years older than I am, but it’s uncanny how much his story aligns with mine, right down to the planetarium, the acorn tube radios, Carl & Jerry, and much else.
- Pertinent to my entry of November 30, 2010, there is apparently a term for memoirs written without the intent to publish generally: legacy writing, which is writing one’s life story for recreational, family, or therapeutic purposes. The definition comes from this article, sent to me by Pete Albrecht.
- Also pertinent to that same entry: A longish but very good article from Smithsonian about how memories form in the brain, and why they sometimes don’t reflect precisely how reality happened. (Thanks to Dave Lloyd for the link.)
- From the FB In The Original Sense File: Popular Mechanics mailed a box containing a thermometer and a three-axis accelerometer, both feeding a data logger, to see how much trauma a package would undergo from each of the major courier services. Summary here. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- I’ve heard rumors of this, but now it’s official: Borders is going to try to acquire Barnes & Noble. So we’ll soon be down to one major national book retailer. Dare we hope that the doors will re-open to the knowledgeable one-off shop or local chain? Owned and run by people who actually read books? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Neat short article on other approaches to manned moon landings considered in the 1960s, some of which would have been cheaper and perhaps more sustainable than our historical use of the Saturn V stack. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- From the With Delegates Like These, Who Needs Skeptics? Department: A group of college students attending the UN’s COP 16 climate change conference in Cancun this week circulated a hoax petition calling for the banning of dihydrogen monoxide, a widely used industrial solvent that, while harmless in liquid form, contributes strongly to greenhouse heating as a vapor. Video of delegates cheerfully signing the petition here. (Don’t those people watch Penn & Teller?)
Odd Lots
- Maxwell’s Demon as Web comic. (Thanks to GMcDavid for the pointer.)
- Here’s a tutorial on adding a MicroSDHC card to the Nook ebook reader. Looks like a mechanically touchy business (be careful!) and nothing substantive is said about sideloading content on the inserted card. Sideloading of content is something I’m less and less willing to compromise on, as I do not want a censor between my slate and material that I want to read.
- I’m due-ing diligence on the very impressive, Android-powered Nook Color, but the frontrunner in the Great Jeff Slate Project continues to be the Galaxy Tab, especially since Samsung is offering this keyboard dock. That said, Nook Color is the right idea for ebook freaks: Approach a general-purpose slate from the ebook side, starting with a killer ebook store and working toward everything else. (Supposedly, V2.2 and access to the Android app store is coming soon.) My view: Dedicated e-readers like Sony’s and even Kindle will eventually give way to more general-purpose slates of similar size, though slates may “lean” toward one enthusiasm (like ebooks) or another.
- Back in 1983 and 1984, I did about 10,000 words on a since-abandoned novel that included a species of road surface that charged your car’s batteries as the car moves over the road. A pickup called the “board” (after surfboard) was suspended beneath a vehicle and hovered over the road surface via maglev to generate current like a linear alternator. I was pleased to see that Wired posted a news item on some guys in New Zealand who are developing almost precisely that. Not sure how well the math works out (especially with respect to infrastructure costs) but it’s a cool idea. I added another small touch: Ohmic losses in the “voltway” surface kept it snow-free in winter.
- Pope John Paul II was an idealist. Pope Benedict XVI is a pragmatist. My SF prediction: As he grows older and sees the problems besetting the Church getting no better and possibly worse, he will begin considering other reforms that his uncompromising predecessor would have considered impossible. Hey, Bennie! How ’bout Vatican 3!
- People who have lots of moles have longer telomeres. Or at least look younger than they are. Carol and I are both so blessed, mole-wise, but I think it worked better on her than on me.
- If you spend a lot of time in the car but off the Interstates, take a spin through RoadsideAmerica, a bemused compendium of eccentric stuff you can see on road trips. I liked the entry on smiley-faced water towers, since we pass one in Adair, Iowa every time we blast back and forth to Chicago. And Adair is far from the only one.
- From the above site: When we left Arizona seven years ago, some people nodded and said, Cool! Colorado isn’t as crazy as Arizona. Well…I’m not sure that’s true.
Odd Lots
- Here’s how the ancient Greeks calculated the distance between the Earth and the Moon. If the notion surprises you, well, you were reading comic books during geometry class, weren’t you?
- Although I’d heard of the Millionaire Calculator, a sort of mechanical uber-sliderule used circa 1890-1940, I did not know that it had helped to discover Pluto.
- From The Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: materteral, of or pertaining to an attentive aunt–basically the female analog of avuncular. Less commonly, materterine. Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for calling them to my attention.
- I was going to cite Sion , Philip Boast’s outrageous but hugely fun riff on the whole Da Vinci Code thing, as an example of a print book you can’t buy in the US (see yesterday’s entry) but I was wrong: You can get used copies here for a dollar. No extra charge for either the zombies nor the angels with pubic hair.
- Dell has not handled its notorious SX270 capacitor problem especially well. “Hide the corrosion” might have been the company line, and the results could be Capacitorgate. That said, Dell is not the only vendor to have had this problem. (There’s a whole forum devoted to bad PC capacitors.) I’ve been lucky so far…but I’ve also switched to SX280 machines, which are not as prone to the problem.
- They Don’t Make ‘Em Like This Anymore…and when they did, I missed them. Dayum. (More if not quite as cool at Gizmodo.)
- Alfred Powell Morgan basically got me started on electronics when I was 11, through his decades-spanning series of books on electronics for boys. Here’s a nice bio sketch of the Dan Beard of electronics from the ARRL Web site.
- The late Thomas Gold (author of The Deep Hot Biosphere) may have been right. I certainly hope so.
- Honda, I know you’ll never actually build that car, so that being the case, could I have an SUV painted the same color?
- If ski season seems to have come early this year, you aren’t being singled out. It’s snowing on Comet Hartley 2. (Hey, spin that dogbone and make a habitat out of it!)
- 70 is the new 40, and zombies are the new vampires. Let’s talk about this again when I’m the new 40.
- I’ve never been a beer guy, but if I did drink beer, it would probably be this one.
- And pertinent to the above, here’s an elegant solution to a problem that I myself will never have.
- This, on the other hand, is something I could definitely get into.
Odd Lots
- Finland has some of the coolest sky phenomena on Earth.
- Sterile neutrinos? I think particle physics has gotten away from me. At least they didn’t discover it on the bridge of the Enterprise, with the Klingons closing in, right before the last commercial. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Are hipsters gone yet? Does their Weltanschauung capture the Zeitgeist? Or is it only a façade hiding the real bête noir? Will we miss them? Are you sick of dumb-ass questions yet? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- And just when you think politics (even in my own relatively sane state of Colorado) can’t get any weirder, well…
- Several people sent me links to reports of an Irish chap who’s spotted a passerby in a 1928 Charlie Chaplin film talking on a cellphone. Gomog’s Razor (i.e., when all possibilities are equally unlikely, the craziest one is true) suggests time travel, but the little old lady in question may also be holding a compact mechanical trumpet hearing aid. Or maybe her ear is just cold. I’ll bank on time travel, and I know what she’s muttering into her Thiotimoline Smartphone: “Look, you idiots, I said send me to the year 2819, not the year 1928!”
- Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Tab is getting a lot of press these days, but note that this review does not mention ebooks. At all. Wow.
- The Pontiac marque officially died this past Sunday. My grandfather Harry Duntemann always bought Pontiacs. His ’53 had an amber-colored glass Indian as a hood ornament, and my mother owned his loaded ’57 Chieftan from 1961-1967. It was a cool car with a very big engine, and given that my mom was used to driving tiny little Nash Ramblers from the mid-1950s, it was easy for her her to daydream and suddenly realize she was doing 80. I’ll miss Pontiacs. And my next car will almost certainly be a Ford, for reasons I don’t need to explain.
- Sportscasting can be hazardous to your hairdo.
- What if we stopped trying to immunize people against malaria and tried to immunize mosquitoes instead? Takes only one gone link to break a chain.
- “UCLA Seeks to Avoid Turnovers.” Me, I’m leery of cheese Danish.
- Dude, where’s my external tank? (Thanks again to Pete for this and the above link.)
- This is not a hoax. Really, it isn’t. I checked.
Odd Lots
- I meant to post this back in May but the item went into a notefile while I was traveling and got misplaced: Larry O’Brien did a very nice detailed comparative review of my Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition and Randy Hyde’s Art of Assembly Language, Second Edition over at SDTimes. Larry understands better than most people that there are multiple ways to approach learning a topic, and that both books have value and don’t completely overlap one another.
- Another tardy item from that same missing notefile: Scientific American must be desperate for subscribers, as it had the courage to challenge the biggest sacred cow in medical science: the Fat Bad, Carbs Good nonsense that has blown us up like carnival ballooms since it was declared health dogma in the early 1970s.
- Part of the problem: Most medical studies are utter crap, and here’s why.
- And here’s an excellent example. Sadness makes me neither creative nor energetic. Furthermore, all the most creative people I know are borderline manic. Insane, maybe. Sad? Not in the least.
- In 1970, I built a vertex-first projection model of the 600-cell regular polytope in four space using D-stix. My senior-year math teacher hung the model from the steam pipes and I never saw it again, but here’s a photo of one made out of ordinary drinking straws. (Scroll down.)
- What is the frequency of a dog shaking water off its fur? The answer: greater than or equal to 4 Hz.
- Slate asked “Is the movie that almost killed Disney animation really that bad?” My answer: Yes. It’s the Seventies car in Disney’s otherwise reasonable animation garage, full of uninteresting things indifferently drawn, with the possible exception of the weird half-dog, half-leprechaun whatchamacallit Gurgi. The Horned King is the least menacing of all Disney cartoon villains, and certainly can’t hold a candle to Maleficent, Hades, or even Gaston. The Chronicales of Prydain is a decent kid-series, and deserves a remake.
Odd Lots
- Don Lancaster has released a free PDF of his classic RTL Cookbook . No catch. Just go get it.
- One serious problem with legalizing marijuana, for medical use or otherwise, is that there is no one “marijuana.” Like breeds of dogs, weed comes in a multitude of varieties, with various strengths and compositions and effects on human beings. You simply can’t predict what will happen to you when you take it, which isn’t what I like to see in medical therapies–or, for that matter, recreational activities.
- This is good, but not for the reasons you might think: If Macmillan is consigning much of its backlist to a POD agreement with Ingram/Lightning Source, the line between “conventional” publishers and POD publishers begins to get blurry indeed. That’s good, as discrimination against POD titles by reviewers and other gatekeepers in the publishing and retailing businesses has been very discouraging. Mainstreaming POD has got to happen at some point, and the gatekeepers will have to–gasp!–evaluate titles on their own merits. (But that’s…work!)
- Those who think cellular phones were the first mobile phone technology are almost forty years off, as this excellent detailed history of mobile (car) telephony shows. This stuff was huge (as in takes up much of your trunk), hot (as in temperature), and fiendishly expensive, but over a million people were using it in 1964. Love those early-60s control heads!
- I just heard that a lost and never-performed composition by Ralph Vaughan Williams has been discovered in the Cambridge University Library, and will soon be performed for the very first time. He’s my all-time favorite composer, and it’s delightful to think that there’s still something he’s written that I have never heard. (Thanks to Scott Knitter for the link.)
- We got missed (barely) by a 35-foot asteroid yesterday, but I’m guessing that there are plenty more where that came from. And does 35 feet qualify one as an asteroid? I would think they had to be bigger than that. I would call it “modestly scary space debris.”
- Maybe you have to have been an electronics geek for 47 years (like me) to appreciate the humor, but this made me laugh. Hard.
Odd Lots
- My Geiger counter project is still alive, but I ordered an old telephone magneto from eBay and it just got here. Now I have to work up a scheme to transform its hand-cranked 120VAC to 900VDC in the capacitor bank. Will report back once that section of the device is in the can.
- I’ve seen these people in used bookstores and tent sales, and although I knew (vaguely) what they were doing, I hadn’t seen a detailed description of the culture. Here’s why you don’t find lots of bargains at used book sales.
- A correspondent who will remain nameless suggested that, since I’m fighting ongoing shingles pain, I should get a Colorado medical marijuana card and do a series on the Colorado weed scene. After all, an MMD is the third-closest retail establishment to my home (after Blockbuster Video and a nail shop.) Well, no. I’ll go with gabapentin. But if you’re curious about the kind of nuthouse medical marijuana has become (at least in Michigan and probably Colorado as well) read this.
- Taco sauce cleans the oxide layer off of pennies, leaving bright metal in its wake. How? We’re not entirely sure, but here’s an interesting discussion of the question–and some fun citizen science.
- The Soviet Union had a lot of hardware done and mostly tested for a lunar landing circa 1970, but it didn’t have the required launch power of a Saturn V, so the program was mothballed and the landers abandoned. (Thanks to Frank Glover begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting for the link.)
- On the same site, and in the same vein, are some photos of early Soviet snowmobiles, many of which were powered by aviation engines and air propellers rather than treads of some kind.
- This may be TMI about chicken nuggets. You judge. I’ll stick with beef.
- Here’s an interesting take on the Periodic Table, called Helix Chemica, from the 1944 book Hackh’s Chemical Dictionary. “Hackh” is a wonderful name. I think I’ll steal it.
- Our President wants a better America through science, technology, engineering, and math. A little more glue behind the Presidential Seal would be a good start.
- Ok. This is silly. But there is something wonderfully, goofily likeable about it.
- Like I predicted, people are going to be making jokes about this thing forever. I liked this one. Not only epic fail, but epic humilation. Anger is deadly.
Odd Lots
- I’m still pretty sore from lingering shingles pain on my back, and a little grouchy in consequence, though I’m trying manfully not to show it. On the good news end, Carol is much better, and we both had cheese ravioli last night. I think it was the first meal worthy of the name that she’s had in almost two weeks.
- Anger really does make you lose: Sony has condemned “No Pressure” and completely disassociated itself from 10:10.
- From the Terms-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: milk float, a small delivery vehicle (often electric) used to deliver milk in urban England. Some photos here.
- And another from that department: steamdevil, a small vortex of condensed water vapor rising into cold air from a warm body of water like a lake or a river. This is the time of year you tend to see them, and Spaceweather posted a nice example from Wisconsin.
- I’ve always suspected that grains aren’t good for me, but here’s some analysis as to why. Your Body May Vary, but a lot of this sure sounds familiar. Note well the caution on soybeans, which give both Carol and me a lot of trouble.
- Napa’s cool summer has winemakers biting their nails: They may lose much (and perhaps all) of their harvest if a freeze comes before the grapes mature, but if they can walk the tightrope to harvest without falling, this year’s late-harvest wines (my favorite kind) could be spectacular. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- The Colorado Springs marijuana industry has made the New York Times , and has injected new life into local newspapers. I like The Independent, our quirky little free paper (its offices are in an old church with interesting architecture) and every issue I flip through down at the Black Bear Coffeehouse has another page of MMD ads. The latest issue had a 48-page pull-out supplement, devoted entirely to You Know What. The world is clearly crazier than we can imagine.
- Mars may have had not only oceans, but (c’mon, this is obvious!) also icebergs. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Australia is about to get its first native-born Roman Catholic saint: Sister Mary Helen MacKillop, who in 1870 got a child-abuser priest removed from his position. In retaliation, friends of the priest orchestrated her excommunication, but she was exonerated in 1872. She will be canonized later this month, and I’d say she now stands fair to become the patron saint of whistleblowers.
Odd Lots
- The base for the Geiger-Muller tubes used in all of the early Cold War era Victoreen counters (including both tubes now on my bench) is called a standard Peewee 3-pin, JEDEC A3-1. Many thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for sending along this link to a detailed spec sheet (PDF) for one of the tubes. Now I can wire up the counter I’m building for initial tests.
- A couple of people have suggested using a Leyden jar instead of ordinary capacitors to collect charge for my (supposedly) steampunk Geiger counter. I imagine that a Leyden jar would be more period, and it’s certainly a good excuse to build something that I saw in every single one of the kid books on electricity I read back in the early 60s. Not real portable, though.
- There is indeed an organization that helps to keep Latin functional, 2000-odd years from its original coalescence as a major world language. No psychic powers points for guessing that the organization is…the Roman Catholic Church. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link, which, I must say ahead of things, is in…Latin.)
- And Finland just racked up a huge mess of cool points with me for being the only country in the world that broadcasts the news in Latin. (Thanks to Aki Peltonen for the link.)
- Jim Furstenberg put me on to photos of a round dozen Victorian submarines. The site looks to be a marvelously engaging time-waster, er, experience broadener. (Have done much of both in recent hours.)
- Google just announced its own URL shortener, which will do some reasonable screening against malware. I have avoided using URL shorteners for that reason until now.
- Furthermore, the new Google URL shortener will generate a QR code for you if you tack a .qr onto the end of the shortened URL.
- Amazon is creating an Android app store. Peculiar? Not if the next (or next after that) Kindle generation is more than just an ebook reader.
- I’m proud to say that my good sister Gretchen long ago declared that she is raising free-range kids. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant (Carol and I have none of our own) until I read this. Bravo! Now, can we make zero-tolerance policies in schools a felony? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- The other day I mentioned to Carol that, with “Drumlin Circus” taking on a certain steampunk flavor (it’s certainly nothing like “Drumlin Boiler”) I would probably have to buy a top hat. Her reply: “Um…you already have a top hat.” I looked on the high shelf in the closet, and shore ’nuff! I bought it for the 1999 Coriolis Millennium Christmas Party at the Biltmore Hotel in Scottsdale. I wore it exactly once, and then forgot about it. So what’s next? Spats? Or my seriously ahead-of-the-curve Chester A. Arthur facial hair?
