- It keeps a very low profile somehow, but this NOAA site is the first place I go when I want to see what a hurricane is doing. We’re a little short of hurricanes this year, but I’m good with that.
- This is what a pharmacy sign looks like in some parts of Europe. Thanks to Terry Dullmaier (in Germany) for the link. Terry didn’t know if the middle neon part goes off to indicate that the pharmacy is closed. Anybody?
- I’ve discovered a great little free clock app for Linux, called the Cairo Clock. It can run in 24-hour mode and is skinnable, with about two dozen different skins available, some of them pretty weird. The skin I like is called Radium, and it (by choice) has a negative weirdness factor: It looks like an old wristwatch I got from my grandfather when I was a kid, which had radium paint on the hands and hour points. The second hand actually ticks forward and then falls back a little, as second hands driven by mechanical escapements used to do. I’d run it on Windows if I could.
- From the No-Models-Were-X-Rayed-To-Produce-This-Calendar Department: The now-famous X-Ray pinup calendar floated as a promo by EIZO was a fake, albeit a mighty impressive one.
- Bill Higgins put me on to NNDB, which is a biography site and useful for that alone…but take some time to poke at their mapping mechanism, which plots connections between significant people both living and dead. Cool factor 11 out of 10; making the maps useful probably takes more practice than I’ve been able to give it so far–and you must keep in mind that every relationship charted is somebody’s opinion of something.
- There is a natural bridge on the Moon. (And I thought Straight Wall was impressive!) Thanks to Darrin Chandler for the link.
- Numbers may be hard to grasp; precision and scale are even harder. This animation may help a little. (Thanks to Chuck Ott for the link.)
- I don’t care how silly an idea it is. These guys get points for…something.
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Several people have written to say that green neon sign crosses are common in Europe (where I’ve been all of twice, sigh) and indicate conventional pharmacies having no necessary connection with marijuana. That would explain a lot; Europe has certainly led the world in marijuana tolerance. Here, however, green crosses have clearly become culural icons for the medical marijuana industry.
- Here’s a very nice introduction to the meteorology behind the El Nino and La Nina Pacific weather events.
- From the Epic Failure of Imagination Department: I’m holding out for STORMY, MACS, Laura, Launce, CardShark #17, and Sangruse V9…but William Gibson is throwing in the towel and settling for Google.
- The fine structure constant, which governs the strength of electromagnetic interaction (and thus many properties of matter, including important things like star formation) may not be constant across the entire cosmos. We should be lucky that we’re here, because if we were somewhere else we might not be possible. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Sheer marketing brilliance: A small brewer is printing a level indicator on his beer bottle labels so that you know how far to fill the bottle with water (or leave it filled with beer) to generate a given musical tone when you blow across the top.
- I am much impressed with Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab Android slate, but I’m afraid it may force me to contact with the colleague for the urgent work during a cosy time.
- So much for lounging around the house in your ratty underwear.
- Evidence continues to accumulate that the BMI is not only utterly useless, but in some areas misleading. (It can’t even predict obesity.) There are better methods and just as simple. But like the “carbs good, fat bad” mantra, BMI just won’t go away, even if it’s contributing to early death. (Thanks to my own Carol for the link.)
- Yes, it’s true: There was just something different about ’60s and ’70s SF book covers.
Odd Lots
- Well, I got the Mallo-Ware bowls I bought from eBay, and they were in better shape than they looked in the listing, and Dash has clearly busted his last bowl. Which leads to a thought: I used to prowl garage sales for entertainment, halfheartedly hoping to find something useful. (I once got a completely functional early-50s tube tester for fifty cents.) Now I just decide what I consider useful and go to eBay or Craigslist.
- Adobe’s Flexnet copy protection system evidently writes to the MBR, and thus can make a system unbootable if it gets in a wrestling match with something else that also wants to be there. Flexnet, in fact, looks disturbingly like a rootkit from here. If I wasn’t sanguine about moving up to Adobe CS before, I sure as hell don’t intend to now.
- Courtesy of Esther Schindler (who apparently was the editor who commissioned it) I give you a crackerjack tutorial by Tom Bunzel on how to do pivot tables in Excel.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: A luthier is one who makes or repairs stringed instruments. From “lute,” which is one of the most ancient instruments in its class.
- Now that Apple has anointed the slate category, the usual suspects are coming up with their own surprisingly interesting takes on the concept. This is my favorite so far, and brings up the interesting question: Why not include both FM radio and TV tuners? If these things are to be travel toys, that’s a must-have. (I also want real GPS, not just cell-tower interpolation.)
- Here’s a list of 100 resolutions (102, actually) that anyone aspiring to be an Evil Comic Book Overlord should make. Resolution #2 is particularly important: “My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.”
- My daily spam count felll significantly (about 30%) a few days ago, and I wonder if this had anything to do with it.
- Somebody told me about this years ago and I didn’t pay attention. I have one of these in a drawer. Will attempt when time allows.
- I used to call Hoag’s Object the “Here’s Looking At You, Kid” galaxy. I’m amazed that so few people have ever heard of it, or seen photos. You no longer have an excuse.
- If the chemical elements played rock music (or if rock bands were set up like the Metal Men) this would be their periodic table.
Odd Lots
- In my last very mobile couple of years, I’ve had some of my best ideas while driving across the featureless plains of Nebraska, including a way to solve a plot/tech issue that had prevented me from further progress on The Molten Flesh: How Protea sampled the powerful and very paranoid Sangruse Device. In looking back, this has been a pattern: In times of enforced boredom, ideas happen. Here’s some insight on that issue, which matters a lot to me, who loves ideas but loathes boredom.
- Here’s a very good tutorial on how to take photos of electronics projects, and by implication any small object shot for detail on a neutral background.
- The causes of “the French Paradox” (the French eat loads of fat and yet have little heart disease) have long been argued about, but it may simply be due to the fact that the French government makes sure that its pregnant women are well-fed, and has been doing so since the 1870s. (See next link.) Low fetal weight (often caused by poor maternal nutrition) correlates strongly to heart disease, diabetes, and much else later in life. Modern declines in heart disease may have nothing to do with red wine, dietary fat, or even smoking. Pregnant women may just be eating better.
- Sometimes a simple animation can explain a difficult mechanical mechanism. Hey, how many of you dudely dudes really understand how a sewing machine works?
- Grab a look at this bogglingly clear close-up of a sunspot, taken with an Earth-based telescope. The key is the deformable mirror and its overall mechanism of adaptive optics, which continuously corrects for atmospheric turbulence and other disturbing factors.
- Google’s spider evidently crawled Contra thirty seconds after I posted yesterday’s entry. Not complaining, but…how often does that damned thing come by?
- Here’s everything you’ll probably ever need to know about four-leaf clovers. It confirmed what I knew from experience probing our lawn in Chicago as a kid: five-leaf clovers also exist (I found more than one) even if they’re not as legendary.
- Double resistor color codes! So intense! What does it mean? (It means 230K.)
Odd Lots
- The hat size/shape measuring gadget that I mentioned in my entry for August 11, 2010 is called a conformateur, and here’s a whole bunch of pictures. It’s evidently a lot commoner than I thought, still in use, and works spectacularly well.
- And another kind of Fedora anxiety: I accidentally installed OpenSuse 11.3 over my Fedora 13 instance yesterday. Might be a good trade; nothing irreplaceable was lost with Fedora, and I need practice in KDE 4 more than I need practice in GNOME.
- A new, pre-shrunk iPad may be in the chute: 7″ diagoinal display but the same pixel resolution. Will fit in a smaller pocket, and may well render ebooks just as crisply. We won’t know until it happens. If it happens. But if it doesn’t happen, Apple will be way dumber than they look.
- Worry less about hurricanes, at least this year: Accumulated cyclonic energy (ACE) is at a 30-year low and still falling. ACE is a good proxy for hurricane number and strength (look at 2005 on the graph) so while it’s low, breathe deep and take that tropical vacation you’ve been putting off.
- This guy gets on my nerves sometimes, but he nailed it: We may someday create software that does much or most of what the human brain does, but we will not do it by reverse-engineering the human brain, at least the way that Ray Kurzweil thinks we will. (For a more detailed popular treatment of why the genome is not a deterministic description of anything, see Matt Ridley’s The Agile Gene.)
- There’s something very likeable about this Icelandic proposal to build high-tension towers in the form of skeletal human beings. Most of the ones I see here in the US look like angry bull heads–and all absolutely alike–so this would be a huge improvement of something huge that has long needed improvement.
- I see this little guy in sheet music fairly regularly, but never knew what it was until I hunted down this summary of just about all modern musical notation symbols. The symbol in question is called a fermata, but would you know a segno if you saw one? (Or, better yet, a hemidemisemiquaver?)
- What do vegan zombies crave as they stalk about like undead celery? Grrrainnns!
Odd Lots
- My installation of Thunderbird 3 has correlated with a lot of weirdness, not only in system performance but in taskbar “stalls” in response to clicked links in messages. I’ve heard a lot of people having trouble with it as well, and we are apparently not in the minority.
- How can I have lived the last ten years as an SF writer and never heard of John Titor, Time Traveler?
- Stephen Hawking has told us that we must abandon Earth or die. Agreed. Now, Dr. Hawking, would you please invent us a hyperdrive already?
- No, bichons are not groomed this way. (That’s for miniature poodles.) Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.
- Microsoft is working on a tablet prototype with keys on the back surface, opposite the display, so you can type with the fingers that you’re using to grip the device. (Thumbs remain on the front.) This looks better than it tells; do follow the link. Will it work? No opinion until I try it.
- If anyone here has not yet been to thereifixedit.com, Go. There. Right. Now. (Via Make.)
- Many people have sent me a link to this item from City Journal , which may indicate that some sense is finally creeping into the nutrition world. Sugar and grains may be killing you. Meat, eggs, dairy, and animal fat are probably not. I’ve known this from my research for a long time. Now, to get the government to admit that they’ve been slowly killing their citizens for over 30 years…
- Not convinced? Fructose seems to be the preferred sugar of cancer cells.
- Still not convinced? The inventor of Cheese Doodles just died at age 90. So much for salt and fat being deadly. (The food dyes worry me more than either.)
- Pete Albrecht points out that LA coffee shops are beginning to unplug their Wi-Fi access points and plaster over all their wall outlets. They’ve found that people buy more coffee and snacks when they actually talk to one another. No shirt, Sherlock!
- Formufit: PVC pipe fittings for when you’re not using PVC pipe for plumbing. Fine stuff!
- I think that what we’ll miss most about our deathwish-afflicted newspapers are all the silly headlines.
- And anyone who has ever scratched his or her head over that famous if gappy Latin expression “Et in Arcadia ego” should look at the variations here. (I find myself thinking of a paraphrase of another classic expression from junk mail: “You may already be in Arcadia!”)
- Heh. As long as Carol’s beside me, I am.
Odd Lots
- Please read this short article by Mark Shuttleworth. I’ve been saying this for years, but he’s a lot more famous than I am: Tribalism makes you stupid. It also means that you are owned, and are not a free man or woman.
- The Insight debugger front end for gdb has been removed from all Debian-based Linux distributions, and is not present in Ubuntu 10.4. The Debian package for Insight has been criticized as “insane” and unmaintained, and I’m curious: Has anyone here used it in recent releases of Fedora or OpenSuse?
- Autodesk founder John Walker has an interesting free Web toy for Greasemonkey, which attempts to spot “media trigger words” and alert you when weaselspeak is being attempted. (Thanks to Jason Kaczor for the tipoff.)
- Oh, no! It’s the Pluto Effect for dinosaurs! Triceratops is actually an immature Torosaurus!
- Man, turn your head for ten minutes and there’s a whole new kind of punk out there. But this one I may actually like: Dieselpunk. Think Art Deco urban fantasy, with the cultural clock set at 1920-1945. This might include the first Indiana Jones movie, and certainly one of my personal favorites, The Rocketeer. Lessee, we still need Musketpunk, for gritty urban fantasy in 1780 Philadelphia. Ben Franklin with tattoos. Could work, no?
- Don’t be drinkin’ Diet Mountain Dew while reading this site. Trust me.
- There is an entire news site devoted to good news. Perky people like me and Flo read it every day now.
- Sheesh. What’s wrong with “Hi! Is this seat taken?” (Wait, no, that was the 70s. And purely analog.)
- I don’t think I posted a link to this back in April, but I should have. There’s a rectangle of this identical cloth hanging on my workshop wall as framed art. Pray without ceasing, even when you’re soldering up a regenerative receiver.
Odd Lots
- Everyone’s talking about a recent Copyright Office ruling that jailbreaking of smartphones is no longer illegal, but few have mentioned that several other significant exceptions to the DMCA’s anticircumvention provisions have been issued in the same ruling. Most interesting to me are limitations on ebook DRM where they prevent audio interpretation of texts from working.
- Could Popular Electronics be returning? Let us pray. (And thanks to Don Lancaster for the link.)
- Carol and I have begun avoiding movies in 3D. They give her headaches and they make me seasick. I thought it was just us being weird, but there’s some evidence that 3D isn’t the crowdpleaser that everybody (especially in Hollywood) thinks it is. Here’s some explanation.
- And even the 2D movies we’ve seen recently seem excessively loud. We may not be imagining things.
- A new dual-core Android-based tablet by an otherwise unknown German firm is really calling to me. We may not see this one here for awhile (if ever) but if it’s evidence of an evolutionary explosion in Android tablets, I’m good with that. Ours will arrive eventually.
- I’ve always been taken aback by the near-psychotic venom with which certain people treat an informal, likeable little font called Comic Sans. Scan the Internet and you’ll get a sense for what I mean. From ten steps back it looks like a tribal identity thing: You must slander Comic Sans to prove that you’re a member of the tribe, especially if you’re insecure about your membership. Secure people just keep their mouths shut and use something else.
- The little red guy running with a hatchet (see my entry for June 27, 2010) appears to be the logo of Psychopathic Records, not the Insane Clown Posse band itself, granting that the label was founded by the Insane Clowns and is probably owned by them. (Thanks to Ricky C on LiveJournal for the tipoff.)
- I solved another band logo question with the help of Google’s new output format for their Images search. Carol and I saw a band logo that resembled a bright red ballet dancer, apparently headless. I typed “red dancer band logo” into Images and there it was, an emblem of the Dave Matthews Band. I’m starting to like the new Google Images search output because it allows me to scan more images at once, rather than page repeatedly through a more limited matrix. This isn’t always useful, but I’m guessing it’s useful more often than not.
- Bicyclists in NYC seem to be preparing early for the coming Ice Age.
Odd Lots
- Before GPS, there was…rolled paper. I’m not sure how useful a one-dimensional scrollable map is, but it was a good start. (And now, all you steampunkers, figure out how to do the same thing in two dimensions.)
- Shortwave radio and one-time pads are still being used, as we discovered in the recent Russian spy foofaraw. Slate’s done a decent overview of number-station covert communication. The late Harry Helms wrote a lot about these, and most of what I know came from his books. Some technologies just don’t get better over time. They were optimal from just about the beginning.
- This Lifehacker tutorial tells you in agonizing detail how to install OS X Snow Leopard in a VirtualBox VM. Cool enough–but when did that become legal? (My guess: It didn’t.)
- From Pete Albrecht comes a pointer to an item describing a proposed copyright law in Brazil that provides penalties for attempting to limit use of public-domain material, or fair use of copyrighted material via DRM. That is a remarkably good idea. (Maybe we’ll see the Viagens someday after all.)
- This looks real (i.e., not Photoshopped) but as at least one commenter has pointed out, there seems to be no way to get inside. Maybe it’s the ultimate RC car.
- Speaking of cars, in reading the comments for this Wired Blog article (titled “What’s the Fastest You’ve Driven?”) I felt old and frumpy. The fastest I’ve ever driven in my life was 95 or 96 MPH: in 1971, in my mom’s battered teal-green 1965 six-banger Chevy Biscayne, northbound on the Edens Expressway just before the I-290 junction…in the rain. Why? I no longer remember. And that’s probably just as well.
- And yet more about cars: Buss Ford Lincoln Mercury in McHenry, Illinois posts YouTube video endorsements from their happy customers. Buy a Merc before they’re gone…and be famous! (It worked for Carol’s sister and her husband.)
- And now, for quite enough about cars: Pete Albrecht reminds us that in 1973 somebody glued the rear portion of a Cessna Skymaster to a Ford Pinto, and it flew…for awhile. (What do people say? “Don’t fly 70s cars?” Uh, yeah.)
- DARPA wants a flying submarine. They should ask Irwin Allen. Or Tom Swift, Jr. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
Odd Lots
- The $35 Atlantis word processor (see my entry for June 18, 2010) installs effortlessly under Wine and runs without a glitch under Linux. (It has a Platinum compatibility rating, and they don’t get any better than that.) If you’re doing or considering ebook development under Linux, it generates a very good EPub file, and is quite fast and extremely low-profile. (1.5 MB!)
- Doesn’t Popular Science tell us this (and just as emphatically) every three or four years? I’ll believe it when I actually see zepps flying over my house.
- From Bob Fegert comes word that Ray Kurzweil hopes to shake up the ebook business with his still-unreleased Blio reader. I’ve known of Blio for some time; what’s new is the partnership with Toshiba to create a Blio ebook store supporting PDF, XPS, and EPub books. However, what may make Ray the new kingmaker in the ebook world is a recent Federal requirement that universities make their e-readers accessible to the blind. Blio will do that very well (as you might expect, given Kurzweil’s history) and the reader is capable of rendering textbooks to an extent that most other ebook software/hardware combos simply can’t. Much to watch here.
- Having just spent a great deal of money changing out my glasses to a new prescription, I think this Android eye-test app is clearly and crisply brilliant.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Cyberlocker, a cloud-based file-hosting site. The term is generally used of sites like Rapidshare, which are coming to be seen by Big Content as the greatest single offenders in the file-sharing wars.
- Just as Shrek is selling Vidalia onions, I heard from a reader that Wallace & Gromit not only put the Wensleydale cheeses on the map, but with the power of cartoon branding brought the cheeses’ producer back from the brink of bankruptcy.
- Rich Dailey N8UX writes to tell us that the original Idle-Tyme rolling ball clock is back in production again, after 25 years. I saw one in a store window I don’t know how many years ago and giggled a little at the product’s inherent audacity, but it had a following, and I bought a plastic knockoff in the late 70s. The clock broke, but I still have the balls in a drawer somewhere. Read the history page; the inventor (like a lot of inventors) was a very interesting man.
