- Yes, I’ve been lax on posting, but we’ve taken a short vacation with Carol’s family, and I’m reading PDFs of the finished pages in my book, for reasons that I don’t need to go into here. I have lots to post about, but little time or energy to do it. Bear with me.
- Our new puppy now weighs five pounds and is going on eleven weeks old. He still hasn’t told us his true name, but we’ve suggested Dash, Pascal, Dover (think “White Cliffs of”) and two dozen other things, and all he wants to do is chew on Carol’s slippers. At least he’s learned to use the potty pad, a trick Aero never quite mastered.
- You can help classify galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey over at the Galaxy Zoo, which is one of the coolest crowdsourcing apps I’ve ever seen. You don’t have to know anything about astronomy to classify galaxies, but people who are passionate about galaxies may find the process less boring.
- Anyone who has ever killed time with Conway’s Game of Life has got to see this video, of a spaceship gun: a large, complex GoL pattern that generates moving “spaceship” automata that then crawl away toward the right. The gun seen from a height looks stable and in its own way beautiful, but at higher magnification it’s full of furious activity, almost like a chaotic Pac Man game. How such things are designed escapes me completely, but this makes me wonder what larger and even more complex GoL structures exist and have not yet been designed. (Discovered?) Thanks to David Stafford for the link.
- David’s hot this week: He also sent a link to an extremely intriguing article suggesting a different sort of cosmic cycle: After the Big Bang, time began running, but then gradually slows down until it stops. At that point, what had been the time dimension becomes a new space dimension, and (presumably) the whole thing blows up again with a brand-new time dimension, as a richer and in some respects more mature cosmos. Shades of Stapledon’s Star Maker.
- Although we’re still seeing TV spots by the late, great (ok, loud) Billy Mays, Mays has an heir-apparent: Vince Offer, who has begun to saturate off-peak Weather Channel ad space with pitches for Sham Wow and the resurrected Blitzhacker, now unfortunately called Slap Chop in the US. (Carol and I had one thirty years ago, and it was indeed useful.) Mays had a certain goofy warmth about him. Vince, well, he’s just…scary.
- “Sheesh, this thing is ancient! If it breaks, where am I going to find another?”
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Probably because I don’t work that much in the realm of historic images, I did not know that scanned or photographic copies of public-domain images are also in the public domain, at least in the US. I’ve been gathering scans of pre-1923 artwork for possible use on book covers for several years now, but the uncertain origin (and thus the copyright status) of most of the copies themselves has given me pause. I guess it’s time to end the pause and hit Play.
- We’re currently in peak season for noctilucent clouds, which are high-altitude ice-crystal plumes of mysterious origin. Because they’re so high, they reflect sunlight long after the land beneath them is in night-time darkness. NLCs are appearing farther south recently for reasons not understood; predictably, it’s been ascribed to global warming, but some research indicates that southward excursions of NLCs are a proxy for low solar activity, which we’ve certainly been seeing the last couple of years. (Spaceweather has been covering NLCs a lot in recently weeks, with good photos.)
- Here’s an R2D2-shaped toilet paper cozy. Hey, why is this any weirder than the crocheted teal-yarn poodle-nose cozies that my Aunt Josephine used to keep her toilet paper in?
- I have a strong affection for Nebraska, and here’s an interesting article about abandoned farmsteads and structures in the western Great Plains portion of the state. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- A chap named Julian Beever may be the real master of 3-D sidewalk art. (Thanks to Roy Harvey for putting me on to him.)
- We’ve now had cheap desktop CD-R burners for at least ten years, and the lifetime of the media is supposedly about that. Here’s a reasonable article on optical disc longevity that isn’t from an industry source. Has anybody noticed any burned (not stamped) data discs from the 90s going bad yet?
- When we lived in Arizona, I used to climb an elderly neighbor’s thirty-foot-tall grapefruit tree to help her get the high-hanging fruit. I was in my early forties and that was the last time I ever climbed trees on a systematic basis. If I had to do it again, I would probably stay on the ground and build something like this.
- Has Bucky Fuller’s Cloud 9 cities concept ever been used in SF? There’s not much to be found online about them, but in brief, he was talking about geodesic spheres as much as several miles in diameter, each containing whole cities that could float via thermal lift by virtue of as little as a degree or two of temperature delta between inside and outside. I’ve been imagining Cloud 9 spheres made of drumlin parts (with possibly a Hilbert drive ring around the sphere’s equator) and I’m a little surprised that I haven’t already seen the idea used in fiction, given that Bucky wrote about it in 1960.
Odd Lots
- Here’s a nice, high-school physics level lab demonstration of an aluminum air battery, made from aluminum foil, aquarium charcoal, salt water, and a paper towel. A few of these in series will run a simple solid-state radio. It would be fun to figure out how to expand the concept into something a little more durable, with thicker aluminum plates, in some kind of container that will confine the messy materials and yet admit oxygen to sustain the reaction.
- Damned if the photo of this beambot doesn’t remind me of the Ed Emshwiller F&SF cover for “Callahan and the Wheelies,” a 1960 story by Stephen Barr that I blatantly imitated in my own high-school fiction.
- When I first got into computing in the midlate 1970s I had a number of CPU green cards, but was always a little puzzled that none of them were…green. (The COSMAC green card was blue, and the 8080 green card was white.) In truth, I didn’t know at the time why everybody called them “green cards,” and if you still don’t know, here’s a site where you can see the real deal. (Thanks to Richard Haley for the link.)
- And from Richard’s own hand comes a list of instruction mnemonics that you won’t find on most green cards, of whatever color. My favorite is EMW, Emulate Maytag Washer, which the crotchety frontloading 3330 disk packs back at Xerox building 214 were very good at doing, except that they were in the spin cycle all the damned time.
- Google Books has mounted most (if not quite all) of a fascinating book called Hi There, Boys and Girls! which is a history of local children’s TV programming in the US. The book is organized by TV markets around the country, and the Google Books version is intriguing for how much material is actually available for free. The Chicago material is available, and excellent, if not as detailed as Jack Mulqueen’s full-book treatment in The Golden Age of Chicago Children’s Television, which has a much more limited Google Books preview.
- We are getting close to the release of Michael Arrington’s Crunchpad Internet tablet, but little or nothing has been said about the only thing I really want it for: a large-display ebook reader. It needs an SDHC slot (which I think it has) and some decent ebook software (anybody’s guess) but given those two things, it could remake the ebook biz. July is flying. Wherezit at, Mike?
Odd Lots
* From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: “Forcemeat” is meat ground sufficiently fine to make it cohere with a fat base, and mixed with spices and sometimes other ingredients before incorporating in patés, stuffings, and sausages.
* The Weather Channel is running saturation-level advertising for a “3D chalk” product from Crayola, which is apparently a selection of very bright, almost day-glow colors of sidewalk chalk, plus a pair of 3-D glasses with which to view your sidewalk artwork. Done correctly, the warmer colors seem to float above the sidewalk a little. It’s almost impossible to think of this product and not flash on the sequence in Disney’s Mary Poppins in which the gang jumps into Bert’s sidewalk chalk drawing.
* The venerable Alfred Morgan borrowed some of the circuits found in his boys’ books on electronics. I found the phono oscillator circuit from The Boys’ Second Book of Radio and Electronics in a 1943 Meissner data book, and now Peter Putnam sent me a link to a 1955 article in Popular Science showing something very close to the diabolical Geiger counter circuit that I tried and failed to build (out of the same book) in 1964.
* There are fake high-capacity USB thumb drives going around. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.) Nobody’s making 128 GB thumb drives yet (though they will eventually) so don’t fall for it.
* Also from Frank comes a link to an interview with Eric Lerner, the man who claims to have developed a new kind of fusion reactor he calls “focus fusion.” I’m not enough of a particle physicist to know whether this is a scam or not (though it sure smells like one) and I hope that my readers who are particle physicists can tell me whether the physics is as dicey as the business plan.
* Our long, long sunspot drought may be coming to an end. Spot 1024 is the largest seen yet of the new Cycle 24, and the largest sunspot seen in almost a year. I guess I better start shielding the fire alarm sensor wires, so I can get on 10 meters!
Odd Lots
- One of the most remarkable photos of a volcanic eruption ever taken apparently happened by sheer chance, when the ISS passed over the Kuril Islands just as the Sarychev Peak volcano let loose. The rising plume literally punched a near-circular hole in the cloud cover.
- Just in case you happen to see a nuclear weapon go off, having one of these in your pocket would be handy to quantify things. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
- From Bruce Baker comes a pointer to a NYT article about the perils of being an outsourcee for an unscrupulous publisher. And so much for our textbooks being created by experts with advanced degrees.
- John Cleese’s lighthearted but still informative documentary “Wine for the Confused” can now be seen on Hulu, at the cost of a few Toyota commercials. I’m good with that–and in complete agreement with Cleese that knowing good wine from great wine is not automatic, and in fact knowing good wine from bad takes more effort than most would think. Don’t miss it. (Thanks to Roy Harvey for letting me know it was there; I saw it on TV a couple of years ago and much enjoyed it.)
- We may gasp at 64 GB thumb drives now, but storage technologies coming to market in the next few years will make 1 TB thumb drives not only possible but commonplace. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- The annual amateur radio Field Day event happens this weekend, from 1800 zulu on Saturday to 2100 on Sunday. I’ve got the radios boxed up, and will be experimenting with a interesting rotatable dipole made from a pair of AN-45G collapsible military whip antennas, on top of a pipe mast made of four 5′ sections of 3/8″ pipe mounted on my ancient telescope pipe base. The rotator is my right hand, turning a greased 2″ pipe joint on its own threads. I’ll describe the dipole with photos if it works; if it doesn’t work I’ll admit failure and quietly forget about it. But if you’ll be on the air, I’ll be working solo from a nearby campground as K7JPD. Listen for me.
- From the Too Weird To Be True but True Anyway File: The woman who may well become our first Hispanic supreme court justice stated quite flatly in her Princeton University senior thesis that “…in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition.” I’m a Polish-German-Irish-French ubermongrel who last took Spanish in 1973, and even I know better than that. So…can I be on the Supreme Court instead?
Odd Lots
- Pete Albrecht alerted me to Collecta, an interesting twist on a general Web search engine, in that it gathers news being posted Right Now, and displays it item by item on the screen in realtime While You Wait. Alas, most of what it seems to index are tweets, which may just barely count as information, for small values of “information.”
- And yet another stab at the same concept.
- Kingston has just announced a 128GB flash drive. Figuring an average MP3 is 5 MB in size, that’s 25,600 MP3s. And if the average MP3 runs 4 minutes, that’s 71 days of music running 24/7 with no repeats.
- Rich Rostrom sent me a link to a (pretty dense) medical research paper suggesting another possible benefit of low-carb diets: ameliorating schizophrenia. A 70-year-old schizophrenic woman went on a low-carb diet and after eight days ceased experiencing hallucinations. Not any reasonable cause-effect here in this one case, but boy, this suggests a promising avenue of research. (Steak, cheese, and fish are way cheaper than designer drugs.)
- It’s gotten cold enough in Brazil this year to allow Brazilian vineyards to make the first-ever Brazilian ice wine. (Babelfish translation of the original Portuguese.) Ice wine is a dessert wine delicacy made from grapes that are allowed to remain on the vine long enough to freeze in the first cold nights of autumn. Trouble is, there are almost never enough freezing nights in autumn in Brazil to make ice wine. (Most ice wine comes from places like Austria.) Ice wine is great stuff: I’ll continue to worry about global cooling but damn, I’ll buy a bottle!
- Ten years or so ago at Coriolis, we had an underwear policy. We did not, however, have an open wounds policy. HR gets more complex all the time…
Odd Lots
- Have been reading copyedits and catching up on any number of things after five weeks away from home. We’re going to have real books out of the bindery on or about October 1. For the time being, I’ll be glad to just Not Be Doing Book anymore. (And that should be on or about June 30.)
- Some twit (maybe twits) wrote Twitter apps that store unique tweet ID numbers in signed 32-bit integers. The tweet count since startup is approaching the magic number 2,147,483,647. After that, tweet IDs become negative, and hilarity reliably ensues. Should be tomorrow; let’s watch.
- In other recent software fails, Ubuntu 9.04 broke Skype out here, and made sound support work a little weirdly generally. The Mute button gets checked all by itself for no apparent reason. This is evidently not a problem I’m having all by my lonesome, but time to fix it has been scarce.
- A 14-year-old boy got hit by a meteorite, albeit a smallish one. He got a 3-inch scar on the back of his hand, which (once the bandanges come off) will be the most interesting conversation piece he is ever likely to own, since he evidently had to give up the meteorite itself.
- Building this must have been a picnic. (But I’ll bet the view’s to die for.) It’s a tourist thing, like the tchochke shop atop Pike’s Peak, but way cooler. And yet another reason I have to get back to France someday.
- If everything goes well and the IC-729 still works, I may be out in the (pacified) woods somewhere working Field Day on June 27-28. (I hate to haul my IC-736 into the wilds, but I will if I have to.) I have an RV with a generator, an AH-3 antenna tuner, and an obscene amount of wire. I know I can’t use an RV park’s electricity, but can I use their water pipes for an RF ground?
Odd Lots
- Our good president is creating czars right and left, to the point where you can’t tell the czars without a program. So maybe we need a czar czar–I know a guy named Binks who could do the job…
- Jim Strickland sent me a decent video demonstration of superfluidity in liquid helium. Liquid helium had a starring role in my 1980 story “Cold Hands,” and Richard Bartrop’s cover image of my upcoming story collection Cold Hands and Other Stories includes Richard’s visualization of liquid helium floating free in atmosphere at zero-G. I don’t think we’ve ever fussed with liquid helium in orbit, but if we have, I’d like pointers to any mentions.
- In my novel The Cunning Blood, I postulated fluidic computers, which use fluid pressure and flow rates as the encoding units of information. People think I made this up completely, but not so: The technology was in use as early as 1948, and was written up in Popular Mechanics in the 1970s. (That’s where I first heard of it, though I can’t find the citation right now.)
- If you’re at all interested in the future of the publishing industry and newspapers in particular, be sure to read James Fallows’ take on it. Ad-supported print media are being bled white by eBay and especially Craigslist, which is the direct digital analog of print classified ads.
- From the Words-That-Sound-Exactly-Like-What-They-Are Department: “Dudelsack” is German for “bagpipe.”
- Ethanol is a terribly inefficient use of corn (corn stoves that burn it for home heat are a far better use of corn as fuel) and it may destroy engines as well. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
- Some years ago, while bumming around my old neighborhood in Chicago, I noticed an observatory dome on an addition to a late 40s house about three blocks from where I grew up. It was right across the street from Olympia Park, where I tried and failed several times to become good at softball. Pete Albrecht noticed that the New York Times did an article on home observatories a couple of years ago, which included some photos of the observatory, built by an accountant named John Spack.
Odd Lots
- The Atlantic tells us that a growth industry in NYC and other crowded cities is training dogs to sniff out…bedbugs. Dogs who can tell live bedbugs from dead earn as much as $325 an hour, and work for kibble. I got some peculiar bites on one side of my right leg while we were down in Champaign-Urbana last week for Matt’s graduation, and while I can’t prove that bedbugs did it, that side of my right leg is the side that contacts the bed while I sleep (as I nearly always do) on my right side.
- From Chris Gerrib comes word that The Espresso Book Machine has finally been installed in a bookstore, where it prints from a selection of half a million books on the attached server. No word on whether these are all out-of-copyright titles or what, but after what seems like decades of screwing around (I first reported on the Espresso Book Machine, originally called the PerfectBook 080, in 2001) we’re finally getting somewhere.
- I’ve heard tell recently that Vista doesn’t play nice with the Xen hypervisor. Anybody had any crisp experience there?
- William Banting’s Letter on Corpulence is now available from the Internet Archive, and it’s interesting as the very first detailed description of the effects of low-carb diets. Way back in 1864 Banting lost weight by eating protein and fat, and seemed surprised enough by his results to write up his experiences in detail. The more I research this, the more I’m convinced that carbs are what’s killing us, and this is not new news.
- Lulu recently cut some kind of deal with Amazon to put all their books (I think; it certainly includes all of mine) in the Amazon database. However, they added five or six bucks to the cover price. Will people buy Carl & Jerry books for $21? Don’t know, but somehow I doubt it.
- Machines can often see things that we can’t (which is one reason that we build machines) and they’re willing to share what they see with us. Sure don’t look like this in an 8″…
- Ars Technica published a good article on how DRM actually makes the piracy problem worse–an insight I had years ago, and a painfully obvious one after thinking about it for a nanosecond or two.
- No rest for the weary; several people wrote to ask what I would be writing next. Not sure. I still have to get our butts back to Colorado, but once I do, I want to finish my second SF story collection, and work on Old Catholics. You can bet that I’ll be posting more on Contra too, if that counts. Further than that I won’t venture, though I think I’ll be leaving computers alone for a little while.
Odd Lots
- I like nuns (most nuns, if perhaps not all nuns) and I’ve said good things about the few that helped me get started on the road toward personal discipline and basic thinking skills. Over at the Make blog, they’ve got a few photos of an offering left at a monument dedicated to one Sister Nicodema: An elaborately painted wooden lightning bolt carefully delivered in an elaborately crafted custom case. No idea who she was or even where this is in the world, but somebody gets points for originality in implementing the tribute. She must have been one helluva teacher. (The great German term “geistesblitz” comes to mind.)
- I thought of another couple of Irishisms associated with my grandmother Sade Prendergast Duntemann: Kafoothering (furiously fussing with, or frantic activity generally) and curniklee, which defies easy definition but might be described as gross dirt. Both spellings are phonetic, and I’m guessing the originals are from the Irish language. I haven’t myself used “curniklee” in decades, but “kafoothering” is a wonderful word that bears remembering.
- Those who don’t read Contra comments on my WordPress main site may have missed Jim O’Brien’s insights on “oonchick,” which in Irish is spelled “oinseach,” and denotes a person of pathetic foolishness or stupidity. He also suggests that since in Irish the suffix “og” means “young,” a “gomog” may be a young gom, which in Irish is an idiot (or an “eejit” as Sade herself might have said.)
- The “Axis of Evil” patterns that people see in maps of the cosmic background radiation may be caused by lensing at the boundary between the solar solar wind and the slower interstellar wind. Or you can have my completely speculative opinion (not peer reviewed) that the pattern is due to the cumulative effect on the cosmic background caused by everything massive in the universe acting as a very lumpy and unevenly distributed gravitational lens. The universe is not perfectly smooth and featureless. If the cosmic background is indeed leftovers from the Big Bang, it is the farthest source of radiation possible. We’re seeing it, in a sense, through slightly wrinkly glass. How could it be otherwise?
- At least we’re not seeing the Blessed Mother in the cosmic background hiss… (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I’ve known about the Baby Name Voyager for some time, but I don’t think I’ve cited it here before. It’s a Java app charting the popularity of names given to infants since the 1880s. The name “Jeffrey” barely existed until the 1930s, peaked about when I showed up, and then was mostly gone again by 2000. I always thought it was a bad idea. I wanted to be James, and was almost Eric. For a truly fascinating graph, though, enter a single letter, to see the relative popularity of all the names beginning with that letter. Like Q.
- I’m not a beer drinker, but down at Shop and Save, they have Russian beer in 2-liter plastic bottles. I’ve never before seen beer (nor anything else alcoholic) in what most people think of as soda bottles, and I always figured it was either illegal or simply a bad idea chemically. I guess not.
