Odd Lots

A piece on Wired discusses the possibility of “guided bullets” that change course after being fired. Readers of my novel The Cunning Blood will recognize the concept:

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/11/what-if-a-snipe.html

• A couple of people wrote to ask for a photo of Jackie, the gawky, lovable 26-pound bichon I visited yesterday. See above, at the right end of the group. (Compare the size of Jackie's head to that of 10-pound Aero standing next to him.) Jackie is also the only bichon I have ever seen who routinely hangs his tongue out of his mouth.
• I have wondered, at times, why today should be called “Black Friday.” Now I know. Egad. (Remind me to stay the hell out of Nassau County.) Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
• This is an important article if you now have or expect to develop hypertension. Solid studies appear to indicate that nothing works quite as well as ancient, dirt-cheap diurectics.
• I happen to believe that if we do not convert essentially all our coal-fired power plants to nuclear (with solar and wind to fill in the gaps) nothing else we do matters at all in preventing climate change. Small nuclear reactors are one solution to a lot of the rational objections to nuclear energy and here's the best intro I've seen to the topic.
• I like this discussion of the possibility of re-creating the woolly mammoth from DNA scavenged from long-frozen mammoth hair. (I did not know that there was viable DNA in hair.) If Russia did the heavy lifting here and established a Pleistocene Park in Siberia, they could reap billions in ecotourism dollars. First mammoths, then mastodons, then glyptodonts, then…dare we hope…giant beaver?
• And how would the ethics sort out if we tried reassembling the DNA of a Neanderthal and using a chimpanzee or bonobo as a host species rather than a human? Saletan's good and I read him religiously, but this is a subject he could have gone much deeper on.
• While we're dithering about re-creating the woolly mammoth or Neanderthal humans, those crafty Brits have re-created a full-size and completely accurate replica of a long-extinct steam locomotive, of which no significant parts (not even hair) had survived. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the links.)
• Pete Albrecht pointed out that NewEgg is now selling 1TB hard drives for under $100. Is there any common use of that much storage other than movie rips?
• Also from Pete is a pointer to Palmer Bolt, a source he recently discovered for odd size nuts, bolts, and other small hardware.
• I sorted my sock drawer today. I really did. I am not being funny or in any way metaphorical. It's just that it's almost Christmas (when New Socks Happen) and my habit of throwing away individual socks with holes in them had made matched pairs a little scarce.

• Yesterday's Wall Street Journal and New York Times (and many other outlets) reported that the Houghton-Mifflin trade division will be “temporarily” suspending acquisitions of new books. (The textbook division, which provides most of the company's revenues, is not involved.) This comes in the wake of H-M's purchase by an Irish software company last year. I applaud; there are too many books chasing too few readers, and monster publishers are tempted to “buy” store space with co-op budgets that small publishers cannot afford, while publishing whatever they can find just to meet a preset publishing program.
• Here's a hilarious takedown of one of the most precious and irritating new-media types I've ever had the misfortune to read—with, as a bonus, a rare example of the use of the word “gnomic” in its classical sense.
• And while we're on Slate, here's a slightly lightweight item on the psychology of car-horn honking.
• Computer-hardware-as-tasteless-joke is something I've not seen before, but these guys certainly get credit for balls…
• …and so do people who rant and rage against grade-school Pilgrims-and-Indians pageants, especially when there are plenty of American Indians who support them. (School administrators seem to exile balls to the school playground in such cases…but never mind.)
• Here's an interesting but fairly tough 33-question quiz on American history and civics. I scored 100% without “peeking,” but I also read history as a hobby and actually think about politics rather than blindly wave a tribal banner. Let's say that I wouldn't have done this well had I taken the quiz right after my mostly indifferent college education. I had to guess on one question (correctly) and probe really stale memories for another. Can you guess which two questions I had trouble with? (Thanks to Terry Dullmaier for the link.)
• While trying to be a Nice Guy, I bought a bunch of CFLs after they became politically correct, only to see every damned one of them burn out in about six weeks. I lose a lot of filaments here—must be the altitude, or top secret Air Force projects at nearby NORAD—but incandescents go at least six months in the same exact sockets. Finally, an article in the engineering press about why CFLs aren't necessarily a gift from the angels. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• Where can you get “extra” Lego bricks without buying sets full of stuff you don't want? (This was and remains a serious challenge for Meccano/Erector hobbyists.) One word: Bricklink.
• Damn. I never tried Zima. Now I guess I won't get the chance.

• My editor at John Wiley called and indicated that they want me (finally!) to rewrite Assembly Language Step By Step for a new edition in the spring of 2010. This will be a big job, since DOS will be jettisoned completely (and real mode relegated to a hisorical footnote) and a huge chunk of the book will have to be rewritten almost from scratch. More on this in coming days.
• OEM Parts in Colorado Springs (our local surplus house) is moving to a new and larger building about 2 miles north of their current location on Palmer Park. I was there with Mike Sargent the other day and discovered that everthing was half price. Got a bunch of Compactron tubes, some NOS Miller coils, a dozen or so high-ohmage 1-W carbon resistors, and a roll of emery cloth for $22. The new address is 3029 N. Hancock. They weren't entirely sure when they new location would open. Phone first: 719-635-0771
• PC Magazine is going “all digital.” That means they're dropping the print edition. The last printed issue will January 2009. I remember when that damned thing was an inch and a half thick. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• A wine to avoid: Schmitt-Sohne Relax Cool Red, which is a dornfelder so bad I drank one glass and dumped the rest. No wine has gotten that treatment since Three Thieves Zinfandel, and before that, Bully Hill's Sweet Walter, which still holds the prize as the worst single wine I have ever tried.
• Mars is evidently not as dry as we thought: Glacier-sized water-ice glaciers (and not snowdrift-sized glaciers) have been reliably detected by way of the SHARAD radar system on the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter. Some of this stuff is half a mile thick, and you can do interesting things with such quantities of volatiles, water most of all. I recall an entry in my SF story ideas file from many years ago: Somebody has begun terraforming Mars—but nobody knows who.
• While we're talking Mars, Pete Albrecht alerted me to the impending release of Christmas on Mars, a new film billed as “avant-garde SF,” which in my experience generally means “filmed in somebody's basement.” The major character is Major Syrtis. Nyuk-nyuk.
• And while we're talking space, it's worth noting that the average American thinks that NASA gets 25% of the $2.7T federal budget. (!!!!) The truth is 0.58%.

• The pseudobachelor life does not become me, but I'm working on it. So far, the heuristics seem to be: Stay in touch (our cell phones are being given a workout), stay busy, and socialize whenever possible. I've also found that I must get out of the house at least once a day or I get bitterly depressed. Today, at least, I had a mission: I FedXed Carol some papers and things that she needed, and grabbed lunch at the Black Bear while I was in the area. On the way past the Shell station (hardly the low-price leader hereabouts) I noticed that regular was down to $1.99.9. I do not remember the last time I saw gas break $2.00.
• I didn't read Slate for at least a month prior to the election, because by a month prior to the election I had already heard quite enough about the election without going to Slate. Alas, Slate still isn't over the election, but here's a very good article on why we are always so angry. The author seems to see unchallengeable genetic predispositions, but I see spoilt brats: People who give rein to their anger are immature, undisciplined dorks. (Read the blogosphere for abundant examples.)
• And the severely liberal Slate has finally copped to something I learned 25 years ago in Rochester, New York: In tony urban neighborhoods where then-stylish wood stoves burned through the winter, you couldn't hardly breathe. Wood is not clean heat. Wood is filthy, borderline toxic, dangerous-to-your-children heat that does not belong in urban settings, or anywhere with more than one house to five acres. (I cop to having had a wood stove on a third-acre lot in Rochester. I was part of the problem. I apologize, and I won't make that mistake again.)
• This seems too good to be true—or at least permanently true—but it seems like a US court has thrown out most business-practice patents. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
• Well, Manischewitz Egg & Onion Matzos are back at the local King Soopers markets. I brought home two boxes yesterday evening, and could barely get in the door before ripping one box open, slobbering a whole cracker up with butter, and stuffing it back with hazardous haste. (Had Mike Sargent not tipped me off, I doubt I would even have looked.)
• It's not just simple utilities like MozBackup. (See my entry for November 8, 2008.) AVG Antivirus triggered an alert on an essential Windows file, user32.dll, claiming it was infected with a trojan called Generic9.TBN, and recommended that users delete the file. Urrp. ClamWin is looking better all the time.
• I rented The Golden Compass at Blockbuster the other night, and I will say this: It sports the coolest steampunk backgrounds and retromechanicomagical gadgetry of any film I have ever seen, and if you're a steampunk freak, don't miss it. However, having seen it, I know precisely why it was a fantastically expensive flop: It was utterly cold, and not because much of the action took place in the perpetual arctic dusk of Svalbard. I mean it in the sense that I detected little humanity in the characters, with the single exception of the broadly-drawn Texas aeronaut, Lee Scoresby. (The anti-Catholicism of the books was so muted that the Magisterium might as well have been a crew of Sith lords in baroque attire.) When the film was over, I was awed, but depressed. That's the job of an art movie, not a big-budget, kid-oriented, special-effects blockbuster. I doubt that the remaining two volumes in the trilogy will ever be filmed.

• I got drilled and post-ed yesterday and am mostly over it. The weirdest part of the whole procedure was listening to Dr. Salcetti cranking the implant post down into my jawbone with a small tool that sounded like—and in fact actually is—a miniature ratchet driver. (We will not speak of the earlier sound, of her drill going into bone, both sounding and feeling like a drill press working its way into something gummy.)
• For the first time I managed a major-release upgrade of Ubuntu without any fussing. Going from 8.04 to 8.10 took about half an hour, but it went absolutely without incident. (In the past I've had to restart the upgrade after it froze, and once I just gave up and did a clean install after reformatting the partition.) I don't see a lot of differences in Intrepid Ibex beyond the wallpaper, which initially puzzled me. It looks like a soda glass ring on somebody's dirty leather couch arm, but after staring at it for a moment I saw the ibex. Sorry; I liked the heron better—and I tremble to think what the wallpaper will be for v9.04 Jaunty Jackalope next spring.
• Well, alas, Kubuntu didn't fare as well—the upgrade crashed somewhere partway through, and the instance (which is still shown as v8.04 in grub) will not boot. At some point I will reformat the partition and reinstall from the ISO. KDE 4 is an acquired taste, but I've watched it evolve for many years and won't stop now.
• November 2008 is the 25th anniversary of the release of Turbo Pascal 1.0. David I will be printing selected “How I discovered Turbo Pascal” stories in his blog, and although mine is well-nigh legendary (I practically had to be beaten over the head to try it) I will be writing it up and sending it to him shortly. Damn little in tech has ever affected me more than that!
• Bob Ballantine W8SU sent me a scan of John T. Frye's 1985 obituary the other day, and it was severely disturbing: Frye died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Maybe it could have been an accident, but somehow I doubt it. Too many lonely writers (Piper, Disch, and others) have died by their own hands. He is buried with his parents at Mount Hope Cemetery in Logansport. Scroll down or search for Frye in the plot listings.
• Finally, Pete Albrecht reports that the New York Daily News spoke of an election day get-out-the-vote promo in which Krispy Kreme handed out “donut-shaped stars.” (See the figure caption.) I've seen these in SF (recall that long-forgotten turkey, Nova by Samuel Delaney) but never in a donut shop. Maybe Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker works there. Talk about fresh from a hot oven!

• I've posted a significant update of my Carl & Jerry page, with new material on John T. Frye, including the conclusion I've drawn (with help from 1910, 1920, and 1930 census records provided by Bob Ballantine W8SU) that Bailey Frye was not John Frye's brother. Bob also sent out a scan of W9EGV's QSL card, worked up against a 50s cover (not sure precisely what issue) of Boy's Life. New details from newspaper clippings sent me by Michael Holley flesh out the man a little. He was quite a guy. Do take a look.
• Science is good at puncturing legends, and German researchers digging around in the former backyard of Martin Luther have deflated the legend that Luther was a humble monk (and, by implication, starving) but was instead born to an upper-class family and became a prosperous man who weighed 23 stone, 8 pounds (330 pounds for us Yanks) and ate goose, young piglet, several kinds of fish, and (egad) robins. Nor did he pound his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenburg cathedral in a fury with nails, as legend holds, but instead used drawing pins—what in America we call thumb tacks. Oh, the humanity…
• While researching Marian apparitions for a seminar I'm teaching at our church in November, I ran across the Apparitions of Jesus and Mary Reference Chart. It sounds silly, but trust me: The apparition curve has gone exponential in the last 30 years, and you can't tell the Marys without a program anymore.
• I'm in the Chicago area for a few days, and found on my arrival that the legendary Choo-Choo Restaurant in Des Plaines (just down the street and around the corner from our condo) is in danger of being razed to make room for a new police station. There's a Web site for gathering protest and forwarding it to the City of Des Plaines, which apparently can either raze the Choo-Choo or the defunct Masonic temple across the street. I don't quite understand why that's a hard decision.
• Harry Helms sends word that TV Guide, which Rupert Murdoch bought ten years ago for three billion dollars, has been sold for…a buck. Boy, the magazine business is not what it used to be. (If it were, I'd still be in it.)
• Slashdot reports a bit of useful black humor, in that Codeweavers (makers of the Crossover product line) gave the Bush administration a challenge: Reduce the cost of gasoline in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon, and they would give away their products for an entire day. Well, courtesy the recent financial meltdown (which was not caused exclusively or perhaps even primarily by the Bush administration, by the way) gas has gone south of $2.79, and while the Codeweavers site has been Slashdotted into paralysis, there is a facility online whereby the firm will email you an unlock code for something. I've been meaning to try Crossover Linux for some time. Here's my chance, I guess. And gas in Colorado Springs is even cheaper than that. Inc(Boggle);

• Sorry to be gone so long here; I haven't felt well for some days and did not do my usual daily quota of follow-your-nose Web exploration. Part of it is the politics; I seem to be hitting the I-Can't-Stand-It-Anymore level about three weeks earlier than I did in 2004. The rest seems to be the result of eating too many MSG-laden barbecue potato chips.
• Or maybe it's all the purely amateur reporting on the current financial crisis, declaring that it's either the end of the world or already well past it. Michael Covington (who would probably win any contest for World's Sanest Man) has some perspective on both the financial crisis and the stock market's recent fall. Read them, and heed the advice printed on the front cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
• I learned yesterday that Herb S. Brier W9EGQ was a paraplegic and could not walk. Like John T. Frye, he lived in Indiana (Gary) and was almost entirely self-taught in electronics. Bob Ballantine W8SU wrote up a short bio on Brier, and if you ever followed his Novice columns in the 50s and 60s, do read it. The closeness of the two men's call signs (W9EGQ and W9EGV) is probably a coincidence; as best we can tell the two men did not know one another.
• If you build radios, particularly tube or crystal sets, The Radio Board is worth a look. The sheer amount of cumulative tube-hacking expertise there is mind-boggling.
• The local newspapers have been breathlessly reporting rampant theft of campaign signs from both sides of the spectrum, and now that several perps have been caught, it turns out that they were…junior high kids! Wow! (Like I couldn't have told you that.) The little snots are not being charged with anything; after all, theft is political speech. Solution: Force them to give their allowances for the next year to the parties whose signs they stole, and wear a T-Shirt printed with that party's canididate's portrait.
• Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a PDF railroad map of Illinois, containing all currently active routes.
• And while I'm at it, let me point you to Pete's photos of Stephan's Quintet, a group of five close-set galaxies (two are actually foreground objects) that are one of the meanest challenges for backyard galaxy collectors—especially if your backyard is in Costa Mesa. The group is fascinating, and this article about them is worth reading.
• From David Stafford comes an article about what it's like to be a professional term paper writer.
• Once again, The Economist proves itself to be one of the few intelligent print mags remaining by explaining why even peer-reviewed scientific journals are not as trustworthy as we would like. (The Atlantic is on my S-list again for running too much politics; maybe I'll resubscribe in December.)
• Here's a robot that carries your houseplants to a spot in the livingroom where there's more sunlight. It's unclear what happens when the robot tries to share the sunbeam with the dog. I guess it depends on the dog; QBit would tear it to shreds; Aero would lift his leg on it. Suum quique.

• Speaking of sunspots (see yesterday's entry) The Boston Globe posted a series of some of the most amazing photographs of the Sun that I've ever seen. I'm not sure there's much more I can say but go look.
• More sunspot stuff: Wikimedia has a very nice graph of sunspot peaks since we started tracking them more or less scientifically in 1749. I have sometimes wondered if better instruments built in the last 100 years have led to higher sunspot counts, simply because we can see smaller and shorter-lived spots, but supposedly that's been taken into account. My one serious quibble with the associated writeup is that it's the Wolf Minimum and not the Maunder Minimum that corresponds to the beginning of the Little Ice Age. Maunder just made it worse, and Europe's coldest era does indeed correspond to a 70-year near-absence of spots between 1645 and 1715.
• The Make Blog aggegated an item on a beambot built in…1912. It works essentially the same way as the Popular Electronics Emily robot that I built in 1966, minus the solid state current amplifier. Relays can “amplify” current in a snappy, sparky, ozone-y kind of way, and this device has a definite steampunkish air about it.
• I am two days older than musician/composer David Arkenstone, and we're both Chicago boys. Didn't know that until ten minutes ago. Will probably forget it sooner or later, but not in time to make room in my head for more useful knowledge.
• More of what my sister calls “brain sludge”: I built my first kite in September 1962. How do I know this? I remember pulling a sheet of newspaper off the top of the pile in the basement, and seeing the ad announcing the premiere of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” complete with an Al Hirschfield caricature of the Clampett clan in their truck. I had read of his habit of sneaking his daughter Nina's name into every one of his cartoons (I think in the Saturday Evening Post) and took time to find it. I then used the sheet in the kite, which flew well, and was the first of many to be made of newspaper, and other (odd) things. Now, howcome I can remember this so vividly, and still have to think hard about where I left my damned cellphone ten minutes ago?
• This says something about human nature, and nothing good. Me, I prefer cars that don't go off the road, though I have eaten and enjoyed a number of smoked chubs that looked very angry.
• The email consensus is that the Turtle Wax Turtle was indeed atop the Wendell Bank Building at Ashland and Ogden. One correspondent asked the obvious: “Why not email the Turtle Wax people who posted the video?” Duhh. Will do. Sorry.