- I'm not quite as ga-ga as the reporter, but make no mistake: This is one of the most startling deep-space videos ever taken, of the Moon making a transit across the Earth, seen from a distance of fifty million kilometers. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
- My nephew Brian just bought a Blackberry cellphone and is trying to find a software package that will allow him to sync his Google Calendar data with the phone. This is something I've never had to do (I do not currently have a PDA nor a smartphone) and so I'm looking for suggestions.
- Eat kohlrabi, Dean Ornish: A long-term study published in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates that low-carb diets are significantly better at helping people lose weight and lower cholesterol than low-fat diets. As complex as the obesity issue is, I speak to people again and again and again who have found what we've found in their own lives: Lowering fat does not help much. Lowering carbs, and especially lowering sugar, helps a lot.
- Carol and I were down in Lincoln Park the other day, and saw saturation advertising for a wind-powered condo complex that intrigued me enough to write the Web address down across Heath Ledger's late face on the Red Eye. Take a look and read the fine print. Those well-hidden wind turbines on the roof generate up to 2% of the building's electricity. And so wind power takes its place as a techno-fetish among the terminally hip and the gorgeously clueless. Larger turbines could generate significantly more of the building's power, but the neighbors might complain—and that's not hip at all, is it?
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
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- A reader wrote to tell me that I am “MSG blind,” (see my entry for July 14, 2008) which means that MSG does not affect my taste chemistry—and that people who are MSG blind are generally the people who react badly to the chemical. Alas, I can't find anything about this online, but it's an interesting idea.
- Screw the polar bears. The big downside to Global Warming™ is now kidney stones. Ouch.
- I hadn't heard much about the Casimir Effect recently, but courtesy Frank Glover, here's a good article on modifying nanoscale structures to minimize “stiction” due to Casimir forces. More speculative but lots more fun are some links at the end describing projects attempting to harness Casimir forces in various ways, many or most of which still seem a little whiffy. (I made enthusiastic use of vacuum energy in my novel, The Cunning Blood.)
- The Washington Post suggests that we strap engines on the ISS and send it to the Moon, to act as an orbital station to help stage travel to a lunar base. Maybe a little far fetched, but only a little—and we're not doing much with the damned thing where it's sitting right now.
- And as if NASA didn't have enough to worry about, now, well, scientists are telling them that they had better establish an officially sanctioned 200-mile-high club.
- The acronym is unfortunate, but Sandisk's write-once read-many (WORM) SD card has an application that isn't even mentioned in the press release: A unit for mounting a hack-proof operating system instance. No mention what the access time is (I'm guessing slowwwww) but it's an approach that many people have been calling for for some years.
- Finally, as a proud godfather of two nieces who are big for their ages but still very small, this video made me cringe a little. (Don't parents have enough to worry about?) Quick, how long would it take you mechanical engineer types to devise a sheet-metal flap valve to fix this problem?
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- For a little over a year, I've been buying dry-roasted peanuts from Safeway that do not contain MSG. Recently we noticed that the packaging had changed, and checked the ingredients. MSG returns, gakkh. Dry-roasted peanuts are a much better snack than their rep would have it, but MSG makes me feel weird in the head, so the search for MSG-free dry-roasted peanuts resumes. Interestingly, I had a couple of Planter's dry-roasted peanuts the other day (knowing full-well that they have MSG in them; I had a few, not handfuls) and they do not taste any different. Not better. Not worse. Not a little bit. Not at all. So the companies that print “monosodium glutamate (flavor enhancer)” on their peanut labels are being ripped off. MSG does not enhance flavor. What it does do is mess some people over (like me, and countless others) and cost the vendors money. MSG is cheap, but not free. When will food packagers realize that they could save money and increase their market by just dumping it?
- Pertinent to the above, Jay's Barbecue Potato Chips also lack MSG, and are the only barbeque potato chips I've ever seen that don't have it. They are a Chicago brand, and so far we haven't seen them in Colorado Springs. But when I'm here, I gorge.
- I'm a big fan of lashup railcars, but I startled a little when Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a model of a pink Galloping Goose. The paint schemes are described as “authentic.” So was there ever a Rio Grande Goose in pink and white livery? I've not been able to determine that—but whoa, somehow I doubt it. That's a spit-and-baling-wire, real-man's tin-roof rough-and-tumble item that reminds me of Mad Max as much as it does of the Old West. Pink? Sheesh!
- A tenured professor at the University of Minnesota has put out a call for Catholics to send him consecrated Eucharistic hosts…so that he can desecrate them. I had hoped this was an urban legend, but the Washington Times generally knows better. I wonder if he (and his clueless university) understand that this doesn't hurt the Church at all, but makes higher education in general and university professors in particular look mean-spirited and ridiculous. (Quick: Somebody test that guy for toxoplasmosis…)
- From Michael Covington comes a link to a Modern Mechanix item from 1933 that may be the original “watt dog” cooker, which spawned a famous Carl & Jerry story cautioning young tinkerers about the hazards of messing with line current. A board with nails pounded through it, facing up…with 110V on the nails. Wow. (And while you're there, click on the cover image to get a closer look at what was prompting young geeks to buy magazines in 1933. Maybe the Flynn Effect really does exist.)
- On second thought, probably not.
- Thanks to Baron_Waste, I discovered that the United States' net carbon emissions declined by 3% between 2000 and 2006. Of the top 17 carbon emitters, only France reduced emissions more—and I'd wager that that's because France has had the good sense to stuff their antinuclear crackpots in the Bastille and forget about them.
- Nertz. Wrong. France closed the Bastille in 1789. Well, hey: Today is the 158th birthday of the ice maker.
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- Text messaging has always struck me as more than faintly ridiculous: Spend a quarter to cramp your thumbs sending a handful of characters to another cell phone, when you could call that same cell phone and talk for a full minute for less. And even though texting costs phone carriers almost nothing, the cost of texting to consumers has more than doubled in the last three years.
- I was at Barnes & Noble a little earlier today, prowling the history section as I often do. (The history section is now about the same size as the computer book section. This was not always the case…) I remembered something I had noticed many times in the past: B&N stocks an absolutely amazing number of books on the Knights Templars and Freemasonry. (By contrast, I counted three—three!—books on Ubuntu Linux.) The history section at Borders stocks almost nothing on these two topics. Do people actually buy this stuff? Or is there a Templars/Masonry fan club at the highest levels of B&N?
- Xandros has purchased Linspire. Linspire tried their hardest to create an OEM market for desktop Linux, but annoyed FOSS purists by including commercial software in their CNR installation service, which was actually the only part of Lindows/Linspire that I really liked. Ubuntu has mostly swept the desktop Linux field, but I admit, they haven't gone after OEM installs as vigorously as Linspire did, nor as vigorously as they'd have to to get some traction against Windows. Ubuntu's parent Canonical is developing a mobile version that will be sold preinstalled on subnotebooks, but we're not quite there yet.
- Mike Reith sent me an interesting little utility called IsDelphi, which will scan a directory, inspect any executables it finds, and report which ones were written in Delphi. The most interesting revelation: Skype is a Delphi app. I hadn't heard that.
- In case you weren't already worried about whether you should take that trip down the hill to get a latte, I suggest a spin through Dark Roasted Blend's collection of weird car accidents. You Could Be There.
- And in case you're not steamed out or punked out yet, head down to the closest Greek restaurant, order some calimari, and curl up with an anthology of squidpunk. Damitall, when are we gonna see glyptodontpunk? I'll show you escapist and whimsical…
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- Good grief! Salvia is a hallucinogen! How in hell did I get to be 55 and not know that? (We used to grow it as a ground cover years ago.)
- Nick Hodges wrote to say that the Easy Duplicate Finder utility I mentioned in my June 20, 2008 entry was written in Delphi. A lot of no-install apps are written in Delphi. They're fast, compact, and don't crap DLLs into your WindowsSystem32 directory. Too bad they're written in a Kiddie Language™.
- Speaking of no-install apps, I've tried a few more. One good one (if of limited use) is TreeSize Free, which scans a drive or a directory tree and shows you which parts of the hierarchy are the ones that use the most drive space. Another that I've just discovered is the FastStone image viewer, which isn't quite a digital photo manager but comes pretty damned close. So far, I can recommend both.
- Jason Kaczor sent me a pointer to Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope, and it's worth a look, especially if you've got a big-screen TV that can display at least 1024 X 768 graphics. Needs XP SP2 and some middling computer horsepower, but man, what a show!
- Any time anybody anywhere experiences any weather that they don't like, environmentalists jump up and do the Global warming! Global warming! cheer—but when environmentalists block brush clearing in a fire-prone area and the whole place subsequently goes up, as Santa Cruz recently did, do we hear but a peep? Heh. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
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- After posting my June 13, 2008 entry, I did locate an unofficial list of apps to be included in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix distro: Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Rhythmbox, FBReader (for ebooks), Liferea (RSS feed reader), F-Spot (photo viewer) and OpenOffice. No serious surprises here, though I wonder how well a mobile CPU like Atom will run OpenOffice. I guess we'll find out later this year.
- Ken Taaffe spotted my lament that my rotatable parts tower was no longer available, and pointed out that it can be had from a different vendor. It's more expensive than it was in 1990 (though what isn't?) but it looks like precisely the same item. $439. I paid about $350 for it in 1990. See a photo in my shop tips article.
- Years ago, I half-seriously suggested that somebody should create a Bottom 60 radio format, and only play songs that charted but never made it into the Top 40. Well, Shawn Nagy's SuperOldies is pretty much the item, though it uses the Cash Box charts rather than Billboard. It's Internet Radio and you can listen with Winamp and other Internet Radio players. I've had it on for most of an hour and have yet to hear a song that I recognize. Is that good? Well, how bored with Clear Channel are you?
- I'm intrigued by a recent run of articles about tweaking certain simple algae and bacteria to produce Diesel fuel as a metabolic waste product. Here's one. And another, both from the London Times. Assuming that this works reliably and doesn't have a downside, we may all eventually have a refrigerator-sized thingie in the basement or garage into which we dump trash, lawn clippings, or other organic waste and from which we extract vehicle fuel, drip by drip. It doesn't matter if it only produces a gallon a day; for a smallish car with a good Diesel engine, that's plenty. The other (and in my view, far greater) advantage is that it's completely decentralized: If our vehicle fuel comes from a hundred million little boxes (rather than five or six monster refineries) terrorists and hurricanes will have a bitch of a time messing up the transportation industry.
- Aki Peltonen sent me a link to a large forum post by Java expert and author Bruce Eckel, about why he can't abide Vista and won't use it. Read the comments, too. Lots of interesting ideas and suggestions here.
- Michael Covington posted a note abut the Ebox 2300, a very small, fanless $200 PC-compatible computer suitable for dedicated/embedded applications running Linux or Windows CE. One little but brilliant touch is making the machine's mounting holes the same as a VESA-compatible monitor stand, meaning that you can mount the computer on the back of the monitor using the same holes. I envision a desktop weather station or something like that. Oh, for time to tinker…
- Pete Albrecht sent me a pointer to Virtual Moon Atlas, an extremely rich resource for Lunar geography that belongs in every SF writer's toolkit. 422 MB download, but hey, dare ya to find all this stuff on one Web site, or anywhere else.
- Finally, here's the reason that “woe is me” is actually correct English, and always has been, right back to the days of Chaucer or even Beowulf. I had heard that, but never had the presence of mind to chase down the grammar. It's about the dative case, and all these years we thought we were just repeating an old error. Woe is we.
Odd Lots
- Aero won his first “major” (a win against at least three other males of his breed) at the Colorado Springs Kennel Club dog show this past weekend. That gives him a total of five points toward the fifteen he needs (and the first of two majors) to win his championship.
- Shopping a little harder for gas these days? This site may help, keeping in mind that driving miles to save pennies isn't always a win—and the price could change before you get there. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
- Neal Rest sent me a pointer to “Ten Things I Hate About Commandments,” which is a parody trailer made as a remix of scenes from a very famous movie that you may recognize. It's less a parody of the film than of film trailers in general, and very funny.
- From Roy Harvey comes a link to a paper containing a great deal of data on historical climate change. I don't agree with all the points made by the author, but the paper is so thick with graphs that I'm not sure his conclusions are the real value-add here. Do take a look.
- One of the scariest videos I've seen in a while shows a good-sized house literally sliding into the rampaging Wisconsin River and floating away downstream. Lake Delton, near Wisconsin Dells and home of the (in)famous Tommy Bartlett Water Ski and Jumping Boat Thrill Show, basically created a new channel for itself and drained completely into the Wisconsin River, driven by massive rains. The Dells themselves weren't directly affected, but a great deal of aquatic activity on Lake Delton (duck boats, jet skis, and poor Tommy) are now gone for the rest of the 2008 season. (And we're going to the Dells this July!)
- Missed including this one a couple of months ago, but it's worth some consideration: Blogging has become the new work-at-home piecework, with “professional” (read here: sometimes paid) bloggers working themselves literally to death for as little as $10 per post. Damn, I wish my blog earned me that little! (Here's a counterpoint that misses the point a little, but worth reading for balance.)
- Finally, I stumbled on Curious Expeditions while trying to find aerial photos of the Roman Catholic church I grew up in on the Web. No dice on the church (it's so ugly the parish Web site contains no photos of it!) but if you want to see a picture of a petrified bat, Galileo's mummified middle finger (now, who did he give it to?) or hundreds of other peculiar things, this is the place. It's not all creepshow stuff, either: The entry on New York City's pneumatic message system (similar to the legendary pneu of France) is the best treatment I've seen on the American side of the subject.
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- Carol and I were at the Longmont Dog Show over the weekend, and Aero got another two blue ribbons, though that was in the Open Dog category and didn't yield him any points. I actually “handled” (took around the show ring) another dog owned by Aero's breeder Jimi Henton. Showing Jackie (Jimi's Hit the Jackpot) was fun, especially since Jackie is the biggest, heaviest, strongest bichon any of us has ever seen (23 pounds, all of it muscle!) and there's nothing the least bit fussy about him.
- The Make blog aggregated an item on making your own railcarts and railbkes. I've often thought that this might be fun (it's certainly nothing new) but the snag is that when railroads abandon a run of track, they typically tear up the rails for scrap almost immediately. The mere presence of iron suggests that trains come through, if only occasionally, and that would make me nervous. I have been looking for but have not yet found an index of track sections where trains are known not to run.
- In the certifiable Brain Sludge category of Web content falls Topher's Breakfast Cereal Character Guide, which lists (and in most cases shows images of) all the characters hawking cereal on boxes and commercials that you've ever heard of, and I suspect more than a few that you haven't. The list also includes purely fictional cereals like Calvin's Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, and Admiral Crunch and Archduke Chocula from Futureama. Early versions of the Rice Crispies Elves are interesting—and I never knew that Tony the Tiger had a spouse. All here.
- Speaking of cereal, this article confirms my grocery-store math: House brands cost as much as 40% less than largely indistinguishable name brands. If you're spending more for gas, at least spend less on Rice Chex. The only type of cereal where house brands taste distinctly different to me are oat toruses, or whateverthehell you call them in the generic—Cheerios clones. The house brands are not necessary bad (in fact, the Trader Joe's house brand oat toruses are distinctly better) but it's odd that all the chex and the flakes can't be told apart but Cheerios brooks no imitation. By the way, most house brand cereals are made by Ralston Foods. Here's their list. Of interest to geometers are Crispy Hexagons. What, no Crispy Dodecahedrons?
- And to round out the discussion of nostaligic carbs, I regret to inform all who may care that Dressel's Cakes are really and truly gone forever. Their distinctive frozen whipped-cream chocolate cake was a Chicago standard for 75 years, coming from their plant at 66th and Ashland Avenues, but the firm was bought by a French company a few years ago and dismantled for reasons unclear. (I'm glad I can still get Green River!)
- Mike Reith sent a pointer to goosh, a purely textual interface to Google that works a lot like the Unix shell. Could this be useful to the vision-impaired?
- There are no visible sunspots right now, and according to several items I've read, there have been none for some weeks, and very few for months, all the way back into the middle of last year. Ham radio guys (like me) track sunspot activity closely because it affects shortwave radio propagation. Here's a sample. It's probably too early to worry, but long-term sunspot minima have been very bad juju in the past.
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- Wired aggregated this item about a convertible bus/railcar that somehow suggests a modern take on the legendary Rio Grande Southern Galloping Goose lashups. I like the concept a great deal, especially for rapid transit in places where there are rails but not enough population density to create a dedicated passenger rail system. The technology is hardly original with Japan; I see Union Pacific maintenance pickup trucks riding the rails all up and down the old Northwestern corridor outside of Chicago every time I'm in town. The trucks straddle the tracks at a grade crossing, drop their flanged steel wheels, and then apply traction from the truck's rear rubber tires. I don't see why a passenger bus of some sort couldn't do the same thing.
- I don't recall when someone asked me this (or, in truth, who it was) but the decorative font used on the cover of the Degunking books for the main titles is the Chicken King font from Font Diner. The similar decorative font used in the main chapter titles is Fontdinerdotcom Loungy. Font Diner is a type foundry that specializes in retro fonts, and they have a bunch of them, generally sold in 10-font packs for $28.
- My uncle ran a dairy farm in Wisconsin until 1975 or so, and in addition to milk, his herd produced a mid-boggling (to me, at least) quantity of cow manure. Finally we have a small-scale mechanism for harvesting the methane produced by decaying manure. The consolidation of small dairy farms like my uncle's into monster corporate milk producers makes something like this not only economical but pretty compelling.
- What the open source world needs is a sort of integrated bootloader system as good as or better than Apple's BootCamp. I've been hearing about GRUB2 for a long time, but it doesn't seem any farther along than it was a year ago. Coreboot/FILO is another interesting idea, but as I read it would require close cooperation of PC hardware manufacturers—which would be a good thing, fersure, if it would happen. (That may be the big trick.) I'm considering the commercial Bootit NG for my next machine, but in the open source world I don't see a lot happening. If I'm missing something, do let me know.
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- Someone's invented a glass jar with a screw-on lid on both ends. Makes sense: By the time you reach the bottom of the peanut butter, most of the oil is gone and what's left is as hard as a rock. Or, alternate lids and gradually work your way toward the middle. If you keep alternating which end is up, the oil won't be as likely to collect on either end and the peanut butter may stay softer until it's all gone.
- Bruce Baker directs us to a Webring of homebrew CPUs. No VLSI. No LSI. Maybe TTL chips. Or discrete transistors. Or relays. I wire-wrapped a COSMAC machine with 2K of RAM back in 1977, and I thought it was a job. Wow.
- As an individual with a “special relationship” to calculus (and a special fondness for filk) I damned near bust a gut watching this. The Slashdot commenters (who are interesting all by themselves) need to get a life, or at very least a sense of humor. Most of them weren't even alive when Disco was first-run, and so I suspect the comedy shoots right by them.
- Epson has been demonstrating a proof-of-concept model of an A4-sized e-ink display with a mind-boggling resolution of 3104 X 4128 pixels, in monochrome. 385 DPI is more than enough for monochrome graphics (though gray-level depth is not stated) and within a few years, a full-sized letter/A4 ebook reader will not only be possible but inevitable.
- From Jan Westerlink comes a pointer to a wonderful gallery of home-made kites, including one I especially like, especially in light of yesterday's entry: A 4-cell tetrahedral made by rubber-banding 24 bamboo shish-kebob skewers together. Scroll down to pictures 24 and 25. Beautifully done, if a little prickly: If that thing dives toward you, duck!
