- Most people know that the New Age Millerites believe that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012; if that's news to you, here's a nice overview of this deliciously deranged topic, courtesy Frank Glover.
- Several people online, in an almost offhand fashion, have indicated that Vista's knucklehead UAC feature is training people to click “Allow” automatically, no matter what it's asking about. That may be the single greatest design error in Vista, and could over time render Vista as insecure as anything that came before it, and certainly less secure than just working in an LUA under XP.
- A reader has asked me to post an entry on all magazines to which I have subscribed and re-upped at least once, but no longer subscribe to. That would be an interesting collection, and a long entry, but I'll try and get to it soon. One of that group that I might still read if I had enough time is First Things.
- I had a tin toy robot when I was six or seven, and it seems like most of my friends had one or two. So it was a Boomer kid-culture phenomenon, and one I don't see much about these days. Here's a photo gallery from Wired with some nice shots. Most of my early childhood nightmares were about robots and mummies, which suggests that my two subconscious fears (at least according to one amateur Jungian friend of mine from twenty-odd years ago) were of death and berserk machinery. I'm not so sure; that was what most of the cheap horror/sf flicks I saw on Channel 7 were about at that time.
- Another interesting article/discussion on the Fermi Paradox. Me? I think we really are alone. I don't know why just yet. If I had to guess, I'd say that it's because imagination as a mental mechanism is rare. But I've been thinking about this for thirty years and keep coming back to that conclusion.
- Lordy, I remember these from catalogs back in the early 60s. Why do they suggest a filk: Looking Through the Eyes of Badminton! (Thanks to Bishop Sam'l Bassett for the pointer.)
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Sorry for the recent quietude here; the weekend was a whirlwind, and it took all of yesterday just to catch my breath.
- Scott Kurtz' PvP webcomic celebrated its first ten years by showing us that Brent Sienna actually has eyes. Wow.
- Allan Heim sent me a pointer to a nice article on the Fermi Paradox that expresses a position I have been drifting toward for most of my life: That we are probably alone in the universe, perhaps not only as intelligent, tool-building beings but also as living things, period. The author makes a case that being alone in the universe would be very good news, but not for the reason you might think. Read it.
- Borland is apparently selling their CodeGear division (which develops and supports Delphi) to Embarcadero Technologies, a database tools company. This was not unexpected, and to be honest with you, I can't tell if it's a good idea or not. One of Delphi's most serious problems is that it got so good after five or six years that most people stopped upgrading; I'm amazed at how many people are still using Delphi 6. The cost of the product was also an issue—there is no ~$100 starter edition—and the Turbo Delphi Explorer experiment demonstrated how important the ability to install components was. An amazing number of people wrote to me to say that they downloaded the free product, installed it, fooled with it for a week or so, and then went back to Delphi 6.
- From Mike Sergent comes a pointer to a NYT piece indicating that most people do not have the training to discern the level of subtlety in wine flavor that they claim to, and that a lot of it may exist mostly in our heads anyway. This is not news (to me, at least) but it's nice to see it going mainstream.
- Michael Covington posted a fascinating graph of changes in home prices from Q4 2006 to Q4 2007, suggesting that the “housing bubble” has not been evenly distributed. The coasts have suffered, as have most major cities and trendy places like Colorado's Front Range, but flyover places like Nebraska and Wyoming have posted solid increases in that time. In addition to that, sharp differences by state suggest that state-level housing and banking policies have more to do with housing cost changes than most people are willing to admit.
- Also from Michael is a graph demonstrating that the US economy is not as much of a disaster as Big Media has been hammering on. (I won't invite all the usual hate mail by explaining in detail why this is, as it's pretty obvious if you think about it.)
- The other day I found myself thinking something remarkable (for me): I would rather buy a Mac and run my essential Windows apps in a Parallels window (or in a compatibility box like Crossover) than move to Vista.
Odd Lots
- Here at the condo this morning, I can't bring up squat on the Web because everybody's out there trying to figure out who won the Democratic primaries last night. So I did an absolutely unheard of thing: I went down to the White Hen, got some of their great coffee, and picked up a newspaper. What a notion.
- I'm hearing more and more people say that Wi-Fi doesn't work as well as it used to, which is weird because microwave physics hasn't changed recently. But…look at how many APs Windows can see from wherever you are. From my kitchen table here, NetStumbler sensed twelve APs…and walking around inside our dinky little condo picked up four more. Three of the strongest signals were on default Channel 6—and five out of sixteen were cleverly named “linksys.” I don't think it's the physics, folks.
- After Meetup.com went all-paid (and highly paid) I investigated an alternative called Gatheroo, which later (in response to another damfool lawsuit from somebody) became Zanby. The site's been redesigned and is worth a look if you want to start a meatspace social network where you live. There are both free and paid levels of participation, and it's certainly not as expensive as Meetup.
- Matthew Reed (and lots of others after him) sent me pointers to articles about the recent implementation of memristors, which are a species of passive electronic component postulated in 1971 but not actually implemented until HP researchers made some earlier this year. Whether this interests you varies directly by the strength of your passion for electronics, and whereas I understand the concept now, my head is still spinning trying to figure out what it implies. Everybody's talking about better computer memory, sure…but what could this do in simple analog circuits?
- Jim Strickland sent me a pointer to a YouTube video about a flame triode amplifier/oscillator lashup, and guys, you gotta see this. It's basically a vacuum tube without either vacuum or tube: When the electrodes get hot, it starts amplifying. I don't fully understand the physics yet, but this would be one fantastic high school science fair project. The question arose in our local group as to whether this could be considered steampunkish, and I'm not sure. People in the steampunk era had no problems generating reasonably hard vacuum and blowing glass envelopes. What they had problems with was understanding electrons. Nonetheless, with a big enough flame and some honkin' batteries, you could have done some impressive things back in 1888.
- Global Cooling adherents have been sending me pointers to Watts Up With That, and Icecaps.us. Fascinating reading, including numerous facets of the climate change discussion that you won't see in Big Media. F'rinstance: Weather monitoring installations that were built sixty or seventy years ago out in the leafy countryside have recently become surrounded by new development, buildings, pavement, etc., and as a result are now in the middle of heat islands. What might that do to long-term temperature data? Hmmmm….
Odd Lots
- We had rockfish for dinner the other night, and since I didn't know exactly what I was eating, I researched it (it's nothing remarkable; a sort of domesticated sea bass) but in the process I happened upon a brilliant little animated hard SF short about an unflappable interstellar sportsman of the future who goes out with his faithful pet monkeydog and trolls for The Big Catch: “Rockfish.”
- While we're doing animated videos, don't miss the charmingly inane steampunk short “A Gentleman's Duel” from the same studio.
- From Frank Glover comes a pointer to an interesting article about whether there are “habitable zones” in our galaxy. We're caught between our schedule, our metals concentration, and our supernovas, and ferdang, somehow we got placed “just right.” I'm always a little suspicious of charts that somehow get us dead-center. Supernovas may trigger lots of interesting things, from radiation-proofed cellular reproduction systems to “novel” stars and planets. I'm far from sure that zones closer to the Core are so deadly as to preclude the evolution of any kind of life—just Life As We Know It.
- Are you nervous about European-style national health care? You should be.
- Also from the NYT: The housing crash will likely cut the US birth rate, which roughly tracks housing availability and may be the reason that the birth rate is so low in Europe, with its staggeringly high housing costs.
- A compendium of really weird products, including wedgie-proof underwear and a Hilary Clinton toilet bowl brush. What boggles the mind is that this is not a collection of hoaxes: All of these items are real.
- Here's an eye-crossing but interesting paper that explains a lot of why I dislike competitive sports.
- From David Stafford comes news of one of the most bizarre motorcycles ever imagined. It's electric. It works a little like the Segway. It gets points for design, fersure, but…you ride. I'll watch.
Odd Lots
- Ok. It's April 16, and outside it's 30° and blizzarding. There's about two inches on the ground already and we may get another 4″ – 6″ tonight. Would you fools please stop calling it “global warming” and start calling it “climate change” before the whole world decides we're idiots?
- In one respect the snow is welcome: There were two very bad wildfires here in the last couple of days, one of them only about fifteen miles due south of me, and the smoke was bad enough to make my allergies go ballistic this morning.
- Interestingly, the fire broke out about a quarter of a mile from where we intend to go RV camping the day after tomorrow. (As best we know, the campground has not seen any fire or other damage on their land.) Snow seems to follow us on camping trips. (That little adventure was on the last day of summer, people!) We're hoping this time will be different.
- Democrats in Congress are spearheading an effort to compel states to collect state taxes on out-of-state online vendors. Far from targeting corporate fat cats, the effort will cost ordinary people, including some fairly poor ones, a great deal of money. Tell me, now: How is this supposed to help you win elections?
- I just bought an off-lease, nearly flawless Dell Optiplex SX270 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with a 60 GB hard drive and a DVD-ROM…for $199. Computers, like books, have gotten so cheap that they're basically disposable. If this machine dies any time soon, I'll just buy another, wincing a little to imagine that my 1978 Intersystems DPS-1 S-100 bus machine with a 1 MHz 8080 CPU cost me $3600 1978 dollars. (It was the first and still the coolest-looking computer I have ever owned that I did not build myself.)
- The story I could not identify in my April 10, 2008 Odd Lots (about a guy who extracted gold from seawater) was “The Man Who Ploughed the Sea” by Arthur C. Clarke, and it was a Harry Purvis story from Tales from the White Hart.
- From Bruce Schneier's CryptoGram comes a pointer to a wonderful little piece on what sorts of books bookstore shoplifters lift, and what sort of man a bookstore shoplifter is. (You do subscribe to CryptoGram, don't you?)
- The lyrics to one of the funniest pop songs ever to hit the Billboard Top 20 are (legally) online, at the author's Web site: Dean Friedman's 1976 “Ariel.” It's one of the few songs I would ever consent to perform in public, though that would require that I learn to play some kind of an instrument. Maybe this.
- Bob Thompson sent me a link to one of his posts relating (as my entry for yesterday did) to catalogs of the 1960s, in this case the Sears Catalog. His comments pertaining to chemistry sets are bang-on, though I would add that a significant amount of the value of chemistry sets lay in allowing kids to imagine themselves as scientists—chemistry has more identifiably iconic paraphernalia than almost any other scientific discipline—and what kids can't imagine themselves as, they generally won't become.
Odd Lots
- Those who marveled at the quirky motion of the Big Dog quadripedal robot should not miss the (inevitable) video parody.
- And while we're watching videos, make sure you watch this one, starring a Pope Benedict XVI bobblehead identical to the one on my bookshelf. While this is what I call “gentle humor” and I suspect that Good Pope Bennie (with whom I disagree but whom I do not despise) would have laughed had he seen it, the usual grump-ass moroons who object to things like this prevailed to have the ad pulled. Fu on 'em.
- Which of course reminded me of this famous Far Side cartoon, which incensed Jane Goodall's staffers but made the great lady herself laugh. My father told me early on: Life demands a sense of humor. Only cowards cannot laugh at themselves, and only hopeless slave-collar tribalists cannot abide humor about their own leaders.
- George Hodous sent me a link to an artist who uses intersecting lasers to etch a crystal cube containing a 3-D starmap of our stellar neighborhood out to five parsecs. Nice work, and if you ever forget, he's marked the direction to the galactic core.
- Maybe this is why I started to get muscular in middle age. Thanks to Frank Glover for the pointer.
- Takahiro Kato of Japan sent me a link to his page on 12V tube work, including a 30mw transmitter he designed. It's in Japanese, and (alas) the machine translation link does about as well as machine translation links generally do. But look at his construction techniques—I haven't seen anything that clean and rational for a long time.
- Those who love The Rocketeer (whether the graphic novel or the film) will want to take a look at this, documenting a Swedish inventor who has come damned close to making it real. (Yes, he does look more like Buzz Lightyear than Cliff Secord.) No explanation here of why his pants don't catch fire, but hey, wow.
- While hunting for a new standard model thumbdrive to replace the no-longer-made Cruzer Mini I ran across this prototype. Not what I need but very cool nonetheless. Let's just hope they don't pollute it with U3.
- In thinking about non-obvious disruptive technologies, it occurred to me that using nanotech filters to separate gold from seawater could be hugely disruptive to nationalk economies if it became effective. However, with gold at about thirteen ppt (parts per trillion) in seawater, it would take a lot of nanofilm to get any useful quantity. I vaguely recall an old SF story about a guy who pulled gold out of seawater somehow. Anybody remember what that was?
Odd Lots
- I've had a difficult week here; new dental problems have arisen, culminating in an unplanned root canal this past Thursday, followed almost immediately by a much-delayed flight from Denver to Chicago for an Easter visit, where they happened to be having a blizzard. (The earliest Easter since 1913 corresponded with a lingering winter across the Midwest.) Tooth troubles continue, so if my posts have been (and continue to be) a little sparse, that's most of the reason.
- Our early Easter this year caused some people to ask how the date of Easter is calculated. Well, it's not pretty. At least next year it happens in April, whew.
- Here's a nice article describing a problem that is by no means recent: The split between people in the Catholic Church who can worship with a light heart, and people who invariably equate reverence with grimness . This has been an issue at least since Pope Pius IX lost the Papal States in the mid-1800s, after which the Papacy became obsessed with its authority and lost any ability to laugh at itself or anything else. (Pope John XXIII bucked the trend, but we didn't have him anywhere near long enough to make a permanent difference.) Roman Catholicism needs a sense of humor far more than it needs a Pope, but this may be one of those things that won't be solved within my own lifetime.
- In keeping with its long history of contempt for the consumer (which, in all fairness, is rife in Japan) Sony attempted to charge purchasers of its laptops $49 not to install a crippling load of crapware on the machines. Apparently they've taken so much flak for it that they recently dropped the fee. What I find boggling is that they willingly cripple their own machines by selling huge numbers of crapware slots, which makes you wonder how much money they make in the crapware business. We may be heading down the same path here for laptops that printers have followed, in which the printer is a thin, shabby thing sold for very little that makes money for its parent company by consuming artificially expensive ink/toner cartridges.
- It seems that I've been hearing a great deal within my own circle of contacts about people who try to help nontechnical folks (often parents) make Vista work with existing peripherals and software. The script goes like this: Nontechnical person brings home a new Vista PC or laptop from Best Buy and tries to install older software or connect it to various external hardware devices. Install fails; system aborts in various weird ways; technical person tries to fix (or simply understand) the failure, to no avail. Moral here: Do not use Vista. Everything that isn't needless window dressing is there for Microsoft's or Big Media's benefit, not yours. (Reread the venerable Vista Failure Log if you haven't read it for awhile.) You can still order PCs from vendors like Dell with XP preinstalled. Do it while you still can. And failing that, start researching Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
- Speaking of failure, WiMax (which we have seemingly been waiting for since the last ice sheets retreated) may be a failure because it's lousy technology. The wireless DOCSIS technology mentioned in the linked article as a solution has been around for some years and doesn't have a much better reputation. We may in fact be asking too much of low-power microwave broadband systems—fixed point-to-point broadband is totally at the mercy of topography and even vegetation—and I keep coming back to the conviction that some sort of “roof-hopper” mesh network may be the best path to follow. People are doing this in some areas; why it isn't seen as a more general solution puzzles me.
Odd Lots
- While chasing an interesting “out of the blue” idea that came to me while exercising the other day, I happened upon an RV surplus shop. Not surprisingly, it's in Elkhart, Indiana (Ground Zero for the American RV industry) and it sells leftovers and overstocks of RV parts and interior furniture. If I were to want to built a custom RV dinette table with a built-in keyboard, well, this might be the place to start.
- Good grief: Has Big Media run out of Republicans to torment? ABC News posted this story about the pastor of Obama's Chicago church, who repeatedly condemns the US in his sermons and tells his people that they should be singing “God Damn America” instead of “God Bless America.” Expect those sermons (which are offered for sale by the church) to become very popular in coming months.
- Illinois is famous for a lot of things, but being the historical capital of manufacturing of fraternal organization initiation and hazing equipment is not one of them. However, the De Moulin Company of Greenville, Illinois, now known for making band uniforms, used to do a big and almost unimaginably bizarre business manufacturing expensive gag items used to make new Masons and Elks feel like one of the gang. The precise psychology here is obscure to me (the last remotely fraternal organization I joined was the Boy Scouts) but the devices are just insane. Browse and boggle.
- Here's another source for home-made telescope optics and truss telescope kits up to 32″ in clear aperature. Even though I'm not a big Dobsonian fan, the scopes look good, and if you want light-gathering power above all else something like this is as good as you're going to do short of a full-concrete observatory. The optics are not cheap, but they're good. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Also from Pete comes a link to a site selling Swiss Army Ohmmeters. Should the Swiss Army encounter resistance, well, they'll be ready.
- Mike Burton (who worked in the industry for some time) wrote to say that “double shot” keyboards are no longer produced due to their expense. A double-shot keyboard is one in which the keycaps are molded in two steps: One step to mold the body of the cap, with a void in the shape of the letter, and a second to fill the void with black plastic. Such keycaps never lose their legends, like my decal-equipped Avant Stellar is now doing at great speed. I guess I had better stock up on period Northgates.
- We have evidently found the gene that triggers the onset of puberty. One wonders what suppressing this gene would do long-term. What would be the psychology of a 75-year-old boy who had never gone through puberty? Larry Niven toyed with the idea in World Out of Time, speculating that stopping puberty would stop aging, but I intuit that much more could be done with it. Would I give up sex for a shot at becoming immortal? (Answer from this side of the fence: No. Ask me in 1962 and you might have gotten a different answer.) Much depends on whether emotional maturity is a process inherent in or only affected by puberty. Sooner or later some renegade will try this, and we'll know.
Odd Lots
- Do not fail to read Bruce Schneier's latest short item in Wired, which is his simple demolition of David Brin's peculiar “transparent society” concept, which I first read of in his so-so novel Earth (1990) and thought was BS even then. Having no secrets doesn't help where the differential of power between two parties is high. This seems pretty obvious to me; I do not understand why Brin gets points for this “no secrets” notion of his.
- Some of the worst horror films (as well as SF films and some westerns) can be streamed without charge here. Where else can you find “Attack of the Giant Leeches” or “Killer Shrews,” both of which I recall seeing on Channel 7 at 4 PM on Thursdays back 1965-ish. Even at age 12 I could roll my eyes and say, “Those aren't giant shrews. Those are dogs in bad shrew costumes.” But hey, that's what makes a B-movie a B-movie, right?
- It may be clever, but can a gun this small really be deadly? (That is, assuming you don't aim it up your left nostril…)
- This is freaking amazing: Images of a landslide on Mars, taken while it's happening. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Jim Strickland pointed out a pneumatic tennis-ball based antenna launcher. We always used slingshots back in the day, and I have a Greenlee Cablecaster that was designed for dragging CAT5 over suspended ceilings via fishline, but something about the ball shooter is very appealing.
- Glover Wright is bringing back Science Fiction Quarterly as an online pub, and it looks promising. I recall reading a few ancient issues of the original SF Quarterly pulps from the late 50s and was pleased, though the world and I were, um, at least thirty years younger then. The first issue will be out in March.
- Gripe of the week: The keycap letters on my expensive Avant Stellar keyboard are decals, and they are already wearing off. It's only been a year. What's this thing going to look like after another ten?
- Speaking of keyboards: I need a wireless keyboard for use while sitting on the couch and running photos or video clips on our big TV. The SX270 is under the TV in plain view of the couch. The keyboard needs to have an integral pointing device. (I prefer things like IBM's TrackPoint nipple to the ubiquitous scratchpad.) Anybody got any suggestions?
Odd Lots
- I remember reading somewhere years ago that having a photo of a box on your Web store improves your sell-through of downloadable software, even if the product is never sold in a box and even if the box doesn't even exist. Anyway, here is a product that helps you create imaginary product boxes.
- Here's another very similar product. We evidently have a small industry here that I had never heard of before this morning.
- And yet another: This time, it generates a 3-D rotating video of an imaginary box!
- After a little further research, I'm guessing that the “online affiliate marketing” industry is driving the imaginary box subindustry. On the other hand, the online affiliate marketing industry is itself imaginary, and basically a scam that labors mightily to stay just half a hair on the legal side of the razor. It's what the 419 scams would be if Nigeria had something like the FTC.
- From Pete Albrecht comes a link to a video showing how well a 21-foot (!!) X-wing model rocket flies. (Flies? So-so. Dies? Spectacularly!)
- Don Lancaster has a detailed article (PDF format) about why rooftop PV solar power isn't as big a win as everybody says it is. Definitely worth reading, and pay especial attention to the description of exergy, a concept I had heard of but not understood until now. As with TTL and CMOS logic, Don finally made it click for me.
- Is Flash memory “write endurance” (i.e., the number of times you can change the state of a Flesh emmory cell) a serious issue or not? I always thought it was, but Eric Brombaugh (one of my EE friends who knows a thing or two about such matters) sent me a link to an article that changed my mind. If you're interested in Solid State Drives (SSDs) the parent page is worth a look as well.
