- Although I created a Twitter account back in November, I haven’t done much with it until a day or so ago. I’ve begun posting what amount to instant Odd Lots on Twitter, so if you were waiting for me to do something useful before following me, well, the wait is over.
- Twitter has been using its own link shortener t.co to shorten all links in tweets since 2011 or so. It’s automatic and requires zero additional keystroking. Why, then, do tweeters still use services like bit.ly and goo.gl?
- The FCC may change the definition of “broadband” today, which could demote tens of millions of people (mostly DSL users) to some weird limbo between dialup and broadband. Most of the DSL connections I’ve used have been hideous, some providing measured speeds right down there with 1994 dialup, along with weird lockups and general bit-mayhem.
- Update to the above: Yup. It happened. Next on the agenda: net neutrality.
- NASA’s New Horizons probe is now waking up. We’re about to get our first close-in views of the last (known) un-visited planet in the solar system. Pluto and its gigantic moon Charon are only 12,000 mles apart and orbit one another in 6.3 days, so I’m expecting that some of the upcoming images will be startling, to put it mildly.
- Your coding style gives you away. Mine certainly does–all my reserved words are in uppercase. Why run with the pack?
- Wired tests five wine-stain removers. $18 a bottle? I dunno. At $3.50 or so, Spray & Wash Resolve Stain Stick always works pretty well for us. (Me, actually. Carol drinks white wine.)
- Apple’s app store billed more than Hollywood’s entire box-office take last year.
- It’s easy to say “We’re going to tie health-care payments to health-care outcomes. It’s a lot harder to measure those outcomes objectively.
- This thingmajigger–called a “Panjandrum”–is almost certainly the silliest weapon in 20th century military history. I invite you to nominate competitors, but I warn you, it’s a tough act to beat. (Make sure you scroll down to the video, even if you don’t read the whole thing.)
- Finally, from the Global Vaporizing department: 2,960 degrees in Cave Creek. Boy, it didn’t get quite that hot back in the 90s… (Thanks to Bill Roper for the link.)
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- This item may not be visible after a few more days, so catch it now: A very weird “hotspot” turned up in the satellite water temperature record at the far eastern end of Lake Superior. For a short while, water temps excursed from the 30s up to the 60s F. Instrument Error? Cargo ship on fire? UFO exploding? STORMY baiting and then rounding up firenados? No one can tell me, though I suspect that the truth is out there.
- The FCC is trying to redefine “broadband” as 25 Mbps down / 3Mbps up. The big carriers are livid. And what are they saying? “Nobody needs Internet that fast!” Just like Esther Dyson said that no home computer user would ever need a CPU as fast as the 286.
- The dropoff in some ebook author revenues this past fall (which many blamed on Kindle Unlimited) may have been a sales cycle thing, unrelated to Amazon.
- Dare we hope that this new Facebook feature will be the end of hoaxes and hate memes? Be on notice that I intend to use it a lot.
- Slashdot inadvertently invited all the Pascal-haters out of their caves for one more hatefest. Heh. Maybe not a hatefest. The emotion I pick up when C partisans’ eyes roll back in their heads over Pascal is not hate, but…fear.
- Angry Twitter posts are harmful to your health. Duhhh. Angry anything is harmful to your health. Anger is jack-in-the-box suicide: You can’t tell quite when, but the more you turn that crank, the sooner the thing’s gonna pop.
- The Pirate Bay has a phoenix logo and a countdown timer on their old site, suggesting that they’re coming back online on February 1. I consider this unlikely, but I’ve been surprised by these guys before.
- From the same site: Dozens of Pirate Bay clones are not nearly as useful as the real thing.
- And while we’re talking about (if not like) pirates, whatever happened to Antigua’s blanket permission to distribute copyrighted files? Lots of news about that in midlate 2013, nothing since.
- The highest-paid YouTube video author films herself unwrapping Disney toys. That’s it. And for that she earned $5M. I think I’m in the wrong damned business.
Odd Lots
- Verizon refuses to stop using tower-side cookies (which can’t be deleted by mobile device users) even as AT&T has caved on the issue. The solution is to stop using Verizon. That’s what Carol and I are about to do.
- Relax. Microsoft did not pull the plug on Win7 updates on 1/13. That won’t happen until 2020. What’s going away are new OS features and phone support, two things I don’t think the world desperately needs.
- I like molten lava as much as the next guy. (Just wait until you read my novella Firejammer, coming out–finally–this spring.) That said, I’m not sure I like it quite this much…
- With January only half over, the Great Lakes ice cover is now up to 34%. Lake Erie has pretty much iced over completely.
- Britain’s Royal Society has published some evidence that people born during solar maxima do not live as long as people born during solar minima. It may be folate depletion by UV. Or something else. However, the correlation appears to be real. (Thanks to Neil Rest for the link.) Carol and I are solar minima babies, whew.
- Discovered two very good red wines recently: Menage a Trois Red, and Menage a Trois Midnight. Both are dry reds, both are fruit-forward, and (in contradiction of the vintner’s Web writeups) neither has any detectable oak. I guess if you’re going to get the hipster market you have to claim oak, even if you lie about it. In this case, nothing of value was lost.
- I doubt that my readers are dumb enough to think you can lose weight by ingesting chemistry sets like Slim-Fast. But just in case, read what Tom Naughton says about recent diet rankings in content-free publications like US News. Hint: The same doofi who bleat endlessly against “processed foods” (which now means “any foods I don’t like”) are endorsing fructose cocktails like Slim-Fast over Atkins and paleo.
- Popular Mechanics lists the 14 best cities in America for startups. None are in Silicon Valley, and all are in relatively low-cost areas. Maybe hipster city cachet is finally starting to lose its cachet. Or so we can hope.
- Lots has happened in CPU architectures since the 1980s, when a lot of us learned it. (I started a little earlier, but the IBM PC brought most of us to a new starting gate at the same time.) Here’s a decent summary. One consequence of all this is that human-written assembly language is less of a win over compilers, and the best reason to learn assembly these days is to understand what your damned compilers are up to in there.
- Before he broke into the SF business, Keith Laumer was an ace model airplane designer. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Physically small, fanless PCs have been around for awhile, and I was bullish on them until I began using Dell USFF (ultra-small form factor) machines like the Optiplex 780, which are pretty small and almost entirely silent. Should we settle for 1.6 GHz? Only if there’s a specific application in mind, like education (think RPi) or embeddedness.
- Bill Cherepy sends us news of a thermostatic butter keeper that can keep a stick of butter (block? It’s a form factor we don’t make in the US) at any arbitrary temp from 15 to 23 degrees C. Butter is definitely coming back into its own, bravo halleluia!
Odd Lots
- Intel’s announced the Compute Stick, a complete $150 Win8.1 machine in the format of a fat thumb drive. Looks like the plug is HDMI, though, and the device gets power from an uncommitted USB port. I could see this melting seamlessly into a big-screen TV (or any monitor with an HDMI input) and giving you something that indeed approaches (as Michael Abrash said probably 20 years ago about 21″ CRT monitors) Windows on your bedroom wall. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.)
- It’ll be awhile before this becomes available, but a brand-new antibiotic has been isolated from bacteria that live in dirt. I’m doubly enthuisastic because this may encourage researchers to look harder at bacteriophages, which live in dirt and worse.
- If you haven’t heard of Smart Pascal, it’s an interesting concept and worth a look: A commercial Object Pascal compiler that generates HTML5 apps. It’s basically a way of writing sophisticated Javascript apps without having to wash your mental hands and rinse your brain out every twenty minutes. To me that would be worth $42/year.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: A selfie stick (also known as a narcissistick) is a camera holder that allows you to take pictures of yourself or groups by parking your camera on it and holding it up in the air so that the camera is facing you. It’s usually just a rod with a handle, sometimes telescoping. Many support bluetooth to trigger the camera, though the details remain obscure to me.
- Beware the Facebook Logic Fallacy: One member of Group X is evil, therefore all members of Group X are evil. Much of my objection to Facebook memes is that this is a very common template. Attack memes must die. Not sure how to get there from here.
- The percentage of ice cover on the Great Lakes is now 18.7%. Keep an eye on this graphic, as I think our current winter stands to be an…interesting…season from a Great Lakes ice perspective.
- In general I’m no fan of government regulation, but here’s an excellent argument that both broadband providers and airlines could use a little consumer-oriented regulation.
- Related to the above: Air travel is a lousy business (rather like health insurance, in fact) and merciless price competition has led to creative fee-hiding and generally charging extra for a travel experience that hasn’t been made deliberately miserable.
- From the Department of the Painfully Obvious: There are many benefits in finding a spouse who is also your best friend. I guess it’s nice to have some research behind it, but damn, is this really news to anyone? (Maybe New Yorkers.)
Odd Lots
- Hachette is now doing exactly the right thing (instead of exactly the wrong thing) by exploring new sales channels. In this case, it’s Gumroad, a technology that allows retail sales on Twitter. I need to look more closely, but I could certainly get behind that. And–yeek!–a real use for Twitter!
- “Nutrition is full of all kinds of nonsense.” Boy, is it ever. (Thanks to Erik Anderson for the link.)
- Ibuprofen (Advil) appears to extend the lifespan of several species, mostly way down the complexity chain from humans. Ibuprofen is not without side effects; like most NSAIDS, it hits the stomach lining harder harder than acetaminaphen (Tylenol) and I avoid it for heartburn reasons. I’d certainly like to see further research on whether the effect still exists on much lower doses.
- I’m not sure torrenting was ever really safe, but with the disappearance of the real Pirate Bay and the appearance of Pirate Bay clones, the risks have definitely increased. I’m also guessing that a lot of the traffic that once ran through TPB has now gone “black” and moved to private trackers and seedboxes.
- Several French publishers are suing the creators of AdBlock Plus for ruining their business model. My position: Accept financial liability for serving malware in your ads, and I’ll stop blocking your ads.
- My guess is that the waittress will look at you funny if you order corned-beef octothorpe.
- Carol and I got our flu shots some time back, but it may do us (and you) less good than we all think. The virus mutated after work began on this year’s virus, and the vaccine is nowhere near as effective against the mutated strain as it is against the others. No cons for us this season.
- David Brooks generally isn’t funny. But when he is, yikes! He bends it like Jonathan Swift. (If you’re not behind the paywall, search for “Brooks The Thought Leader”.)
- Corn flakes are (mildly) magnetic. I didn’t know this.
- Government is your friend! Without it, how would you know enough not to buy vulgar underwear?
Odd Lots
- Yes, I changed my mind and signed up for Twitter, after pondering somebody else using my name and creating a Fake Jeff Duntemann. (Thanks to Bob Fergert for prompting me to imagine the unimaginable–and I’m a good imaginer.) More on this a little later. I have yet to post anything due to lots of top-priority projects here, but I’ll get to it within the week.
- Dietary saturated fat is not related to plasma fatty acids. In other words, it doesn’t matter how much saturated fat you eat; your blood levels of fatty acids are controlled by other factors. What other factors? Care to guess? Are you reading this on Contrapositive Diary? Is the Pope from Argentina? Is the atomic weight of ytterbium 173.04? It’s the carbs. Wow. Whodathunkit? (Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal, who was the first of several to put me on the scent.)
- There is actually a prize for the worst sex scene in literary fiction. It is not a coveted award, and I guess is seen as a sort of booby prize among literary writers. The WSJ recently posted a brief guide on how to avoid writing such scenes. (I avoid writing really bad sex scenes by not writing sex scenes at all. Works amazingly well.)
- Two people in my circles who don’t know one another have independently recommended Ting as a cell carrier. First impression: Sounds too good to be true, and sheesh, they were created by Tucows. (That said, Tucows is no longer what most of us grayhairs remember it being.) Any other opinions? Getting new phones and a new carrier is my next big tech research project.
- I’d also like to hear some early impressions of Lollipop, if anybody’s got it or is about to get it.
- Here’s something you don’t see every day; in fact, I don’t think I’ve seen it even once, ever: A square flat-panel monitor, with a 1920 X 1920 resolution. Assuming these survive their launch (not a sure thing by any means) I’d be sorely tempted. As the story says, “Enough of the ultra wideness already.”
- I wasn’t sure whether good technical books could be created as reflowable ebooks, but Yury Magda is doing it. He has five self-published Arduino-related titles now, and what I can see in the samples looks damned good. I’m going to buy a couple, less for the Arduino content as for how he does the layout. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for putting me on to this.)
- Gizmodo/Sploid has a very nice short item on the XB-70 Valkyrie, certainly the most beautiful and possibly the second-scariest military aircraft ever built. Do watch the video of how the second prototype crashed–and if you’re ever within striking distance of Dayton, don’t miss the other Valkyrie at the Air Force museum there. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Barðarbunga is emitting over twice as much sufur dioxide every day as all of Europe’s smokestacks put together, and the volcano is still hard at it. SO2 is well-known to be a powerful cooling factor in the atmosphere. Combine that with a quiet Sun, and nobody really knows what might happen.
- Best video illustration of how tumbler locks work that I’ve ever seen.
- For that special, short, hairy, ironic someone in your life: You can get a genuine Flying Nun-inspired Weta-made Bofur winter hat, shipped all the way from New Zealand. Not cheap and not sure if it’ll arrive before Christmas, but if this winter keeps going like it’s going, you’ll be all set to face dragons, ice ages, or both.
Odd Lots
- I’d like all-year-round DST for this simple reason: By November 1, it’s generally too dark to grill on my back deck, even as early as 5PM. And as early as we are said to eat, I don’t want to have to pull the steaks off the grill by 5.
- I’m not entirely sure what this is. It’s about Neanderthals. It’s worth reading. (Thanks to the many who sent me the link, starting with Bruce Baker.)
- The story’s a year old now, but still excellent long-form journalism: How Merck developed suvorexant, the designed-from-scratch next-gen sleeping pill approved this past August for sale starting January 1, as Belsomna.
- Solar cycles have been growing weaker since Cycle 19, which was the strongest cycle in recorded history. (As the late George Ewing used to say, you could work Madagascar on half a watt into a bent paperclip.) Here’s a nice graphic showing the marked decrease in strength from Cycle 21 through the current Cycle 24. If solar cycle strength correlates to climate (suspected but not proven) my retirement will be cold and 6 meters dead.
- There’s now a Raspberry Pi A+ board, which surprised a lot of people, including me. Eben Upton explains the product. I’m getting a B+, actually.
- Here’s a piece on the most popular pocket radio…in American prisons. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- I write a lot about AI, but I’m not entirely sure I believe in it, because we know so little about how the brain works that we can’t model it. This may be an unsolvable problem.
- From the Words-I-Had-Forgotten-Until-Somebody-Reminded-Me Department: Muggletonianism, a very peculiar Christian sect dating back to 1551, which taught (or didn’t teach–evangelism was not on their menu) that God is between five and six feet tall. They were among the English Dissenters, in there with the Grindletonians and the Diggers. If ever I were to call something Dadaist Christianity, this would be it. And I love their name. (Thanks to reminder Pete Albrecht.)
- I missed it when this item was first-run: The titanic Saturn V F-1 engine has been reverse-engineered, and it or something based on it could fly again…assuming we remember how to make it. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the link.)
- I wouldn’t have predicted this: After being an online tech magazine for 20 years, CNET is going to launch…a print magazine. God love ’em and good luck–they’ll need it. I miss magazines, but I can’t imagine a new gadget book could get much traction today.
- It’s called the Hipster Effect: If everybody tries to look different, everybody ends up looking the same. At the heart of it is the fact that nobody wants to be the only one who doesn’t adopt a fad. (Throughout most of my life, that nobody would in fact be me.)
- Orthorexia nervosa (obsessive concern with clean or healthy diets, to the point of insanity) is about to get a formal definition, which might allow it to join the gazillion other mental health disorders in the DSM. I eat sugar now and then. I eat a lot of fat, because research tells me that humans evolved on fat. I have some fruit, and all the vegetables I can choke past my gag reflex, which, granted, isn’t a lot. More to the point, I know that this is a statistical exercise, not a holiness code, and I can thank my essential sanity for that.
Odd Lots
- Sales of the Raspberry Pi board are closing in on four million. Wow. I’m an optimist, but I’ll confess that I wasn’t that much of an optimist!
- Some ISPs have apparently begun blocking encrypted traffic (especially VPNs) because VPNs make it difficult to throttle traffic based on what that traffic is. Basically, a user of Golden Frog’s VPN software started streaming Netflix in the clear and saw all sorts of stutter and other signs of throttling; the user then streamed Netflix through the VPN and the signs of throttling vanished.
- Internet toll roads? More evidence.
- Here’s a 3-D printed pump-gun that folds and fires paper airplanes. This should be on the cover of the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog before Christmas… (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Stanford University reports that GMO foods appear not to bother farm animals at all; maybe we should look harder for cause and effect in humans. Conventional wisdom can be deadly.(Thanks to Jim Fuerstenberg for the link.)
- Deadly? Ancel Keys’ fraudulent science (which soon became conventional wisdom, once government got behind it) has killed many millions. Fat is good for you. Sugar is deadly. (Thanks to Tony Kyle for the link.)
- Adobe’s Digital Editions ebook reader sends your reading logs back to Adobe. As best I can figure, it’s DRM gone nuts–which is precisely what you would expect of Adobe. Don’t use Digital Editions.
- Whoops. Silly boy. Adobe isn’t the only one doing this. Once it becomes general knowledge, more and more people will pirate ebooks and sideload them, which will ultimately hurt publishers and retailers more than covert data mining will help. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
- Lazarus/FreePascal 1.2.6/2.6.4 has been released. The damned thing is getting good.
- The Great Lakes’ water temps are about four degrees colder than average, (and six degrees colder than this time last year) after some lakes didn’t shed the last of their ice until June. It’s going to be an interesting winter here on the weather front.
- Scott Hanselman thinks that I might as well be Thomas Watson. (Go to 1:30 on the video and watch for a bit.) Alas, not only do I not think there will never be more than five computers in the world, there are already over five computers in this room. (Thanks to Ben Oram for noticing.)
- 18 English words that should never have gone out of style. “Spermologer” doesn’t mean quite what you’d think. Nor do “pussyvan” and “wonder-wench.” Me, I’d add “cerate” to the list. Look it up. (Thanks to Dermot Dobson for the link.)
Odd Lots
- This overlong, (10,000 word) wandering, muddled, and occasionally brilliant essay is a must-read if you feel (like I do) that tribalism and tribal hatred are the greatest threat facing humanity today. We’re precisely one month away from the midterms, and my phone is ringing a dozen times a day with haters demanding that I hate whole groups of people who have little in common with one another beyond their being hated by the callers. Here’s a clue, folks: Politics does not give you permission to hate. If you hate, you’re a hater…and those of us who don’t hate know who the haters are.
- Jim Strickland sends a link to new research on creating organic solar cells based on short vertical nanopillars that look like well-trimmed blades of grass, or a short-pile shag carpet.
- Here’s as clear a statement as I’ve ever seen why not to play with bitcoin, quite apart from the fact that law enforcement probably considers posession of bitcoins ample evidence of criminal activity. No thanks.
- There was 53K of RAM on our planet in 1953. And damned if the computers didn’t want 64.
- A case that was a long time brewing may establish additional precedent that DRM is an antitrust violation. Actually, what DRM really does is turn honest customers into pirates.
- Michigan vineyards are having their worst grape harvest ever this year, thanks to last winter’s record-breaking cold. That’s a shame; Michigan makes some damned fine wines, especially sweet wines, which we drink when we’re in Chicago. (I don’t see them here in Colorado.)
- Wines, yes: Back in 1973 I had my first can of wine. The other night I had my second. My first thought: The Seventies are returning, egad. My second thought: Hey, that’s not bad wine!
- The real reason there will be no Windows 9: Some lazy code jockeys will mistake “Windows 95” and “Windows 98” for “Windows 9.” This makes sense to me, and if it reduces the universe’s bug supply even a little, it’s a very, very small price to pay.
- Wow. There are no longer any cartoons on Saturday Morning broadcast TV. Which doesn’t mean that the universe is not awash in cartoons, most of them simply hideous.
- Before reading this article, I had never heard of Axe Deodorant. Now, all else being equal, I’d rather smell like nothing. But do I read here that there’s an SKU with the scent of…solder? How about Bakelite terminal strips plus capacitor wax?
- Pertinent to the above: The last aftershave I think I ever used regularly was called Nuts & Bolts in, I believe, 1971.
Odd Lots
- My old friend Lee Hart scratchbuilt a marvelous model of the Galileo spacecraft, including an operating COSMAC processor that blinks out the Arecibo message on an LED.
- The COSMAC 1802 was a good choice for spacecraft, because it drew almost no power and could be radiation-hardened. It was all static CMOS, so the system clock could be slowed arbitrarily, down to audio rates, or just stopped. Alas, the contention (which I’ve shared) that there was an 1802 on the Viking spacecraft isn’t true. Bummer.
- Here’s an essentially bottomless collection of old radio literature, including magazines, technical books and articles, and ephemera. The PDFs are of excellent quality, though I wonder how legal some of the items are. Worth a look, for the Deco artwork in the 20s and 30s magazines, if nothing else.
- And if you’re interested in toilet paper on a total lifestyle basis, Toilet Paper World is just the thing. I’m not sure I even noticed that tinted toilet paper existed before they told me. And now it’s gone. I guess it’s true that 80% of the world is always below our radar.
- We’ve had air rifles since…1779. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I’d heard about how the Soviets repaired their ailing Salyut 7 space station, but not in anywhere close to this kind of detail.
- Paris used to use (and may still; the article is unclear) a sort of Indiana Jones mechanism for clearing blockages in its extra large economy-sized sewer pipes: Rolling a 9-foot iron ball through them.
- If you’re watching sea ice levels in the Antarctic (as I am) this site puts up very nice graphs on an almost daily basis.
- Is there anything that hipsters can’t ruin? (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Murder comes naturally to Chimpanzees. The sad part is, it comes naturally to us, too. I suspect it came so naturally to the Neanderthals that they didn’t need Sap to extinctify them.
- Somehow I managed to see the first Hobbit flick four times and never noticed that Bifur had an axe stuck in his head. I thought it was some sort of ornamment.
- Oh, and predictably, Buzzfeed has a stack rank of Peter Jackson’s dwarves by, um, hotness. They should have asked some Dwarf women; the hottest dwarves are also the ones that look the least like dwarves. Several times I was asking myself if Fili and Kili had been left in a basket on some dwarf’s front porch.
- One more and I’ll let the dwarf thing go. Separated at birth: Bofur the Dwarf and…Sister Bertrille.
- I survived the 60s. I had all the Beatles albums. I am not and have never been a Communist. I guess this means that hypnotism is impossible.
