Odd Lots
- I don’t think I’ve announced it broadly yet, but I am now agented, for both fiction and nonfiction. Either is a first for me, and it may make any number of things better on the writing side.
- This isn’t glaciation, obviously, but having been researching the coming Ice Age for a year or so now in the service of a Neanderthals novel, I was riveted: A calf-deep wave of ice fragments advances across the land like a cross between Jack Frost and The Blob.
- One way to solve the Raspberry Pi stuttering keyboard problem is to use a wireless keyboard/mouse set. The one I have (the Logitech MK520) works beautifully. Stutter gone. (The high road, of course, is to power everything, including the RPi itself, from a wireless hub.)
- Microsoft has offered B&N $1B for the entire Nook business, including the readers and all facets of the B&N store. This says a lot less about Microsoft than it says about B&N–none of it good.
- Here’s an inside look at a dedicated bitcoin mining machine. Now, could the same box mount a brute force attack against password hashes?
- A bunch of do-it-yourself Muppets present ten reasons why time travel is no good.
- I’ve discovered a spectacular new cheese: Uniekaas Black Label 3-year-old gouda. (Scroll down.) Bears about as much resemblance to the gouda I knew as a Porsche does to a Trabant. Pair it with any dry red; I’ve had it with Middle Sister Rebel Red and Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel. Actually, it pairs well with Real Sangria. Or, for that matter, whole milk. Sheesh, even dead air. We get it at Whole Foods. Try it.
- Still another voice calling for an end to team sports in schools. Team sports are how we teach high schoolers that alpha males can do whatever they want to the people below them on their ill-begotten ladders.
- Want another reason? The most highly paid state employees in nearly all states are…college sports coaches. And we all know how “college” college sports are.
- Watch out, Colorado. Here come the pot machines.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: ebooks · food · hardware · humor · psychology · rpi · sf · writing
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(On the fast-moving ice): I’m just south of it. The same thing happened on many lakes around here. We had a few warm days, and the shore ice melted. That left a huge mass of free-floating ice in the center of the lake.
Then, we have a day with very high winds. The ice was blown ashore, and piled up just like you see in the video. The mass of all that ice on the lake was accelerated to a couple mph by the wind. When it hit shore, the inertia kept it going!
The most highly paid state employees in nearly all states are…college sports coaches.
They’re also the most likely to get fired for non-performance.
Incidentally, the most successful NCAA Division I program in the country over the last 10 years is…
Northwestern University women’s lacrosse. Nine championships, one second-place finish. Last summer I rode past the campus during a summer program for high school players. A zillion teen girls with lacrosse sticks swarming about.