Odd Lots
- My collection Cold Hands and Other Stories is now available to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
- Well, judging by its website it may seem a little wobbly, but Heathkit has a new owner, and is actually selling radio kits. Let us wish them the best and watch what happens. (Thanks to Tom Byers, Michael Covington, and several others for alerting me.)
- Smart bullets appear early in The Cunning Blood, which I wrote in 1998. (You can read that part of the story in the Amazon “Look inside” ebook preview.) Seventeen years later, we’re starting to pursue that line of research, with the Army’s XM25, which us about ready to test. By 2374, those little devils are going to be pretty damned dangerous.
- Lazarus 1.4.4 has been released. Mostly bug fixes, but it’s free and well worth having if you program for Delphi or Pascal generally. Plus, it can be installed and works very well on the Raspberry Pi 2.
- Here’s David Archibald’s solar update for October, 2015. I find the trend lines in the graph of F10.7 flux fascinating: They’ve been in a pretty linear decline since the beginning of the year. Anything under 100 signals a cooling trend. We’re now at 84, and the reading may “bottom out” at the lowest possible reading of 64 by January of 2016.
- As if a quieting Sun weren’t enough, there’s a newly discovered mechanism pushing the planet in the direction of global cooling, via volatile organic compounds, particularly isoprene.
- Roy Harvey pointed me to MakerArm, a sort of general-purpose 3-D positioner that can be used to mill PCBs, print 3-D artifacts, and draw things on cakes with frosting. This is definitely second-gen, or maybe third (I lose track) and something in me seriously wants one.
- Esther Schindler sent a link to word that high-fructose corn syrup apparently slows recovery from brain injury. It also overloads your liver, especially downed 44 convenience-store ounces at a time.
- I’m considering renting a short cargo container as a temporary storage shed in our new (large) back yard. We did this at our second house in Scottsdale in the 90s, and it worked very well. Researching containers led me to this writeup of the world’s largest container ship, MSC Oscar, which can hold 19,224 containers. Me, I’d call it Darth Freighter.
- This is very cool: Brilliant color photographs of an era (1940-1942) we remember almost entirely in black and white. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- More Oldiana, for early vintage Boomers and before: An Old-Time Chicago Quiz. This one is not easy: I got less than half of them right, granting that most of the ones I missed were sports-related. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- We’re getting closer to being able to prevent Lyme disease, though injection of lab-engineered antibodies.
- Megan McArdle thinks it makes sense. I think it’s their last swing around the drain marked “DOOMED MAGAZINES.” Whoever turns out to be right, Playboy is eliminating nudity. Wow. Isn’t that kind of like caffeine-free diet Jolt?
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · electronics · health · history · pascal · photography · programming · science · sf · writing
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The MakerArm may be what finally trips my “gottahavit” for a “3d printer.
Conceptually, it’s not all that different from my X2 desktop CNC mill with a toolchanger. The idea of using the same basic setup for light assembly never occurred to me.
The Library of Congress has some color photos from Czarist Russia that go back into the ‘teens. See http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/gorskii.html
Yep; they have two different sets if I remember right. And don’t forget shorpy.com, where you can get lost for hours.
They have a bunch of Civil War photos scanned in at ultra-high resolution from the original glass plates, snapshots people have donated, and a vast and growing dataset of information people have contributed to the photos; places, events, and the people in them.
This shot is 150 years old, and is still probably my favorite on the whole site: http://www.shorpy.com/node/6548?size=_original
I believe Vernor Vinge came up with smart bullets in The Peace War, vintage 1984. For what it’s worth. Fun book.
Excellent book, in fact, as was Marooned in Realtime. I haven’t read either in a long time; probably the 90s. My smart bullets have a sort of weak but very focused AI, and in the second chapter Peter Novilio has to outsmart a couple of them to survive.
There were smart bullets in the 1984 movie *Runaway*, starring Tom Selleck and directed by Michael Crichton. Very worth watching, if also very dated.
The XM25 has actually already been tested in combat: prototypes were used in Afghanistan in 2010.
Harry Harrison had smart bullets in one of the Stainless Steel Rat books, probably in thr 1960s…
Heathkit is back! My dad (VE5OA) build his original ham gear from Heathkits. (Sold to collectors by now, alas.)
I’ve owned numerous Heath items in my 42 licensed years, including a lot of their test equipment as well as radios. I still have a Sixer and a Twoer in full working order, but have sold the rest of it for lack of space. Over the years I had a Comanche receiver, an HW-23 single bander, a Seneca transmitter (though I could never make it work correctly) a DX-60B and its VFO, and a few others. I restored a DX-20 and sold it 25 or 30 years ago.
I also had some Knight units too, including the T-60 and R-150, which, alas, was a lousy receiver.
It is encouraging to see them reappear, though I have my doubts about Santa Cruz as a base. It is likely to keep the prices higher than they might have been in Benton Harbor.
Particularly interesting that they are offering update kits for old heath products. I still have my IG-18 and my distortion analyzer. I think the heath power supply may have been lost in a move (or may still be in a box…)
Thanks for the photo link. Our lives are so easy and abundant compared to the youths of our parents.