Odd Lots
- Here’s a fascinating history of AM radio technology, focused on WLW—the highest-power AM radio station the US ever had.
- If you’re trying to create an application with an embedded (non-server) SQLite database, this article may be of some help.
- The Friendster social media platform has risen from the grave. It’s got a new twist that sets it apart from other social media platforms: To add someone to your friends list, you have to meet that potential friend in person and tap phones.I like that a lot. With no ads it’s a little unclear how they’ll pay their expenses. We’ll see how it goes.
- The US Fifth Circuit Court just ruled that people can distill their own hard booze in their basements. That’s not anything I would try, but I’ll cheer any expansion of American freedom. Will the Supreme Court reverse this ruling? I kinda doubt it.
- We know less about Alzheimer’s Disease than we thought we did, and groupthink may be a major reason why.
- Since Carol and I never had kids, I didn’t hear about the Tin Can Phone until earlier today. Here’s a detailed discussion. And here’s the Tin Can Phone home page. It’s an Internet phone, but designed not to have a screen. It carries only voice, and thus is a throwback to the landline phones I grew up with and used until about 2000, when we went to pocket cell phones, and then smartphones in 2011. The idea is to let kids communicate with voice, as in the good old days, without screens and third-party web content to get in the way.
- AI is being used to generate revenge stories for…YouTube. (H/t to my friend Pete, who is a bigger YouTube watcher than I.) Here’s an example of its output.
- A non-humanoid robot has beaten top-level human players of…ping-pong. One wonders how a session with two robots of this design would go.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: electronics · health · history · radio · social media
Something for the next “Odd Lots”:
Something to do when bored:
An international team of Earth scientists led by Douwe van Hinsbergen, a professor of global tectonics and paleogeography at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, developed a website that lets you plug in any location on the planet and see how its latitude has changed over the past 320 million years. The site, called paleolatitude.org, is built on the Utrecht Paleogeography Model, which reconstructs the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates dating back to the age of the supercontinent Pangaea.
Link to story here, among other places. (Site appears to be a bit busy…) https://gizmodo.com/new-digital-tool-lets-you-see-where-you-backyard-was-millions-of-years-ago-2000752084
Hey, cool! ~320,000,000 years ago, Phoenix was on the equator! I had no trouble getting in, and it had no trouble placing my IP in Phoenix. I’m not bored often, but things like this appeal to the SF guy I am most of the time. (Less so when I’m working 20M or flying kites.) Don’t hesitate to send links you think belong on Odd Lots. I greatly appreciate it, and will h/t you for them.
I wasn’t aware of WLW, but several out-of-state 50 kW AM stations could be heard from Salt Lake City: KOA (Denver, CO), KFI (Los Angeles, CA), KNX (Los Angeles, CA), WHO (Des Moines, IA), WOAI (San Antonio, TX), WLS (Chicago, IL), KOB (Albuquerque, NM), and at least one of the powerful Border Blaster stations, XEPRS (Mexico).