- J. D. Hildebrand endorsed Contra today over at SD Times. He mentions a falling out we had in ancient times (I think 1993 or so) which I remember as being a publicity stunt. Even if it wasn’t, 20 years is plenty for a falling-out. From one J. D. to the other: You’re OK in my book. (His blog at SD is here.)
- Quite by accident, I stumbled upon a clock app written in Lua, a language which I had heard of (vaguely) but never read up on. I mean, really, does the world need YADSL? However, a closer look showed that Lua does not use almost-invisible curly brackets for structuring code and instead relies on those big, bold, evil kiddie-language END keywords. It is to rejoice. LUA for Windows is here; will report again when I fool with it a little.
- I’ve linked to this before, but it’s been a few years: Tom Swift Lives, home of some of the best fanfic I’ve ever seen, much of which is yards better than the original Tom Swift material.
- Over the past year, I’ve discovered that the most effective single pain reliever for my occasional migraines is…aspirin. I dropped Tylenol like a hot rock. Now there’s evidence that aspirin reduces the risk of cancer. Avoiding gastrointestinal bleeding is an issue, but I can’t imagine that that’s not just engineering.
- And here’s how the food industry’s quest to undercut butter and lard gave us trans fats, more heart disease, and the myth that animal fat is bad for you. I believe in evolution. We evolved eating animal fat. We did not evolve eating vegetable oils dissolved out of seeds with hexane. Q.E.D.
- I never gave this a thought, but it’s obvious if you think about it: Setting printed material in Japanese using movable type involved an immense amount of lead.
- Although I’ve never seen a railbike in action, the concept has always fascinated me, and here’s one that doesn’t need any welding. There’s no abandoned trackage convenient to me, but it’s around. My only reservation is that it must be easy to run off the rails by letting the front wheel pivot even a little bit. (In Europe railbikes are called Draisines.)
- Having killed Microsoft Reader, which I liked a great deal, MS is apparently investing in the future of the Nook. Will Reader return? Let us pray; I have a number of ebooks in that format.
- At least these Macbooks won’t be subject to trojans now. Or anything else.
health
Odd Lots
No Supinator for You!
On Wednesday I hurt my left arm, and am still typing one-handed. Carol (who is a physical therapist) tells me that I may have pulled my left supinator. I didn’t even know I had a supinator, which to me sounds like a brand of crockpot. Whatever a supinator might in fact be, I know by now that it hurts like hell when mistreated.
Bottom line: I may not be doing much posting for the coming week. Lesson: I am 59, not 19. I cannot throw boxes full of books around with the aplomb I once exhibited. I would like to get my aplomb back, but like my hair, that train may have left the station.
I’ll be back when I can use my left hand again.
Odd Lots
- Movers are coming imminently to reassemble my lower level, so I will be mostly out of touch for the rest of today.
- If you’ve never had an account with Verizon in the past, don’t get one now. Verizon sold a huge number (over a million!) of expired debt accounts to a debt collection agency called AFNI, which has been attempting to collect on some of them, even when the debt has long since passed over the horizon of the statute of limitations. Some of these debts were long since paid off, some were mistakes, and some may possibly be complete inventions. Verizon’s action was legal; AFNI’s may not be. Still, Verizon started it, and I’m encouraging people not to do business with them.
- Here’s an aurora prediction site I’d not seen before. We’re a little too far south to get much from the current outbursts, but having seen some of the 2005 auroras here (if barely) I’m certainly watching that red line. (Thanks to Jamie Hanrahan for the link.)
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: A tuya is a volcanic landform created by a smallish volcanic eruption that occurs under a kilometer-class ice sheet, as from our most recent ice age.
- Roy Tellason wrote to tell me about his tube data sheet page, which has more scanned data sheets (all PDFs; typically under 1 MB) in one place than I’ve ever seen, with no ads nor any fussing (registration, etc.) required to access them.
- Rich Rostrom sent a wonderful link to a collection of photos and drawings of the Hindenburg, including its passenger areas, which included (egad) a smoking room! Originally (it was later expanded a little) the airship could carry only 50 passengers, tops. Those must have been expensive tickets…
- I was starting to get this message almost fifteen years ago: Heart disease is about inflammation. It’s not about meat or fat. Inflammation comes from smoking, chemicals of various sorts, infections, and (most commonly) sugars and vegetable oils. No inflammation, no heart disease. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
- I’m shopping for vacuum tube intercoms, and found that someone on eBay has listed the Talk-A-Phone set that my parents bought (they were made in Chicago then) and used as a baby monitor after my sister was born. I’d really prefer one of the mid-60s tube-based carrier-current models. All the majors had them. (Carol wants a better way to reach me when I’m in my office than yelling down the stairs…)
- The beautiful 1920s Des Plaines Theater has reopened after some major restoration, and is now slotting upscale live acts rather than movies. It’s literally around the corner from our Chicago-area condo, and I’m itching to find an event as an excuse to go in and look around.
- If you’re afraid of spiders, don’t go to Australia for awhile. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Dinosaur fossils don’t get a whole lot better than this.
- While doing my semiregular scan for pirated copies of my books, I happened across something fascinating on alt.binaries.e-book.technical: a scan of the original service manual for the Nazi V-1 flying bomb. I don’t know how to create an NZB that points directly to the file, but the item was posted on 10/25/2011. Search for “Gerate-handbuch FZG-76”. A dieselpunk pulse-jet is what it was, and now you can see what was inside it. (Being able to read German is a plus, but the photos are very good.)
- A wonderful photo collection of vintage ice-cream trucks. We saw the Good Humor trucks regularly on our street in the 50s and early 60s. The driver rang bells by pulling on a string. He did not play obscure hymns or creepy recorded voices saying “Helllo!”
- How’s your scene? (I had to look it up to see what a “scene” was in this context.) My “scene” is not listed, but you can see what the chap thinks of steampunk. And if you want a timeline, it’s here. (Alas, it starts in…2000. Do you feel mondo-creaky old looking at this? I do.)
Odd Lots
- Very cool: a home-made wire stripper that tells you when you’ve cut the insulation precisely as far as necessary.
- I’ve of two minds about the genre of infographics, but this one appears to capture a pretty complicated business in a fairly small space: That fat does not make you fat. (Thanks to Apostle of Eris on LiveJournal for the link.)
- Jim Strickland showed me something startling when I was up in Denver this past Monday: A cylindrical neodymium magnet slowly tumbling as it drifts down a 2′ length of copper pipe. Drop it at the top, and then watch it (against a reasonably bright floor) as it goes. Videos are on YouTube. No mystery; just physics, courtesy Lenz’s Law.
- Also from Jim is a link to some discussion about why McGraw-Hill seems willing to accept $15 iPad-based secondary-ed ebooks instead of $75-a-pop print textbooks. Most of it comes down to eliminating the resale market, and receiving that $15 from every student who ever uses that book. Expect resistance from many quarters, including this one.
- Those who remember the Steeleye Span song “Seven Hundred Elves” from the 70s may be interested to know that it was only the first part of a much longer and much older poem. (Long forum thread; read it all.)
- Here are some peculiar ways to deliver toothpaste, including Crest-flavored pudding and pie filling. No, I don’t understand that one either, unless it falls under the category of “business development.”
- This certainly sounds like a hoax to me, but whether it’s a hoax or not, it might be seed corn for some interesting fiction. (Thanks to Bishop Sam’l Bassett for the link.)
- Read the Wiki piece carefully, and you’ll discover that Graham crackers were invented circa 1829 by a preacher who thought that eating them would discourage masturbation. Oh…ditto corn flakes.
- In conclusion, don’t forget to watch The Puppy Bowl later today! (Football? Wazzat?)
Odd Lots
- Happy Thanksgiving Day to all who celebrate it–and to those who don’t, well, this guy is still thankful that the world is big enough for both of us. In terms of Thanksgiving Day meditations, I’ll simply offer the one I wrote in 2008. I may not ever do better than that.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday File: seedbox, a remote and generally headless system on a high-bandwidth Internet connection, used exclusively to seed torrents in defiance of ISP speed-throttling of BitTorrent users.
- Also pertinent to yesterday’s entry: Penguin Books got into a snit of lender’s remorse, and basically shut down access to its titles previously available to public library patrons through Amazon’s Kindle lending program. Apparently the DRM wasn’t DRM-y enough, and Penguin (through the Overdrive technology) locked its titles out. Precisely what the technical issues are is still unclear, but I’m researching it.
- We have lost Anne McCaffrey, at age 85. She died of a stroke at her home in Ireland on November 21. She was the first woman to earn a Hugo or a Nebula award, and did a great deal to drag SF out of the locker room to which the pulps had led it.
- Having recently become an Android user (via my Droid X2) I have now begun to dream of SparkFun’s Electric Sheep.
- Debsnews now has a wine channel. It’s one way to focus in on specific short videos (example: WalMart’s new $3 wine line) without having to spend a third of your life parked in front of a TV.
- Anybody who’s tried to spread a Ziplock bag with one hand while pouring leftover spaghetti sauce into it with the other may appreciate this gadget. Everybody else, move along.
- Many people are sending me links to stories about canned goods containing greater than acceptable levels of BPA. This is not new news. However, I didn’t know about it until yesterday, right after opening a can of Spam.
- Maybe the new Spam Singles packaging is the answer. No can!
- Carol met Colonel Sanders at the Mayo Clinic back in 1975, and the guy does get around. You can now see him from space. This is not photoshopped, but the real deal. It’s been there since 2006, and consists of 87,000 colored tile “pixels.” (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Make describes a steam-powered bristlebot. Somehow this reminds me of those little scrubbing-bubble guys on the TV commercials.
- There may be another reason (quite apart from battery life) to turn your smartphone’s power off every night. (Thanks to Pamela Boulais for the link.)
- If you’ve never gone up to the Car Talk Web site and looked at the staff credits page, you’re missing out on people you haven’t seen since your study hall attendance-sheet days. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
Talking About Con Crud
I’ve been quiet here in part because Carol and I bought new smartphones on Saturday afternoon: a pair of Droid X2 units with which we are (so far) completely delighted. That said, I’ve discovered that research into the Dalvik VM and bytecode set does not help you learn how to move icons onto your Android desktop. Smartphones don’t come with manuals in the box anymore. Preston Gralla will sell me one on October 5. Until then, my learning process will consist of mildly Web-guided poking around.
More on this later. In the meantime, Michael Covington recently reminded me of a phenomenon I had not thought about in some years: con crud. Basically, people who go to SFF or media/gamer cons often come home with a nasty cold that sometimes borders on flu. Con celebrities have taken to refusing handshakes and hugs for fear of catching it (PvP guru Scott Kurtz is one) but nobody seems to agree on what-all causes it nor how to avoid it.
I’ve gotten con crud more than once. Interestingly, it wasn’t always at SFF cons. I came down with a nasty case after the 1983 (I think) Trenton Computer Festival. And the mother of all con crud episodes for me was a computer trade show in 1992, at which I came down with a bad case of bacterial pneumonia after three days in the PC Techniques show booth. It took some heavy-duty antibiotics and a week flat on my ass in bed to become functional again.
While there’s little agreement online as to causes, there are statistical bumps in the discussion on the following points:
- Not enough sleep. Staying up all night is a form of recreation in itself.
- Physical contact with other people. Hugs, not drugs!
- Bad food. People eat sugar and fat at cons. (Never at home, right?)
- Poor personal hygiene. We’re having too much fun to shower!
Sleep is certainly an issue. When I don’t sleep enough, I get sick. I have noticed that (within my own circles) morning people are generally healthier than night people, and among those I know well enough to ask, night people get way less sleep than morning people. There are of course causality questions here, but I think I can say confidently that the con crowd is dominated by night people.
The notion that fat and sugar suppress your immune system, and the flipside that fruits and veggies and whole grains strengthen it, is unproven and probably nonsense. (If it were true I’m sure I’d be long dead.) Skipping meals entirely may be more of an issue here. Hugs and handshakes may put some loose viruses on your skin, but breathing other people’s air is probably a more potent vector, and anybody who works in a big company cube farm is breathing other people’s viruses at con-scale all day, every day. Poor personal hygiene is an issue, though it may be as simple as not washing your hands as much as you do in mundane life.
I do have a suggested cause that I have not yet seen online: talking too much. Some people talk for a living. Most people work and study largely in silence. Then they go to a con and spend three days and three nights talking almost continuously. By the end of Day 2 of booth duty at early Coriolis show booths I generally felt scratchy in the throat, and when the whole thing was done and over I could barely talk at all. Basically, when you shred your vocal cords all weekend, you provide a stressed environment in your throat that’s easy prey for microorganisms. Not sleeping may then be enough to push you over the edge into serious infection.
If this is true, there’s no easy way around it. Cons are social gatherings, after all, and the real draw are not the exhibits or conference sessions but all the interesting people. My prescription will get some people angry but I think it will work: Talk all you want, but be in bed by midnight and sleep until 9:30. Try it. Let me know if it works.
Odd Lots
- Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and generally acknowledged as the inventor of the ebook, has left us. He was only 64.
- That supernova that popped up in M101 about ten days ago keeps getting brighter, and the 8″ scope is out in the garage, collimated and ready to roll. I have never seen a supernova (mostly because I’ve never hunted for the pikers that have appeared in my lifetime) but this is starting to look too good to miss. Brightness should peak in the next few days, and if the clouds would break here for an evening I think it would be reasonably easy to spot.
- White dwarf stars may be able to exceed the Chandrasekahr Limit by spinning rapidly–and as soon as their rotation slows down sufficiently, they collapse and go supernova. Such stars may be more common than we think, and offer a cool SF gimmick for galaxy-level warfare: Subtract a little rotational energy from a super-Chandrasekar white dwarf, and wham! Supernova-on-demand.
- An earlier article from the same site suggests that such spinning white dwarfs may be messing up a long-established luminosity heuristic for measuring the distance to far-off galaxies. If all similar white dwarf stars collapse and blow up at the same mass, their luminosity may be assumed to be about the same. If more massive stars can delay their destruction by absorbing angular momentum along with accreted mass, the metric fails.
- Getting uranium out of groundwater is a good thing–and when you’re done, you still have the uranium. (In my view, uranium is just as useful as clean water.) I energetically wonder if this process can be generalized. If so, then anyone could become The Man Who Ploughed the Sea.
- Damn, I’ll believe it when I see it, and if I actually see it I may not in fact believe it, but Heathkit is going back into the kit business!
- I’ve never seen this before and I doubt you have either: A razor-sharp composite photo of the Moon’s north pole.
- From whence the above: I could do with more science and less Science Guy, but if you don’t visit NASA Goddard’s Flickr photostream regularly, you are missing out bigtime. (Site virgins, prepare to lose an afternoon…)
- T’hell with home theater: If this thing is quiet, it could be a spectacular desktop for office apps. (Alas, I see no published spec on how loud it is or isn’t.)
- If more ties like this were available, I might wear ties more. (Especially the, er, cable tie.)
- Back in 1948, Bell Labs polled their staff to decide on a name for what may be their most potent invention. Also-rans include the solid triode, crystal triode, and (my favorite) the Tom-Swiftish iotatron. That’s just so much cooler than “transistor.”
- Hmmm. It seems that Yale scientists may be offering me the choice between being a bald head and a fat head. I may stay where I am.
- But, Miles, it’s full of… marshmallows !
Odd Lots
- Does anybody here use true peer-to-peer chat? I don’t use chat much, and when I do it’s with a very small number of people, typically one-to-one. By peer-to-peer I mean via direct connect from one IP to another, without intermediation at the server level, as with things like Trillian, Skype, Jabber, etc. I know that WASTE does this, though I’ve never tried it. What else might work? I don’t want to mount a new server if I can avoid it.
- New research suggests that low-salt diets increase insulin resistance–and thus propel otherwise healthy people toward diabetes. (Via Fat Head.)
- More on Amazon’s rumored Android tablet. Print Replica (as I discussed in yesterday’s entry) has almost nothing to do with it.
- Note well: Sony’s new tablet is not really sideload-able, since the device cannot render content directly from an inserted SD card. You have to copy all material from the card to internal storage. Also, the weird cross-section makes it almost inescapably a landscape machine. No thanks.
- Interesting short piece on the other Delphi–as in, Oracle of.
- For those who asked: The 400W power supply I just bought for my Core 2 Quad is the Antec Neo Eco 400C. So far…love it!
- Having sold out all the TouchPads there were at fire-sale prices, HP now intends to…make some more. Something flaky here: Lose a little money on each sale, and make it up in volume? Doesn’t add up…unless it was a slick and risky attempt to build a demand base.
- Didn’t know this before: Setting a .jpg to quality setting 7 in Photoshop degrades the image’s quality. Stay at 6–or bump to 8.
- How about Han Solo Carbonite Slab ice cubes? Brilliant gimmick, though I wonder (given that the product is marked as “unavailable”) if they’re really out of stock or just didn’t close the deal with Lucasfilm.
Paradoxical Insomnia
For all the time I’ve been struggling with insomnia, I had never heard of “paradoxical insomnia” until Michael Covington recently called it to my attention.
Sleep is a weird business from top to bottom. I’ve encountered a lot of that weirdness, especially since 2001, when my company began to implode. I’ve never been a strong sleeper, but after that I began having nights when I might sleep for no more than an hour…
…or so it seemed at the time.
One of the weirdnesses of the post-Coriolis era is that, for as little as I thought I slept, I seemed to do reasonably well during the day. I certainly wasn’t at my best, but for the most part I wasn’t falling asleep in my chair. I wonder now if I experienced paradoxical insomnia, which is an unusual sleep disorder in which patients feel like they have slept little (or not at all) when in fact they slept adequately, if not normally. In paradoxical insomnia, a patient perceives time spent awake incorrectly. He or she might feel like it takes an hour or more to fall asleep when in fact it took only a few minutes. Early-morning awakenings during which hours seem to pass may again span only a few minutes. The condition is poorly understood. Researchers now think that patients are dreaming that they’re awake. This may seem bizarre to people who sleep normally, but let me tell you, I understand completely.
Here’s why: In my case, at least, the border between wakefulness and dreaming is rubbery. I’ve had some success with a technique I read in one book or another, which involves imagining some quiet activity that reflects daily life. Counting sheep may work for people who live and work with sheep. I’ve seen live sheep half a dozen times in my life, and you can have ’em. What works for me is imagining things like taking walks, sorting books on bookshelves, and having boring conversations with unexceptional people. Although I have “interesting” dreams about one shot in ten (along with the very occasional lulu) the vast majority of my dreams are very much like that: walking alone or sometimes with a nameless companion, or doing domestic things of little consequence, like taking towels out of the washing machine and putting them in the dryer.
I know that the technique works because a time or two I recall sliding from guided meditation into a dream without any change of scenery. I know that it was a dream because it stopped following the script. Here’s the best example: Jeff and a nameless and poorly imagined female companion are walking down a country road on a generic summer evening, talking about dumb stuff. No mosquitoes.
JEFF: Hey, there’s a sycamore tree! I like sycamore trees.
COMPANION: Me too.
JEFF: My grandfather planted one in the back yard when I was a kid. It had the biggest damned leaves.
COMPANION: I remember those.
JEFF: And seed balls. We used to throw them at each other.
COMPANION: That must have been fun.
JEFF: It was. We used to be able to burn the leaves in the street.
COMPANION (Turning): Jeff, what do you want most from God?
JEFF: Unconditional love.
Bzzzzt! In my directed meditations my imaginary companions do not ask me questions. So when my imaginary companions begin taking control, I know (in hindsight) that I’m dreaming.
In the grim days after Coriolis went under, I had plenty of experience lying awake much of the night and staring at the wall. At some point it became part of ordinary life, and thus completely unremarkable dream-fodder. I also seem to slide from conscious thought into dream states very smoothly. This is why dreaming about lying awake is no stretch at all, and may have continued long after I had gotten over the loss. It may continue to this day. Short of monitoring my own brain waves, I’m not sure how to tell.
But boy, it’s probably better than talking beavers.
Odd Lots
- The IBM PC turns 30 today. I had a dual-floppy 5150 and loved it. Hard to believe it came home almost thirty years ago.
- The number of retractions of dead-wrong and perhaps fraudulent scientific papers is surging, rising fifteen-fold in the last ten years. So what’s a citizen scientist to do? Probably not buy into just anything that might be in a peer-reviewed paper. (Maybe we need more peers. Or better ones.)
- Good example: There’s little or no evidence that salt causes hypertension, but that doesn’t stop certain scientists and many government functionaries from insisting that it does. (If salt did cause hypertension, I’d be…dead.)
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-I-Played-Scrabble-With-An-Expert Department: ort, which is a fancy but short word for leftover food scraps. As in, “Yesterday at 12:15 the junior-high lunchroom became an ort cloud…”
- The Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight just before dawn, but a nearly full moon will drown out many or most of the fainter traces. Hey, get up early and plop into a deck chair for a while. Assuming a clear sky, you’re almost guaranteed to see something. And there’s always next year. (Carol and I have been watching them as weather allows since 1969.)
- This is still extremely new, but it has promise: an AbiWord plug-in that exports epub files from within AbiWord. (I haven’t tested it yet.)
- Ditto for Open Office Writer. (Haven’t tested it either, but thanks to Sam’l Bassett for the link.)
- Are you the kind of reader who reads the ending in the bookstore before buying the book? (I used to be.) Apparently spoilers don’t spoil the fun of reading novels as much as most people assume.
- Who doesn’t like control panels? Here’s a wonderful album of panels from every sort of machine, from the Space Shuttle to the 1966 TV series Batmobile. Don’t miss Part 2. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the links.)
- Wow. You used to be able to buy dynamite at the hardware store…at least if you were a farmer.
- Scott Adams thinks that boredom lies behind a lot of creativity. As we become less bored, we grow less creative. He may be right. But…how do we solve the Boredom Shortage? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I like butter. I like it a lot. But maybe not this much. (Thanks again to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Don’t just have your survivors give you a 21-gun salute. Be the 21-gun salute!
