astronomy
- I’m behind on a great many things, especially fiction writing and replying to email, so bear with me until I get dug out from under the pile. Exchanging offices within a house is precisely the same as moving two offices, and that means a lot of boxes and a lot of bother, exploding intercoms being the least of it.
- I didn’t expect this wine to be as good as it actually is. About $11.
- The weather’s been beautiful here, so yesterday I was going to get out on the back deck with my Icom 736 and work the world. That was, of course, the day that sunspots basically vanished on the visible face of the Sun. What does it mean to have solar flares but no sunspots? Nobody knows.
- Thanks to many people (Jim Strickland being the first) who wrote to tell me about a “smart sand” project at MIT that is the first step toward the sort of nanoreplicator I postulated in my Drumlins stories: Tap in a 256-bit code, and some “smart dust” (very smart) in a stone bowl assembles something for you. I love it when my crazy dreams come true!
- Single-atom nanotransistors can now be reliably made, rather than hunted for. (Thanks to Roy harvey for the link.)
- From Michael Covington comes a link to a fascinating article about the other kind of abduction: abductive logic. If you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, don’t miss it!
- The Colorado state law that led Amazon to nuke my Associates account has been declared unconstitional. No word from Amazon as to whether I can have my account back.
- I would probably buy one of these if I could find one in stock somewhere.
- Jack Tramiel has left us, having created quite a raft of famous computers, including the very best forgotten computer ever.
- I checked the date on this one, but it was nine days too late to assume it’s a hoax. One might argue that solar panels are more elegant, but you can’t make buffalo spaghetti sauce in a solar panel.
- I’ve seen more dumb YouTube posts than I’m willing to admit, but this one takes the cake for sheer willful stupidity. I knew how this worked in 1959, when I was 7.
- Kids, this is futurism. All we need now are better tacos.
- 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.)
- For the several people who asked: The odor-free carpet pad that we used in carpeting the lower level here is called Napa Carpet Cushion, from Leggett & Platt.
- Apart from N&P’s Fallen Angels, Bob Tucker’s Ice and Iron, and possibly Mackelworth’s Tiltangle, what other SF novels involve an ice age on Earth in the near(ish) future? I have a concept that capitalizes on all my recent paleoclimate research, and I’d like to see if it’s already been done.
- Whoops, found a list just before posting this. I clearly have some reading to do, assuming I can find any of these items. What are your personal favorites?
- Today’s sunspot number is very close to zero. I haven’t seen sunspot activity this low in some time, and here we are supposedly barreling into the Cycle 24 maximum. The sunspot number is going in the wrong direction. 6M DX is evidently not in my immediate future.
- Joe Flamini and Jack Smith are both pretty sure that the mysterious Comco gizmo I presented in my February 6, 2012 entry is an early remote control unit for commercial and public service radio systems, allowing control of a transmitter or repeater through leased phone lines. More on this in a future entry.
- Having read briefly about hydraulic analog computing in a magazine decades ago, I built hydraulic calculators and computers into the technological background for my novel The Cunning Blood. Turns out the Russians did it on a pretty large scale back in the years running up to WWII. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.)
- From the You-Probably-Couldn’t-Do-That-Today Department: The flipside of the Chad Mitchell Trio’s 1963 hit kid/Christmas 45 “The Marvelous Toy” was “The Bonny Streets of Fyve-I-O, about a colonel who shoots one of his own captains for insubordination.
- Tucows (does anybody even remember Tucows?) is launching a contract-free mobile service using Sprint’s network. The rates are interesting, and favor people who want smartphones but just don’t use them much, and data little or not at all.
- The Maker Shed has a $99 Geiger counter kit that allows logging of pulses through a serial port, and detects both beta and gamma radiation.
- A little gruesome maybe, but it’s real: When we lived in California in the late ’80s, there were reports of sneakers washing up on Santa Cruz area beaches…with human feet still inside them. At the time we assumed drug violence, but there’s a less scurrilous if no less ghastly explanation for a phenomenon that’s still happening. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Mmmph. Military combat aircraft should be able to fly in more air than we’re used to, no? Sweden had this problem recently. (I’m guessing that Saab has it too, now.) Thanks to Aki Peltonen for the link.
- The name of my company, Copperwood Media, LLC, was inspired by a set of traces on an old PCB that just happened to look (a little) like a tree. I had an artist draw me a better copper tree for the logo, way back in 2000. Now Rich Rostrom sends a link to the odd tradition in some parts of the UK of hammering coins into cracks in trees until the notion of “copperwood” takes on a whole new meaning.
- Some very nice steampunk watches and jewelry. “Chronambulator” is a great word, whether or not you’ve got a steampunk gizmo to hang it on. Note also the level-reading absinthe hip-flask. (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.)
- 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 !
- Fairness requires that I point this out: An article in the Guardian that I cited in my last Odd Lots was in error. NASA had nothing to do with the paper in question, which was written in his spare time by a postdoc who happens to work for NASA. That makes the paper no less ridiculous, but at least NASA isn’t doing stuff down that far along the dumb spectrum.
- And I’ll give this project a fair shot, though I would prefer to see NASA do this on a non-exclusive basis rather than for a particular publisher only. No word on whether and what Tor/Forge is paying for the deal. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Samsung has cited Kubrick’s film 2001 in a patent prior art case. (Engadget has a shorter entry with a still.) I wasn’t aware that fictional concepts can be raised in prior art challenges, but evidently it was done back in the 1960s when waterbeds were coming into common use. Robert A. Heinlein had described a waterbed in his 1942 novel Beyond This Horizon, and it was cited in a prior art challenge that cost Charles Hall his patent on the waterbed in 1968.
- My computer books and articles have been cited in patent applications 37 times, but I don’t know if it’s possible to look up prior art case citations. Will have to research this.
- While we’re citing citations, I was recently cited in a book by Paul J. Nahin, Number Crunching: Taming Unruly Computational Problems from Mathematical Physics to Science Fiction . The citation, on page 281, briefly describes my reprints of the Carl & Jerry stories from Popular Electronics. Alas, he cites me as “Copperhead Press” but mentions of the boys are way down in the last year and I’m glad they were mentioned at all. Thanks to Bruce Baker for letting me know.
- If you’re interested in hurricanes, here’s a nice summary page with automatically updating satellite imagery and lots of interesting graphics. The satellite imagery can be animated to show changes over the last several hours.
- I didn’t think this was new news, but apparently star formation is slowing down, as material that was originally hydrogen is “locked up” in white dwarfs, neutron stars, and heavy elements, even after a supernova has blasted a star’s substance back into interstellar space. I didn’t think that 70% of a supernova’s mass fails to return to the gas pool, but that seems to be the case.
- Jim Mischel sends along a link to a marvelous homebrew bandsaw made mostly of wood. (The blade and the hardware may be inescapably metallic.) The site as a whole has lots of interesting woodpunk concepts and projects. I especially like the wooden gear template generator, which calculates a gear outline that can be printed to paper and then cut out from wood.
- Whew. We get the message, guys.
- 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!
- Here’s another take on the EasyBits GO debacle, from a guy who used to work at Easybits. Even if it’s not a trojan, it’s still crapware, and careless crapware at that. The Microsoft connection is intriguing: MS will soon be reviewing the entire Skype ecosystem, and may decide to do some decontamination. I don’t think it will go well for EasyBits.
- Down in the trenches in the Carb Wars, people who yell, “A calorie is a calorie! It’s just the laws of thermodynamics!” don’t understand thermodynamics. I’ve known this for years. Here’s a good explanation. (Thanks to David Stafford for the link.)
- Mike Reith saw a pure white squirrel awhile back, up near Denver. I had never heard of non-albino white squirrels before, but they exist, and appear to be spreading due to evolutionary selection–by humans.
- Maybe it wasn’t us who extinctified the Pleistocene megafauna. (Or at least our paleolithic ancestors.) Maybe it was the Sun. Scary business. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.)
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Last-Week Department: prosopagnosia, the inability to recognizes faces or familiar objects. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for calling it to my attention.)
- From Pete Albrecht comes a link to a video of a train wreck caused by a tornado–with the wrinkle that the wreck is filmed from a security cam on one of the freight cars. Toward the end we see a derailed tanker striking sparks as it’s dragged against the rails. Made me wonder what would have happened had it been full of LP gas…
- Forgive the vulgarity and the pervasive comics/movies influence, but this is a point that needs to be made, and textual fiction is no exception. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- I like sprouts. I haven’t eaten them for ten years. Here’s why. Alas, being organic doesn’t help. (Thanks once again to Pete.)
- Here’s a cogent (and funny) illustration of a great deal of what’s wrong with science these days. Hint: It’s not science. Most of the problem is the butthead festival we call the media. (The rest is the grant system.)
- As I write this mid-afternoon on May 2, 2011, we’re in the thick of something approaching a blizzard here on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain. This is probably the coldest spring here since we arrived in April 2003. The beautiful warm weather of May, 2002 (when we first discovered Colorado Springs) might have been a fluke. Or maybe this is. No one can tell me.
- Here’s an interesting take on the value of media images as symbols, and to some extent supports what I said yesterday about Bin Laden’s death: We did our best not to leave images around to be turned into revered icons. That, coupled with the native Muslim caution about idolatry, will limit the man’s future power as a martyr.
- Fascinating bit of Old West history: Bass Reeves, one of the most successful US Marshals of his or any era, was black. (Thanks to Nick Hodges for the pointer.)
- VE3EN is losing his job mid-year, and his marvelous solar data aggregator may go dark. That would be a tragedy, though I’m not sure what can be done.
- I think I’m going to make one of these.
- Would a power-cord tethered high-resolution touchscreen all-in-one make a good armchair ebook reader? A smaller unit like this one could be, and would provide enough resolution to read art-heavy PDF-based ebooks without eyestrain, even with old eyes like mine. Now if they’d just allow us to take the legs off…
- Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter are now visible in the east just before sunrise, and if you look quick you’ll see them all. (Mercury is the tricky one.)
- If you like volcanoes, Oregon State University has a nice aggregator for eruption news. There are some terrific photos here, and scary ones.
- Is this what it means to “sit on your brains”?
- Here’s a nice graph of the smoothed sunspot number for the last four solar cycles (21-24.) Our current Cycle 24 is still young, but it stands fair to be the weakest solar cycle in 200 years. It may mean nothing, but 200 years ago we saw cycles like that frequently and were in the worst part of the Little Ice Age.
- Darrin Chandler pointed out Maqetta to me: an HTML5 WYSIWYG Web editor, free and open-source. And from IBM, yet. Haven’t tried it but hope to in coming days. Has anybody else played with it at any length? I use Kompozer for Web work right now, and it’s not evolving very quickly, let’s say.
- And what we may need more than Maqetta for Web pages is Maqetta for epub ebooks. I remain appalled at how much kafeutherin’ it still takes to do an epub with a cover image and even the simplest forms of paragraph differentiation. (Like no first indent to indicate a new scene in a story.) People continue to hand-code ebooks. This is idiocy to the seventeenth power.
- Sometimes you read a short, casual mention of something in a book or article, and the weirdness of it doesn’t really hit you. So stand ready for some pretty boggling astronomical weirdness: A 400-meter asteroid that moves in a horseshoe-shaped orbit. And guess who’s in the gap of the horseshoe?
- At our most recent nerd party, my new friend Aaron Spriggs mentioned Chisanbop, a method of finger arithmetic created by the Koreans and little known here in the US. This is very cool, and would be extremely handy on fictional planets (like my own Hell and the Drumlins world) where electronic computation either doesn’t work and hasn’t been invented.
- A brilliant new method of imaging underground structures like magma plumes shows that the Yellowstone supervolcano is bigger than we thought. The imaging is done by measuring electrical conductivity in the rock rather than the transmission of physical (seismic) vibration. The images give us no additional information on how close (or far) we may be to another eruption, but it may help us to interpret what little data we already have.
- Hoo-boy, here’s a problem I don’t think anyone anticipated in the wake of Japan’s recent catastrophic tsunami: Safes full of (soggy) money washed out of individual homes are now washing up on the seashore.
- Okay, I promised more about circuses and steampunk today, but odd lots are piling up.
- From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: spudger, a small tool like a miniature putty knife that helps you pry the backs off of watches and electronics, like the monitor I repaired last month. (Thanks to Tom Roderick for alerting me to its existence.)
- Also from the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday (ok, last month) Department: algophilist , a person who takes sexual pleasure in pain. Broader and more ancient term than “masochist” or “sadist.” (One such appears in Drumlin Circus.) And to think I first thought it was a guy who liked algorithms…
- Given that Amazon buries the cost of Kindle’s 3G connection in publisher content fees, the lack of graphics (big) within text (small) makes sense. I always thought it was about the crappy low-res e-ink display. It’s not. Here’s how it works.
- Alas, this may be too late for me. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- From Bill Higgins comes a link to a list (alas, not searchable) of the 200 Borders bookstores that will be disappeared shortly. (PDF) Bogglingly, neither of the Colorado Springs stores are on the list, even the small, always empty, and mostly pointless one at Southgate. I will miss the one in Crystal Lake, though.
- Guys who come up with schemes like this talk about avoiding government censorship and such, but what will actually drive adoption (if it ever happens) is anonymous file sharing. And nertz, I outlined a novel a couple of years ago describing a technology very much like it. The late George Ewing called this The Weaselrats Effect.
- Years ago I remember reading somewhere that steam calliopes are hard to keep tuned because the metal whistles expand as steam passes through them, throwing their notes off enough to easily hear. Can’t find a reference now. Running a calliope on compressed air from a tank might be problematic as well, because air stored under pressure gets cold when it’s released. Surprisingly (perhaps unsurprisingly) good technical information on calliopes is hard to come by.
- Whoa! If you’re interested in solar astronomy, do not miss this video of new monster sunspot 1158 forming out of nothing. It will give you a very crisp feeling for the tubulent nature of the photosphere. Those aren’t spots: They’re solar hurricanes!
- If you’re reasonably high-latitude (45+ degrees) look north after dark for the next few days. That giant sunspot 1158 is spitting a great deal of energetic chaos in our direction, and the sky could light up as a result.
- Samsung has announced a new, larger 10.1″ Galaxy Tab, running Android Honeycomb. Details are sparse, but I’m wondering if we’re not ultimately going to see the slate market divide into 7″ and 10″ form factors.
- Beating cancer may mean we’ll have to be three and a half feet tall, like these mutant Ecuadorians. I’d be good with that–as long as everyone else was three and a half feet tall as well.
- Gawker Media has a new Web UI that I find so annoying that I’ve mostly stopped reading their sites, which include Io9 and Gizmodo. I could do without sites like Jalopnik and Jezebel, but damn, I’m gonna miss those other two.
- I have yet to find a good popular history of refrigeration. Somehow I doubt people are going to feel sorry for me about that.
