- Older people apparently lose some of their ability to retain memories via poor sleep. So how much worse will it be someday for younger people who simply refuse to be in bed for more than six hours at a shot?
- Related, and also from UC Berkeley: Refusing to sleep makes you selfish and grouchy, and in some cases incapable of sustaining a relationship.
- Steve Jobs may have died from a high-fructose vegan diet. We were killer apes long before we were peaceful farmers, and we became peaceful farmers because it was that or go extinct. I’ve made peace with my inner killer ape; in fact, he’s got a chain around his neck and he does what I tell him–which is mostly shut up and eat your steak.
- Or krill. The total mass of all humans on Earth is far less than that of all krill. (287 megatons vs. 500 megatons.) So get out there and eat your krill!
- The World Trade Organization has given Antigua permission to ignore US copyright law and sell copyrighted works (movies and music, I’m guessing) without paying squat to copyright holders. The provision under which this was granted was approved by most nations, including the US.
- A standard deviation here, a standard deviation there, and sooner or later you’re talking new physics.
- The alphas doth protest too much, methinks. (See yesterday’s entry.)
- For more on tribal psychology and how alphas use it to dominate and exploit their people, see Colin Wilson’s book Rogue Messiahs. Also, virtually anything by the formidable Jared Diamond.
- If I didn’t love Newegg before (I did) I sure love them now.
- What? Pez still exists? I broke my last Pez dispenser by trying to fill it with candy corn in (I think) 1958. I might be a little more careful with one of these.
- Why do women hesitate to date short men? My theory: It’s a primal worry that short men may be Neanderthals. (I’m serious. Ok, half serious. 47% serious? What percentage of Neander/Sap pregnancies were sterile? That serious.)
- The Neanderthals were all over Siberia, and scientists have found that present-day Siberians have cold-climate adaptations that most of the world’s population do not have. Now, where d’ya think that might have come from? (Dating short men?)
science
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Juggling, thing-throwing robots are a major theme of my newly completed novel, Ten Gentle Opportunities. It’s a good bet they’ll be deployed in Disney theme parks eventually. I’m not sure why, but I find this very depressing.
- I read this when it first appeared ten years ago and I still think it’s true: DRM does not and cannot do what it’s supposed to do. This from Microsoft, heh. I sure wish they’d quit trying.
- Here’s a good quick survey of Linux window managers, starting out by explaining the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment. (We don’t have this problem in the Windows world.)
- Smilodons and bear dogs somehow managed to coexist. What I don’t understand is how I lived sixty years without ever hearing the term “bear dog.”
- I dunno. This reminds me a little of Cold Fusion: We all want it desperately, but it just seems so damned unlikely. (Thanks nonetheless to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Facebook enforces a sort of least-common-denominator social behavior on people, and is thus stressful. In other words, everybody’s got a hot button, and if you have enough friends people will get pissed at you no matter what you say. The people who don’t care are probably the only ones who should be on Facebook.
- Not space-efficient, but very cool in its way: the Moebius clothes hanger. (Big question: If you buy two will they breed in the closet?)
- This is the heaviest thing that Amazon will ship for free. It weighs a ton. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)
- If you still have a Commodore 64 (or something like it) try this one-line BASIC program. Amazing.
- Yes, except that if I drink as much as I want, I wouldn’t sleep. (I barely sleep without drinking it at all.)
- Everything you didn’t really want to know about Gangnam Style and didn’t feel like asking. The funniest thing about the video is that it doesn’t go anywhere near the ritzy Gangnam area that it’s named for, though I would expect only Koreans to get that part.
- Oh–and the name of the dance that PSY and his gang are doing is (as best I can tell) “the invisible horse dance.” It’s a natural at weddings. Watch out, chicken dance–your days are numbered.
Odd Lots
- Here’s more evidence that you should never, but never use Adobe Reader, especially on Linux. I haven’t used it for a couple of years, and if a machine comes into my care with that bugfarm on it I uninstall it immediately. I tried the free version of Tracker Software’s PDF XChange, then bought the pro version, and I’ve been using it ever since. Highly recommended.
- No matter what PDF reader you use, make very sure that you disable Javascript in the reader. JS is probably the second most dangerous thing in the software world right now, after unbounded string functions. Fortunately, you can turn JS off a lot easier than you can spot software that still uses unbounded string functions.
- Having hand-made countless hookup wire jumpers for breadboard work in my life (or at least since 1975, when I first got a push-down breadboard together) I was pleased to see a brilliant hack in Make: soak the glue off a block of ordinary desk stapler staples with acetone, and they make perfect (if short) jumpers.
- From the same trip through the Make Blog comes a goofy and rather literal “third hand” for inspection, soldering, etc. If one of those came to, um, hand, I might even try it, though I think I’d stop short of the nail polish.
- I’ve seen a fair number of Wi-Fi ad hoc networks come and go since I got into Wi-Fi in 1999, and all of them were far more trouble than they were worth. Byzantium looks better on a number of counts, and I wonder if any readers have tried it.
- I used to burn these in my wood stove, and now we’re told that the entire global economy rests on them. It probably does. Alas, they’re mostly not made of wood anymore.
- Also from Slate: Kids who passed the marshmallow test not only did better in nearly all aspects of life, but they weigh less at age 45. Their super-power may be simple impulse control, or it may be more than that: I’ve long suspected that some people are simply addicted to wanting. If it isn’t the marshmallows it’ll be something else.
- From Tom Roderick comes word that we’ve finally gotten a maser to work at room temperature.
- There is a new PDF-based magazine devoted to the Raspberry Pi board. Considering that it’s ad-free and they’re not charging for it, I think it’s pretty well done.
Odd Lots
- For readers who are in the Colorado Springs area: All Breeds Rescue is hosting the 14th annual Romp in the Park this Saturday, August 11, at Norris Penrose Event Center. The event runs from 10:30 AM to 4:30 PM. Carol will be working it, and I should be there midafternoon with QBit.
- The Curiosity rover has a trick I didn’t hear about until after it landed: Its treads imprint a Morse code pattern in the sand or soft soil it crosses. The pattern spells JPL. Now that’s DX!
- From Ernie Marek comes a link to DRB’s very visual article on Project Orion, including a sketch of Niven/Pournelle’s Michael spacecraft from Footfall. I would have called it OBB, for “Old Boom-Boom.”
- Weird clouds are a minor interest of mine, and here’s a compendium from Wired that I missed when it first appeared in 2009.
- New Zealand’s Tongariro volcano just erupted–and it was a complete surprise. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned Erik Klemetti’s Eruptions blog on Wired before, but it’s well worth following if you have any interest at all in volcanic phenomena. Erik has a helluva constituency: The comments occasionally contain better insights and links than the blog itself!
- Memories sometimes just appear out of nowhere, and the other day I remembered these. My next thought was, Nah, you imagined that! But they did exist, and when I was 13 or 14 they were first-run and I used them.
- Ballotpedia has a fascinating listing of the net worth of congresspeople and senators. First insight: We are ruled by multimillionares. I am not disturbed that some of our representatives are multimillionares. I am disturbed that virtually all of them are. Second insight: Compare the net worth of Democratic vs. Republican senators. Things are not what you’d expect.
- From the Hardware WTF File: The ASUS Transformer Prime’s otherwise excellent keyboard dock does not have a delete key. Shift-Backspace is as close as it gets.
- And on the outside chance that you too have a Transformer Prime keyboard dock, here’s a list of keyboard shortcuts.
- Newsweek will probably cease print publication later this year. A lot of people have never forgotten their mean-spirited and idiotic 2009 cover story, “The Case for Killing Granny,” and I personally cannot wait to see that thing rot in its grave.
- David Plotz does not like August. Me, I could do without March.
Kids as Parametric Oscillators
Back in June, when Carol and I were in Chicago, we took our nieces to the school playground across the big field behind my sister’s house. We pushed them on the swings, as usual, and I considered that both girls are tall and muscular for their ages. So I asked, “Katie, do you know how to pump?”
“What’s pump?”
“It’s pushing yourself on a swing so nobody else has to push you!”
She looked at me funny. She does that a lot; it’s part of the Uncle Jeff job description. So while pushing her I prepared to answer the obvious question: How do I do that, Uncle Jeff?
I stood there for a second before I realized that I had not pumped a swing for, well, decades. I wasn’t entirely sure I remembered how to do it. I gave Katie an extra big push and jumped onto the swing next to hers.
Shazam! The mind may forget…the body remembers! In thirty seconds I was going way high, and was devising my tutorial for the scarily bright little girl three feet to my left:
As you go forward, pull back on the chains and stretch your feet out. When you start to go back, stop pulling on the chains and pull your feet underneath you.
Wait a minute. Wait one damned minute! How does that work? I mean, I’m not pushing against the ground or anything else, and not hurling reaction mass. I realized that while the body remembered clearly how to pump a swing, the mind could not explain it.
I vaguely and anciently recalled reading something about a swing with a kid on it acting as a parametric oscillator, but the details were just gone. My guess at the time was a good one: When you pump a swing, you’re raising and lowering your center of mass a little by “bending” the pendulum, synchronized to the timing of the swing’s motion. That adds energy during the forward motion of the swing. There are explanations all over the Web, but the one I found by Dr. William Case at Grinnell College was the best, including several short video clips.
It’s an amazingly subtle business.
I’m kicking myself now for not thinking to try the obvious enhancement, which is pushing forward on the chains at the rear extreme of motion. Next time.
Katie didn’t quite get it but she gave it a good shot (heck, I was at least six before my cousin Diane taught me circa 1958) and with a little practice she’ll remember it well past her sixtieth birthday in 2066, and possibly even into the 22nd Century.
Some things are just timeless.
Odd Lots
- I hit a milestone the other day: 40,000 words on Ten Gentle Opportunities, which is at least halfway there and maybe (if I’m willing to settle for a 75,000 word story) more than halfway.
- One of my readers sent a link to a page describing how to install the Insight debugger under Linux Mint. As my ASM freak friends will recall, I no sooner described Insight in Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition than Debian pulled it out of their distribution. Supposedly this method will also work for newer versions of Ubuntu. I need to test the repository under both distros, and will report when I do.
- There’s a new nova in Sagittarius. (Is that redundant?) Mag 7.8–which is easy to see with binoculars, if you can separate it from the stellar mosh pit in which it appeared. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
- Michael Covington sent a Google Ngram for the words “whosever” and “whoever’s” indicating that “whosever” has been on the run for a couple of centuries. It became the minority player about 1920 and has been down in the mud since about 1960.
- Ok, I agree: This is the most brilliant kitchen gadget since the salad spinner. Or before.
- I used to do this a lot, though I haven’t done it since 1977: pull the guts out of a photocopier. This guy’s blog, by the way, is news to me but should be on every techie’s blogroll. (Thanks to Jack Smith K8ZOA for the link.)
- Haven’t heard much about software radio recently. Ars Technica just had a nice overview piece on it. The hardware keeps getting better, but all the promised weirdness (including new types of pirate radio) hasn’t happened yet. My theory: Wi-Fi is just a better weirdness magnet.
- Foxconn is releasing a fanless nano-PC toward the end of summer, and I like the looks of it, at least if it’s got something better than an Atom in it. Roughly 7.5″ X 5.25″ X 1.5″. No optical drive. 5-in-1 card reader on the front panel. Under $300.
- Talk about nutty brilliance for film promotion: RC drones in the shape of superhero-style flying people to hype the film Chronicle, which is evidently about…flying people. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- To inflate a Buckyball, just use a laser.
- This sweet merlot (scroll down) was lots better than I thought it would be, especially for a hot summer evening’s barbecue. May be hard to find outside Colorado. No least hint of concord grape, for you mutant-blueberry purists. About $15.
- Yet another sign that we may be winning the Fat Wars: Fat-free dressing is bad for you.
- Still yet another sign may be that the grocery store near our condo outside Chicago carries a sort of spreadable lard called “smalec.” This is the best-kept secret in the food world; it took me ten minutes to even find a picture of it. It was brought here by Polish immigrants and is no less healthy than butter, though I have no clue as to its taste.
- As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, well, the latest home hazard is swallowing loose bristles from your grill brush. My brush is at least five years old and failing. Looking for another technique. (Again, thanks to Pete Albrecht for pointing it out.)
- This sure sounds like a hoax, but there could be a zombie apocalypse theme park in Detroit’s future. The concept suggests that time’s about up for the zombie craze, so I’d better get my novel (which contains dancing zombies) shambling on to completion before the whole thing caves in.
Odd Lots
- 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.
Odd Lots
- Here’s something you could give your geeky sweetie for Valentine’s Day next year: A giant pink 3-D printable heart made of gears. I can’t quite see enough of the mesh to know if the gears actually turn. Someone in the 3-D printing community might know more.
- I certainly didn’t expect this: One of my manuscripts is in the University of Kansas collection of Ted Sturgeon’s personal papers. (Look for item 61b.) It’s the Clarion first draft of “Our Lady of the Endless Sky,” which I wrote at the workshop, the story that went on to be my first professional sale in SF.
- My Favorite Extinct Creature of the Month: Cynognathus, which was half-wolf, half-tiger, half-dinosaur, and all trouble. (No wonder we’re descended from him.)
- From Tom Roderick comes word of a Harvard engineering project that assembles robot bees on a little scaffold only a little bigger than a quarter. Each bee weighs about 90 mg. The bees interest me less than the assembly technique, which suggests that we have barely scraped the surface in the micromanufacturing arena.
- I was having a hard time finding news reports on the killer cold weather in Europe (my older nephew is there now, studying at the London Business School) until I happened upon Ice Age Now. Good aggregator on cold weather issues, to which the MSM is peculiarly averse these days.
- This may be true if you’re a trilobite. It may be less true if you’re a jellyfish.
- From the Tell-Me-Something-I-Didn’t-Already-Know Department: My hometown has the most corruption convictions of any city in the country. Backstory: I used to repair Xerox machines in City Hall circa 1975. Nobody pays attention to the Xerox repairman. But the Xerox repairman was paying a great deal of attention to City Hall. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Also from Pete Albrecht comes a link to something I might characterize as The Couture from the Black Lagoon.
- Bill Higgins points us to a brief collection of rejected Tom Swift, Jr novels.
- The person ahead of me at the Safeway autocheckout machine did not pull his receipt, so when I grabbed my bag and ran earlier today I took the wrong one. What I found was evidence of someone on the Cross Purposes Diet: three line items, of which two were Atkins bars. The third was DONUTS BULK. Good luck, dude.
Odd Lots
- Of all the essential elements of science, proving causation is by far the hardest. Correlation only points in a direction that further research should take; it has no value in and of itself. (The title of the article is very hokey, by the way: Science is not failing us. Human ignorance–and corruption–are interfering with the scientific process.)
- Marvelously wrought steampunk playing cards. (Thanks to Bill Cherepy for the link.)
- I went to high school with one of these guys. (Joe Lill.) Very impressive piece of work. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht–another high school colleague–for the link.)
- I got one of these for Christmas from Lee Hart. We’ll soon see if I can still write COSMAC binary machine code in my head, 35 years later. F8 FF A2…
- Carol presented me with Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and I will report after I finish it. Pinker’s stuff is always worth reading, and I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time.
- The Ropers (my sister Gretchen, Bill, and her girls) gave me one of these for Christmas, and having tested it on a few Meccano parts downstairs, I suspect it may turn out to be the best hex nut starter I’ve ever had.
- This is the first waterproof (more or less) tablet I’ve ever seen, and in my preferred 4:3 format to boot. And a MicroSD slot for sideloading! Details are still sparse, but it’s the first CES 2012 announcement that hasn’t made me yawn.
- I bought a Nook Color last week; more in upcoming posts. I heard today that you can now get a Nook Color for $99 or a Nook Simple Touch for free with a one-year subscription to the New York Times or People. I don’t know if this is good for the industry or not, but it may well do wonderful things for the Nook’s market share.
- There are challenges to living in the best Effin town in Ireland. (But nothing like those of a certain town in Austria.) Thanks to G. McDavid for the link.
- I offer this interesting piece as a glimpse into my ongoing research into the drivers of climate. I have long intuited that climate is a chaotic system, and we see evidence of two states in recent geological history. What the attractors are, and whether there are other states are questions of enormous importance, as is the question of how bad a change to the other known state would be. Note well: My tolerance of Climate Madness is now close to zero. Please limit comments to the points made in the article. If you wander into politics or comment angrily your posts will be deleted without hesitation or regret.
Odd Lots
- The Nook Tablet is no longer rootable, thanks to a recent stealth update applied automatically when the device connects to the Internet. The big deal with the mod is that sideloaded apps can no longer be installed; all you get are what’s available from the B&N app store.
- Lose a few, win a few: Amazon no longer blocks rival ebook apps on its Kindle Fire almost-a-tablet.
- I always roll my eyes when people say things like <YEAR> will be the Year of the <WHATEVER>. However, I’m inclined to believe that Android may finally begin coming of age in 2012, and I’m hoping to score a 10″ ICS tablet once I find one with an external card slot and (ideally) USB charging.
- Xoom 2/Xyboard is off my list because it doesn’t have an external card slot. I also agree with the review (having a Verizon-issued Droid X2 now) that the Verizon app store is hideous.
- This may well be the smallest possible USB thumb drive. No, I don’t want one. I might inhale it.
- Joe Bryer, who sent me the coal samples I described yesterday, has posted some nice videos on YouTube about using coal for home heat.
- The chemical structure of coal (granting that it’s not a uniform material but a mix of many hydrocarbon compounds) looks something like this. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for spotting this for me.)
- My very talented Taos Toolbox 2011 colleague Lisa Nohealani Morton had her name tattoed on her arm–in binary. I myself am no stranger to binary, but if you don’t believe me you can translate it using a binary-to-text translator.
- What if you’d been at my high school lunch table in the spring of 1970? This is what you would have seen. I boggle a little at my then-habit of drinking milk and lemonade at the same meal, but I’ve done (and worn) far weirder things in my life.
- Be careful what stuffed animals you pose with over at the photography studio, especially for your Christmas photo cards. Peace on Earth and all that…
- 42% of the 100% must think they’re part of the 1%. Or something. (Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.)
- Offered without comment: The continents can be rearranged to form a chicken.
