{"id":1277,"date":"2010-05-29T17:44:31","date_gmt":"2010-05-29T21:44:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1277"},"modified":"2010-05-29T17:58:12","modified_gmt":"2010-05-29T21:58:12","slug":"odd-lots-113","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1277","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul>\n<li>As I polish up this Odd Lots, I see that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sectorlink.com\/\">Sectorlink.com<\/a> is down, which is significant to me since they host duntemann.com and copperwood.com. Have no idea what&#8217;s going on yet, nor how long the outage has existed. (I was over at one of Carol&#8217;s friends&#8217; rebuilding some very ad-hoc tomato shelters in honor of George Ewing until an hour or so ago.) If some of my pages are inaccessible, it&#8217;s not about me; it&#8217;s the whole damned hosting service.<\/li>\n<li>We lost <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Martin_Gardner\">Martin Gardner<\/a> the other day, at 95. Amazing man, something like a technical Colin Wilson, who wrote the &#8220;Mathematical Games&#8221; column in <em>Scientific American<\/em> for 25 years, edited <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Humpty_Dumpty_Magazine\">Humpty Dumpty&#8217;s Magazine for Little Children<\/a><\/em> (which I read circa 1957-59) and cranked out books for most of his life. Every one I&#8217;ve read has been terrific, and I especially endorse <em>Fads &amp; Fallacies in the Name of Science<\/em> (1957) and <em>The Annotated Alice<\/em> (1960.) I should look for a few more.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Art_Linkletter\">Art Linkletter<\/a> too, who made it to 97. It was in Linkletter&#8217;s very funny book <em>Kids Sure Rite Funny<\/em> that I found the wonderful kid-quote: &#8220;Now that dinosaurs are safely dead, we can call them clumsy and stupid.&#8221; The book&#8217;s copyright was not renewed and it is now in the public domain; you can read it online or get free ebook copies in various formats <a href=\"http:\/\/www.archive.org\/details\/kidssureritefunn030973mbp\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>The problem with how to carry your iPad made it all the way to the <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em>, which devoted <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052748704379004575249092546984862.html\">an A-head story<\/a> to the issue. My correspondents (including a couple who have the iPad) think a belt holster is unrealistic. Best iCartage solution I&#8217;ve seen so far (including a photo endorsement from Woz himself) is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scottevest.com\/company\/ipad.shtml\">the Scott eVest<\/a>, with 22 hidden pockets, including one custom-designed for the iPad.<\/li>\n<li>Then again, there&#8217;s some unexplored form factor territory between smartphones and iPads. I find <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dell_Streak\">the Dell Streak<\/a> (formerly the Mini 5) intriguing for its size\/shape alone. (Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2010\/05\/29\/dell-streak-shows-what-the-engadget-app-can-do-with-a-5-inch-scr\/\">an interesting perspective on display size<\/a> from Engadget.) The 5-inch model that will launch later this year (and in the UK on June 4, I hear) is about the size of an old HP scientific pocket calculator, and in the fevered days of my youth alpha geeks carried those around in leather belt holsters. Even the rumored 7-inch version could be belt-holstered with some care; beyond that it gets dicey. (Dell supposedly has a 10-incher in development.)<\/li>\n<li>After asking mobile developer David Beers about his thoughts on the Android OS, I discovered that <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/live-android\/\">Google will let you download an Android LiveCD<\/a> so you can mess around with the OS on an ordinary Intel PC without having to lay out for an actual mobile device.<\/li>\n<li>That unpronounceable volcano in Iceland, perhaps fearing that the world was starting to get bored with it, blew <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceweather.com\/submissions\/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Steve-a-Donna-OMeara-1.SMOKE-RING-Eyjafjallajokull-OMEARA_1274491323.jpg\">a volcanic smoke ring<\/a> the other day. Many people, perhaps thinking that smoking may be hazardous to a volcano&#8217;s health, are cheering it on.<\/li>\n<li>After several calm days here, the winds came up again yesterday morning. As Carol and I were driving back from Walgreen&#8217;s, we saw dust clouds crossing Broadmoor Bluffs in front of us on several occasions. It&#8217;s dry here, and construction sites generate a lot of brown dust, true. But then the winds calmed for a few seconds before starting up again, and when they did, we saw a large pine tree shake in the wind and let go a thick cloud of yellow dust. Pine pollen by the pound. No wonder I can barely breathe.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I polish up this Odd Lots, I see that Sectorlink.com is down, which is significant to me since they host duntemann.com and copperwood.com. Have no idea what&#8217;s going on yet, nor how long the outage has existed. (I was over at one of Carol&#8217;s friends&#8217; rebuilding some very ad-hoc tomato shelters in honor of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[71,15,54,14],"class_list":["post-1277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-eulogies","tag-hardware","tag-science","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1277"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1280,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1277\/revisions\/1280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}