{"id":150,"date":"2008-10-05T14:05:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-05T18:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=150"},"modified":"2008-12-13T22:54:43","modified_gmt":"2008-12-14T02:54:43","slug":"odd-lots-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Small, short-lived sunspots are starting to turn up on a fairly                  regular basis. (I monitor <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceweather.com\/\">spaceweather.com<\/a>                  daily.) Their polarity suggests that they belong to the long-delayed                  Cycle 24, but they are so small as to be almost invisible without                  a powerful solar telescope, and many vanish within 24 hours of                  their initial detection. So we could still be facing something                  like a Maunder Minimum, with small and short-lived spots keeping                  the count up even with generally minimal solar activity. The coming                  year will be especially interesting in solar astronomy.<\/li>\n<li>I ran across <a href=\"http:\/\/home.comcast.net\/%7Ephils_radio_designs\/index.htm\">a                  fascinating couple of homebrew radio projects<\/a>, and the tube                  design is especially intriguing. If you understand tubes even                  a little bit, read <a href=\"http:\/\/home.comcast.net\/%7Ephils_radio_designs\/Hellenedyne.pdf\">the                  article (PDF)<\/a> on the low-voltage 3GK5 &#8220;Hellenedyne&#8221;                  one-tube reflex AM receiver. This is like nothing I&apos;ve never seen                  before, and it&apos;s making me itch to throw one together just to                  see what this peculiar tube can do.<\/li>\n<li>This is humor for deep, deep railroad geeks only, but wow: <a href=\"http:\/\/home.att.net\/%7Eberliner-Ultrasonics\/bwrkapoc.html#multplex\">Parodies                  of classic locomotive designs<\/a>, some of them realized as HO                  scale models. Ok, you may not think these are funny without knowing                  a little bit about railroad history, but hey, there&apos;s just something                  inherently silly about a locomotive painted with the legend &#8220;Wrong                  Island.&#8221; Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.<\/li>\n<li>Also from Pete: Suppose that Tolkien&apos;s Hobbits, out from under                  their terror of the Dark Lord, had a thousand years or so (Hobbits                  don&apos;t hurry) to develop a reasonable technological civilization.                  Their astronomical observatories might well look like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wayfaring.info\/2008\/06\/12\/the-einstein-tower-potsdam\/#more-6319\">this<\/a>,                  which is in fact a working observatory in Potsdam, Germany, named                  for Albert Einstein (I can picture Buildo Baggins, a distant descendent                  of the Sackville Bagginses, analyzing variable star luminosity                  curves at those desks, between bites of bread spread with entirely                  too much butter&#8230;) <\/li>\n<li>Interestingly, the ebook edition of my <i>Souls in Silicon<\/i>                  collection is outselling the print edition 3 to 1. Even more interestingly,                  I make 23c <i>more<\/i> per copy on the ebook edition, priced at                  $3.99 vs. $11.99 for the print edition. This is an extremely useful dataset, and I&apos;m tempted                  to drop the price on <i>Cold Hands<\/i> to $2.99 when I release                  it in December, just to see how it does.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Small, short-lived sunspots are starting to turn up on a fairly regular basis. (I monitor spaceweather.com daily.) Their polarity suggests that they belong to the long-delayed Cycle 24, but they are so small as to be almost invisible without a powerful solar telescope, and many vanish within 24 hours of their initial detection. So we [&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":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","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=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":163,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}