{"id":2031,"date":"2011-07-04T10:37:01","date_gmt":"2011-07-04T16:37:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2031"},"modified":"2011-10-31T13:23:46","modified_gmt":"2011-10-31T19:23:46","slug":"odd-lots-160","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2031","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Freedom matters, and in honor of Independence Day <a href=\"http:\/\/mercatus.org\/freedom-50-states-2011\" target=\"_blank\">here&#8217;s an eye-opening report on the &#8220;state of freedom&#8221; in the fifty American states<\/a>. I knew a lot of this from my research nine years ago, when Carol and I decided to leave Arizona, but it&#8217;s nice to see it all in one free (in the other sense) document.<\/li>\n<li>From the Words I Didn&#8217;t Know Until Yesterday Department: <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Draisine\" target=\"_blank\">draisine<\/a><\/em>, a human-powered device for moving over railroad rails. This is evidently a European term; over here these are called handcars or inspection speeders or rail cycles or a number of other things. Definitely note the hot-pink draisine-built-for-two on the Wikipedia page. (Thanks to Aki Peltonen for dropping the word to me.)<\/li>\n<li>Although I&#8217;m sure that everyone in the civilized galaxy has seen the cartoon, I wasn&#8217;t aware that <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Thagomizer\">&#8220;thagomizer&#8221; is now paleobiological jargon<\/a>. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s a list of somebody&#8217;s picks as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/blog\/editors\/26836\/?p1=blogs\" target=\"_blank\">the ten best hard SF books of all time<\/a>. I agree with about 50% of the picks, though Robinson&#8217;s Mars trilogy was so slow and padded-out that I could barely finish it. (I have not yet read the Egan book cited.) I sense as well that Somebody Doesn&#8217;t Like Heinlein&#8217;s Politics. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Despite a 500-fold increase in cell phone use in the last 20 years, <a href=\"http:\/\/tech.fortune.cnn.com\/2011\/06\/07\/cell-phone-use-is-way-up-so-why-are-brain-cancer-rates-down\/\" target=\"_blank\">malignant brain tumor diagnosis is down in that timeframe<\/a>. This interests me, as three people I knew died of brain tumors (the largest cancer cluster in my circle of acquaintance) and it makes me wonder. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>I had just a couple of comic books back in the early Sixties, and one of the most intriguing was an extra-long number from DC called <em>Secret Origins<\/em> that had the backstory for five or six of the most famous DC superheroes. Oddly, what I remember most clearly was the backstory for Green Lantern, especially the little blue guys on the Planet Without Consonants and (most intriguing of all) a power ring with a flaw that prevented it from working against anything yellow. Trouble is, if you remove the flaw, the ring loses its power completely. Now <em>that&#8217;s<\/em> cool&#8211;alas, in what may be the canonical <a href=\"http:\/\/io9.com\/5812496\/a-beginners-guide-to-everything-green-lantern\" target=\"_blank\">Green Lantern for Dummies page<\/a>, the yellow gotcha isn&#8217;t stated clearly and I wonder if it was just abandoned back in the 1960s.<\/li>\n<li>Forgot to aggregate this back in January: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2281146\/\" target=\"_blank\">One of the most bizarre articles I&#8217;ve ever read on any major site in recent years.<\/a> This totally, completely, utterly certain guy is angry at other guys for being totally, completely, and utterly certain&#8211;and that about something totally, completely, and utterly trivial. My take: We &#8220;know&#8221; nothing at all with certainty, and the more certain you are that you&#8217;re right, the more certain the rest of us should be that you&#8217;re wrong. Nyah-nyah!<\/li>\n<li>And another Odd Lot that has lain around for some time: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wojtek_(soldier_bear)\" target=\"_blank\">Polish troops trained a young bear to carry ammo during the Battle of Monte Cassino<\/a>. My father was at that battle, working a radio station on the back of a truck, but he never mentioned seeing the bear. The bear is said to never have dropped any munitions, which I&#8217;m sure was a good thing for the bear, and possibly my father as well.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s a bogglingly weird Dickensian artifact that I&#8217;d never heard of before: <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5817467\/no-key-guns-do-not-shoot-keys\" target=\"_blank\">A key gun<\/a>. It&#8217;s a gun built into the key to a (large) prison cell lock. I&#8217;m sure if it had worked better I would have seen it before now.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Freedom matters, and in honor of Independence Day here&#8217;s an eye-opening report on the &#8220;state of freedom&#8221; in the fifty American states. I knew a lot of this from my research nine years ago, when Carol and I decided to leave Arizona, but it&#8217;s nice to see it all in one free (in the other [&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":[39,44,43,73,35,56],"class_list":["post-2031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-health","tag-history","tag-humor","tag-language","tag-politics","tag-trains"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031","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=2031"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2174,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2031\/revisions\/2174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}