{"id":2068,"date":"2011-08-12T18:44:36","date_gmt":"2011-08-13T00:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2068"},"modified":"2011-08-12T18:46:14","modified_gmt":"2011-08-13T00:46:14","slug":"odd-lots-163","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2068","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2011\/08\/12\/the-ibm-pc-turns-30-we-hurt-our-hands-giving-it-birthday-punche\/\" target=\"_blank\">The IBM PC turns 30 today<\/a>. I had a dual-floppy 5150 and loved it. Hard to believe it came home almost thirty years ago.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pharmalot.com\/2011\/08\/retractions-of-scientific-studies-are-surging\/\" target=\"_blank\">The number of retractions of dead-wrong and perhaps fraudulent scientific papers<\/a> is surging, rising fifteen-fold in the last ten years. So what&#8217;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.)<\/li>\n<li>Good example: There&#8217;s little or no evidence that salt causes hypertension, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/2011\/08\/01\/another-a-salt-on-science\/\" target=\"_blank\">that doesn&#8217;t stop certain scientists and many government functionaries from insisting that it does<\/a>. (If salt <em>did<\/em> cause hypertension, I&#8217;d be&#8230;dead.)<\/li>\n<li>From the Words-I-Didn&#8217;t-Know-Until-I-Played-Scrabble-With-An-Expert Department: <em>ort<\/em>, which is a fancy but short word for leftover food scraps. As in, &#8220;Yesterday at 12:15 the junior-high lunchroom became an ort cloud&#8230;&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/io9.com\/5830035\/how-to-catch-tomorrow-mornings-perseid-meteor-shower\" target=\"_blank\">The Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight just before dawn<\/a>, 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&#8217;re almost guaranteed to see something. And there&#8217;s always next year. (Carol and I have been watching them as weather allows since 1969.)<\/li>\n<li>This is still extremely new, but it has promise: <a href=\"https:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/abiword-epub\/\" target=\"_blank\">an AbiWord plug-in that exports epub files<\/a> from within <a href=\"http:\/\/www.abisource.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">AbiWord<\/a>. (I haven&#8217;t tested it yet.)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/extensions.services.openoffice.org\/en\/project\/Writer2ePub\" target=\"_blank\">Ditto for Open Office Writer<\/a>. (Haven&#8217;t tested it either, but thanks to Sam&#8217;l Bassett for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Are you the kind of reader who reads the ending in the bookstore before buying the book? (I used to be.) Apparently <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/news\/2011\/08\/spoilers-dont-spoil-anything.ars\" target=\"_blank\">spoilers don&#8217;t spoil the fun of reading novels as much as most people assume<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Who doesn&#8217;t like control panels? Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.darkroastedblend.com\/2010\/09\/mega-dashboards-and-instrument-panels.html\" target=\"_blank\">a wonderful album of panels from every sort of machine<\/a>, from the Space Shuttle to the 1966 TV series Batmobile. Don&#8217;t miss <a href=\"http:\/\/www.darkroastedblend.com\/2011\/08\/mega-dashboards-and-instrument-panels.html\" target=\"_blank\">Part 2<\/a>. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the links.)<\/li>\n<li>Wow. You used to be able to buy dynamite at the hardware store&#8230;<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.makezine.com\/archive\/2011\/08\/how-to-blast-through-tedious-chores-with-dynamite.html\" target=\"_blank\">at least if you were a farmer<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424053111903454504576486412642177904.html\" target=\"_blank\">Scott Adams thinks that boredom lies behind a lot of creativity<\/a>. As we become less bored, we grow less creative. He may be right. But&#8230;how do we solve the Boredom Shortage? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>I like butter. I like it a <em>lot<\/em>. But maybe not <a href=\"http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/Health\/Diet\/deep-fried-appeal\/story?id=14291787\" target=\"_blank\">this much<\/a>. (Thanks again to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t just have your survivors give you a 21-gun salute. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ammoland.com\/2011\/07\/27\/holy-smoke-ammunition\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Be<\/em> the 21-gun salute!<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s a citizen scientist to do? Probably not buy into [&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":[41,17,37,39,43,73,54,14],"class_list":["post-2068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-ebooks","tag-food","tag-health","tag-humor","tag-language","tag-science","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068","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=2068"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2070,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068\/revisions\/2070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}