{"id":2312,"date":"2012-02-15T17:41:53","date_gmt":"2012-02-16T00:41:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2312"},"modified":"2012-02-15T17:48:40","modified_gmt":"2012-02-16T00:48:40","slug":"odd-lots-183","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2312","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Here&#8217;s something you could give your geeky sweetie for Valentine&#8217;s Day next year: <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.makezine.com\/2012\/02\/15\/giant-pink-printable-gear-heart\/\" target=\"_blank\">A giant pink 3-D printable heart made of gears<\/a>. I can&#8217;t quite see enough of the mesh to know if the gears actually turn. Someone in the 3-D printing community might know more.<\/li>\n<li>I certainly didn&#8217;t expect this: <a href=\"http:\/\/etext.ku.edu\/view?docId=ksrlead\/ksrl.sc.sturgeontheodore.xml\" target=\"_blank\">One of my manuscripts is in the University of Kansas collection of Ted Sturgeon&#8217;s personal papers<\/a>. (Look for item 61b.) It&#8217;s the Clarion first draft of &#8220;Our Lady of the Endless Sky,&#8221; which I wrote at the workshop, the story that went on to be my first professional sale in SF.<\/li>\n<li>My Favorite Extinct Creature of the Month: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cynognathus\" target=\"_blank\">Cynognathus<\/a>, which was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kidsdinos.com\/images\/dinosaurs\/Cynognathus1140277433.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">half-wolf, half-tiger, half-dinosaur<\/a>, and all trouble. (No wonder we&#8217;re descended from him.)<\/li>\n<li>From Tom Roderick comes word of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencedaily.com\/releases\/2012\/02\/120215155309.htm\" target=\"_blank\">a Harvard engineering project that assembles robot bees on a little scaffold only a little bigger than a quarter<\/a>. 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.<\/li>\n<li>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 <a href=\"http:\/\/iceagenow.info\/\" target=\"_blank\">Ice Age Now<\/a>. Good aggregator on cold weather issues, to which the MSM is peculiarly averse these days.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/news\/2012\/02\/fossil-hips-dont-lie-rock-record-got-a-bad-rap.ars\" target=\"_blank\">This may be true if you&#8217;re a trilobite<\/a>. It may be less true if you&#8217;re a jellyfish.<\/li>\n<li>From the Tell-Me-Something-I-Didn&#8217;t-Already-Know Department: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chicagotribune.com\/news\/politics\/clout\/chi-chicago-area-has-most-corruption-convictions-in-nation-uic-study-says-20120215,0,1024358.story\" target=\"_blank\">My hometown has the most corruption convictions of any city in the country<\/a>. 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.)<\/li>\n<li>Also from Pete Albrecht comes a link to something I might characterize as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/newstopics\/howaboutthat\/5274864\/New-beach-shoes-combine-high-heels-and-flippers.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Couture from the Black Lagoon<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Bill Higgins points us to a brief collection of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geekculture.com\/joyoftech\/joyarchives\/1650b.html\" target=\"_blank\">rejected Tom Swift, Jr novels<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s something you could give your geeky sweetie for Valentine&#8217;s Day next year: A giant pink 3-D printable heart made of gears. I can&#8217;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&#8217;t expect this: One of my manuscripts [&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":[43,35,54,18,31,20],"class_list":["post-2312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-humor","tag-politics","tag-science","tag-sf","tag-weather","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312","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=2312"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2314,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2312\/revisions\/2314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}