{"id":2413,"date":"2012-04-10T20:34:27","date_gmt":"2012-04-11T02:34:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2413"},"modified":"2012-04-10T20:36:16","modified_gmt":"2012-04-11T02:36:16","slug":"odd-lots-187","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2413","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;m behind on a great many things, especially fiction writing and replying to email, so bear with me until I get dug out from under the pile. Exchanging offices within a house is precisely the same as moving two offices, and that means a lot of boxes and a lot of bother, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2408\" target=\"_blank\">exploding intercoms<\/a> being the least of it.<\/li>\n<li>I didn&#8217;t expect <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.kj.com\/summation-red-is-a-renegade\/\" target=\"_blank\">this wine<\/a> to be as good as it actually is. About $11.<\/li>\n<li>The weather&#8217;s been beautiful here, so yesterday I was going to get out on the back deck with my Icom 736 and work the world. That was, of course, the day that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spaceweather.com\/images2012\/10apr12\/hmi4096_blank.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">sunspots basically vanished on the visible face of the Sun<\/a>. What does it mean to have solar flares but no sunspots? <em>Nobody knows<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>Thanks to many people (Jim Strickland being the first) who wrote to tell me about <a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/newsoffice\/2012\/smart-robotic-sand-0402.html\" target=\"_blank\">a &#8220;smart sand&#8221; project at MIT<\/a> that is the first step toward the sort of nanoreplicator I postulated in my Drumlins stories: Tap in a 256-bit code, and some &#8220;smart dust&#8221; (<em>very<\/em> smart) in a stone bowl assembles something for you. I love it when my crazy dreams come true!<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencedaily.com\/releases\/2012\/02\/120219143220.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Single-atom nanotransistors can now be reliably made<\/a>, rather than hunted for. (Thanks to Roy harvey for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>From Michael Covington comes a link to a fascinating article about <a href=\"http:\/\/stp.ling.uu.se\/~nivre\/sps\/thor.html\" target=\"_blank\">the other kind of abduction<\/a>: abductive logic. If you&#8217;re a Sherlock Holmes fan, don&#8217;t miss it!<\/li>\n<li>The Colorado state law that led Amazon to nuke my Associates account <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/news\/2012\/04\/judge-spares-amazon-from-colorado-sales-tax-reporting-scheme.ars\" target=\"_blank\">has been declared unconstitional<\/a>. No word from Amazon as to whether I can have my account back.<\/li>\n<li>I would probably buy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2012\/04\/08\/how-would-you-change-asus-transformer-prime\/\" target=\"_blank\">one of these<\/a> if I could find one in stock somewhere.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2012\/04\/09\/commodore-founder-jack-tramiel-dies\/\" target=\"_blank\">Jack Tramiel has left us<\/a>, having created quite a raft of famous computers, including <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dadhacker.com\/blog\/?p=995\" target=\"_blank\">the very best forgotten computer <em>ever<\/em><\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I checked the date on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2012\/04\/10\/insert-coin-the-powerpot\/\" target=\"_blank\">this one<\/a>, but it was nine days too late to assume it&#8217;s a hoax. One might argue that solar panels are more elegant, but you can&#8217;t make buffalo spaghetti sauce in a solar panel.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve seen more dumb YouTube posts than I&#8217;m willing to admit, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=aIYZvr3ueGw&amp;feature=player_embedded#\" target=\"_blank\">this one takes the cake for sheer willful stupidity<\/a>. I knew how this worked in 1959, when I was 7.<\/li>\n<li>Kids, <a href=\"http:\/\/tacocopter.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">this<\/a> is futurism. All we need now are better tacos.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m behind on a great many things, especially fiction writing and replying to email, so bear with me until I get dug out from under the pile. Exchanging offices within a house is precisely the same as moving two offices, and that means a lot of boxes and a lot of bother, exploding intercoms being [&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":[41,37,45,43,122,123,54,18,72,13],"class_list":["post-2413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-food","tag-ham-radio","tag-humor","tag-law","tag-nanotech","tag-science","tag-sf","tag-weirdness","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413","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=2413"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2415,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413\/revisions\/2415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}