{"id":2438,"date":"2012-04-30T21:01:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T03:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2438"},"modified":"2012-04-30T21:03:55","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T03:03:55","slug":"odd-lots-189","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2438","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sdtimes.com\/blog\/post\/2012\/04\/30\/Galileo-or-da-Vinci.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">J. D. Hildebrand endorsed Contra today over at <em>SD Times<\/em><\/a>. He mentions a falling out we had in ancient times (I think 1993 or so) which I remember as being a publicity stunt. Even if it wasn&#8217;t, 20 years is plenty for a falling-out. From one J. D. to the other: You&#8217;re OK in my book. (His blog at SD is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sdtimes.com\/author\/jhildebrand.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li>Quite by accident, I stumbled upon <a href=\"http:\/\/twolivesleft.com\/Codea\/Talk\/discussion\/733\/another-analog-clock\/p1\" target=\"_blank\">a clock app written in Lua<\/a>, a language which I had heard of (vaguely) but never read up on. I mean, really, does the world need YADSL? However, a closer look showed that <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lua_(programming_language)\" target=\"_blank\">Lua<\/a> does not use almost-invisible curly brackets for structuring code and instead relies on those big, bold, evil kiddie-language <strong>END<\/strong> keywords. It is to rejoice. <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/luaforwindows\/\" target=\"_blank\">LUA for Windows is here<\/a>; will report again when I fool with it a little.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve linked to this before, but it&#8217;s been a few years: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tomswiftlives.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tom Swift Lives<\/a>, home of some of the best fanfic I&#8217;ve ever seen, much of which is yards better than the original Tom Swift material.<\/li>\n<li>Over the past year, I&#8217;ve discovered that the most effective single pain reliever for my occasional migraines is&#8230;aspirin. I dropped Tylenol like a hot rock. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/health\/archive\/2012\/04\/aspirin-really-is-kind-of-a-wonder-drug-studies-continue-to-show\/256495\/\" target=\"_blank\">Now there&#8217;s evidence that aspirin reduces the risk of cancer<\/a>. Avoiding gastrointestinal bleeding is an issue, but I can&#8217;t imagine that that&#8217;s not just engineering.<\/li>\n<li>And here&#8217;s how <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/health\/archive\/2012\/04\/how-vegetable-oils-replaced-animal-fats-in-the-american-diet\/256155\/\" target=\"_blank\">the food industry&#8217;s quest to undercut butter and lard<\/a> gave us trans fats, more heart disease, and the myth that animal fat is bad for you. I believe in evolution. We evolved eating animal fat. We did not evolve eating vegetable oils dissolved out of seeds with hexane. Q.E.D.<\/li>\n<li>I never gave this a thought, but it&#8217;s obvious if you think about it: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.darkroastedblend.com\/2012\/04\/intricate-japanese-movable-type-sets.html\" target=\"_blank\">Setting printed material in Japanese using movable type<\/a> involved an <em>immense<\/em> amount of lead.<\/li>\n<li>Although I&#8217;ve never seen a railbike in action, the concept has always fascinated me, and <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.makezine.com\/2012\/04\/30\/no-weld-rail-bike-conversion\/\" target=\"_blank\">here&#8217;s one that doesn&#8217;t need any welding<\/a>. There&#8217;s no abandoned trackage convenient to me, but it&#8217;s around. My only reservation is that it must be easy to run off the rails by letting the front wheel pivot even a little bit. (In Europe railbikes are called <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Draisine\" target=\"_blank\">Draisines<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2011\/08\/17\/microsoft-reader-ends-lif_n_929346.html\" target=\"_blank\">Having killed Microsoft Reader<\/a>, which I liked a great deal, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/epicenter\/2012\/04\/microsoft-nook-investment\/\" target=\"_blank\">MS is apparently investing in the future of the Nook<\/a>. Will Reader return? Let us pray; I have a number of ebooks in that format.<\/li>\n<li>At least <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5906251\/11+year+old-criminal-pees-on-36000-in-macbooks\" target=\"_blank\">these Macbooks won&#8217;t be subject to trojans now<\/a>. Or anything else.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>J. D. Hildebrand endorsed Contra today over at SD Times. He mentions a falling out we had in ancient times (I think 1993 or so) which I remember as being a publicity stunt. Even if it wasn&#8217;t, 20 years is plenty for a falling-out. From one J. D. to the other: You&#8217;re OK in my [&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":[17,39,43,32,115],"class_list":["post-2438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-ebooks","tag-health","tag-humor","tag-programming","tag-railroads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2438","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=2438"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2442,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2438\/revisions\/2442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}