{"id":2617,"date":"2012-09-08T17:01:43","date_gmt":"2012-09-08T23:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2617"},"modified":"2012-09-08T17:08:48","modified_gmt":"2012-09-08T23:08:48","slug":"odd-lots-199","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2617","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>My old friend and fellow early GTer Rod Smith has posted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rodsmith.onthisnet.com\/images\/ChiCon7\/\" target=\"_blank\">a great many excellent pictures he took at Chicon 7<\/a>, including <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rodsmith.onthisnet.com\/images\/ChiCon7\/large-151.html\" target=\"_blank\">a book signing that I attended<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>My mother&#8217;s cat Fuzzbucket died yesterday, at 16 years and change. He outlived my poor mother by twelve years, and while skittish as a kitten eventually warmed to me. I&#8217;ve never had a cat (for obvious reasons, of which I have four right now) but of all the cats I&#8217;ve never had, Fuzzbucket was my favorite. He kept <a href=\"http:\/\/fuzzbucket-cat.livejournal.com\/\">his own LiveJournal page<\/a>, and the final entry brought a tear to my eye.<\/li>\n<li>For those who couldn&#8217;t attend Chicon and were cut off from viewing the Hugo Awards by an idiotic copyright protection bot, you&#8217;ve got another chance: <a href=\"http:\/\/io9.com\/5941428\/after-copyright-takedown-debacle-ustream-to-rebroadcast-the-hugo-awards-on-sunday-night\" target=\"_blank\">The award ceremony will be re-streamed tomorrow night, September 9, at 7 PM central time<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>This morning&#8217;s <em>Gazette<\/em> had an ad for hearing aids, which bragged of their product having <em>16 million<\/em> transistors. This is easier than it used to be, since all those transistors are in one container. Now, does anybody remember the days when ads bragged of radios containing <em>six<\/em> transistors?<\/li>\n<li>And while we grayhairs and nohairs are recalling transistor counts in the high single digits, does anybody remember the early Sixties scandal (reported in <em>Popular Electronics<\/em>, I think) in which Japanese manufacturers would solder additional transistors into simple superhet boards and short the leads together, just so they could advertise the box as a &#8220;ten-transistor&#8221; radio?<\/li>\n<li>Nice piece from <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Ars Technica<\/a> on <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2012\/09\/the-long-complicated-voyage-of-the-dream-chaser-may-yet-end-in-space\/\" target=\"_blank\">the deep history of the spaceplane<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Bill Cherepy sent a link to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.k4icy.com\/launcher.htm\" target=\"_blank\">a marvelous steampunk tennis ball launcher<\/a>, used for getting pull-strings for antennas (and as often as not, the antennas themselves) into high or otherwise inaccessible places. Gadgets like this (albeit not in steampunk dress) have been around for a long time, and I posted a link to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.antennalaunchers.com\/antlaunching.html\" target=\"_blank\">this one<\/a> (courtesy Jim Strickland) back in March.<\/li>\n<li>Also from Bill (and several others in the past few days) comes word of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2012\/09\/03\/new-york-bookshop-digitize-out-of-print-sci-fi-books-singularity-and-co\/\" target=\"_blank\">a promising if slightly Quixotic attempt to preserve orphaned SF and fantasy<\/a>. Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/savethescifi.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">the main site<\/a>. At least they&#8217;re offering money to authors and estates; most other preservation efforts (of pulp mags and old vinyl, particularly) are pirate projects most visible on Usenet.<\/li>\n<li>That said, there are projects that limit themselves to out-of-copyright pulps, like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pulpmags.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">this one<\/a>. One problem, of course, is knowing when a pulp (or anything else from the 1923-1963 era) is out of copyright. <em>Copyright ambiguity only hurts the idea of copyright<\/em>. We need to codify copyright and require registration, at least for printed works. I&#8217;m not as concerned about copyright&#8217;s time period, as long as the owners of a copyright are known. As I&#8217;ve said here before, I&#8217;m apprehensive about competing with hundreds of thousands of now-orphaned books and stories.<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t eat much sugar anymore, but egad, <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5941420\/holy-crap-they-put-candy-corn-in-oreos\" target=\"_blank\">there are now candy-corn flavored Oreos<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My old friend and fellow early GTer Rod Smith has posted a great many excellent pictures he took at Chicon 7, including a book signing that I attended. My mother&#8217;s cat Fuzzbucket died yesterday, at 16 years and change. He outlived my poor mother by twelve years, and while skittish as a kitten eventually warmed [&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":[61,33,21,71,37,108,16],"class_list":["post-2617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-aerospace","tag-books","tag-electronics","tag-eulogies","tag-food","tag-piracy","tag-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617","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=2617"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2619,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2617\/revisions\/2619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}