{"id":2867,"date":"2013-05-25T15:19:15","date_gmt":"2013-05-25T21:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2867"},"modified":"2013-05-25T19:51:33","modified_gmt":"2013-05-26T01:51:33","slug":"odd-lots-228","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2867","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Yes, I&#8217;ve been away from Contra for longer than I&#8217;d like, and the Odd Lots have been piling up. Some of that away was necessary for my sanity, and was spent by the pool at a resort in Phoenix, where Carol and I discussed things like the wonder of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Acetabularia\" target=\"_blank\">a single-celled organism that is 10 cm long<\/a>. The secret appears to be evolving superior organelles. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bandersnatch_(Known_Space)\" target=\"_blank\">Bandersnatchi<\/a>, anyone?<\/li>\n<li>While I was gone, someone released a new OS for the Raspberry Pi: <a href=\"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2013\/05\/23\/fedora-project-announces-pidora-remix-for-raspberry-pi\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Pidora Remix<\/a>. It&#8217;s basically Fedora for the Pi. I haven&#8217;t tried it yet, but I&#8217;ll flip another SD card out of the drawer soonest and burn an image. Man, you have to run like hell just to stay in one place in this business.<\/li>\n<li>The Raspberry Pi&#8217;s main competition, the BeagleBone, <a href=\"http:\/\/linuxgizmos.com\/beaglebone-black-climbs-the-device-tree-with-linux-3-8\/\" target=\"_blank\">now has a 1 GHz ARM Cortex A8 version that ships with a Linux 3.8 kernel<\/a>. BeagleBone Black supports the <a href=\"http:\/\/omappedia.org\/wiki\/Device_Tree\" target=\"_blank\">Linux Device Tree<\/a>, which does a lot to decouple hardware details from the kernel. Looks terrific&#8211;now all it needs is an installed base.<\/li>\n<li>I noticed a system resource draw-down when I had iTunes installed on my old and now electrocuted quadcore. The software took a lot of cycles and memory, even when it didn&#8217;t appear to be doing anything. <a href=\"http:\/\/apple.slashdot.org\/story\/13\/05\/15\/0126252\/itunes-still-slowing-down-windows-pcs-after-all-these-years\" target=\"_blank\">The discussion has come up on Slashdot<\/a>. (The poster also mentioned <a href=\"http:\/\/rainmeter.net\/cms\/\" target=\"_blank\">Rainmeter<\/a>, which I tried once and found&#8230;ok.) I try to run a lean system here, and I frown on things that want services, tray icons, and 15% of my cycles all the damned time. (The Dell Dock does precisely that. For showing a row of icons. Sheesh.)<\/li>\n<li>Amazon is setting up a new markeplace for short fiction, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/feature.html?ie=UTF8&amp;docId=1001197421\" target=\"_blank\">with a twist<\/a>: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/articles\/2013\/05\/22\/amazon-to-build-a-market-for-fan-fiction.html\" target=\"_blank\">It offers to share revenues on fan fiction with the authors of the original items<\/a>. It&#8217;s unclear how many authors will accept that, but I would, like a shot. (I guess all I&#8217;d need are some fans.) In truth, Jim Strickland and I talked in detail some years back about opening up the Drumlins World to all authors who&#8217;d care to tell a story there, without even asking for money.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/science\/new-forensic-technique-for-estimating-time-of-death-by-checking-internal-clock-of-the-human-brain-8614624.html\" target=\"_blank\">Clinical depression may be linked to sleep cycles<\/a>, which appear to have a genetic basis. How to fix this is unclear, but I&#8217;ll testify that depression in the wake of losing Coriolis laid waste to my sleep habits for a couple of years. (Thanks to Jonathan O&#8217;Neal for the link.)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/arthur-clarke-fansite.blogspot.com\/2007\/05\/man-who-ploughed-sea-mine-metals-from.html\" target=\"_blank\">The Man Who Ploughed the Sea<\/a> may soon be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/news\/514751\/novel-material-shows-promise-for-extracting-uranium-from-seawater\/\" target=\"_blank\">mining it&#8230;for uranium<\/a>. I&#8217;d cut to the chase and just mine it for gold, so I can <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ebay.com\/itm\/YTTERBIUM-Metal-20-8g-element-YbREM99-96-TREM99-6-COAavailable-FREE-SHIPPING-\/111077009989?\" target=\"_blank\">buy more ytterbium<\/a> for my Hilbert Drive. Alas, there&#8217;s less gold in the oceans than we thought (1 part per trillion) and not much more ytterbium (1.5 parts per trillion) so maybe I should just extract the uranium (3 parts per billion) and make yellow pigments to sell on Etsy.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m not sure I buy this, but it&#8217;s an interesting speculation: That <a href=\"http:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2013\/05\/24\/where-lies-the-younger-dryas-smoking-gun\/\" target=\"_blank\">the Younger Dryas cold snap was triggered by a smallish asteroid that crashed&#8230;in Lake Michigan<\/a>. Click through for the maps if nothing else. My favorite Great Lake is deeper and more complex than I thought.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424127887324244304578471252974458308.html\" target=\"_blank\">Save the apostrophe&#8217;s!<\/a> (From a fate worse than dearth&#8230;)<\/li>\n<li>And save us, furthermore, from <a href=\"http:\/\/abovethelaw.com\/2013\/05\/how-a-tech-giant-proposes-to-charge-you-for-having-friends\/\" target=\"_blank\">new Microsoft technology that counts people in the room watching your TV<\/a>. Because having more than one person watching a TV show or movie rental is&#8230;is&#8230;<em>stealing!<\/em><\/li>\n<li>3-D printing is still in the stone age (and the Old Stone Age at that) but if we don&#8217;t allow berserk patent law to strangle the kid in its crib, wonderful things will happen once <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/news\/515071\/next-generation-consumer-3-d-printer-arrives-but-a-lawsuit-looms\/\" target=\"_blank\">3-D printers are no longer CNC glue guns<\/a>. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m starting to think that 3-D printers like that will soon make one-off repro of small plastic parts like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=2849\" target=\"_blank\">the ones at the center of kites<\/a> practical. I guess the challenge is somehow getting the precise shape of the part into a file. If I weren&#8217;t trying so hard to be a novelist I would probably have a 3-D printer already. For the moment I&#8217;m glad I didn&#8217;t jump as soon as I otherwise might have.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of CNC&#8230;and guns: Plastic guns are dumb, dangerous, ineffective, and basically a stunt that seems designed (probably in Autocad) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibtimes.com\/3d-printer-regulation-proposed-democrats-fear-criminals-printing-guns-1254537\" target=\"_blank\">to make politicians say stupid things and make enemies<\/a>. The real issue is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bob-owens.com\/2013\/05\/cnc-killed-the-gun-control-star\/\" target=\"_blank\">cheap, portable CNC machines capable of cutting metal<\/a>. <em>That<\/em> horse is out of the barn and beyond the horizon.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, I&#8217;ve been away from Contra for longer than I&#8217;d like, and the Odd Lots have been piling up. Some of that away was necessary for my sanity, and was spent by the pool at a resort in Phoenix, where Carol and I discussed things like the wonder of a single-celled organism that is 10 [&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":[15,39,128,54,18,20],"class_list":["post-2867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-hardware","tag-health","tag-rpi","tag-science","tag-sf","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2867","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=2867"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2870,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2867\/revisions\/2870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}