{"id":3011,"date":"2013-11-05T16:54:55","date_gmt":"2013-11-05T23:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3011"},"modified":"2013-11-05T16:55:02","modified_gmt":"2013-11-05T23:55:02","slug":"odd-lots-242","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3011","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>$10,000. Software written in Pascal. Windowing interface remarkably like the Xerox Star&#8217;s, on which I&#8217;d been trained the year before. I spent a wistful hour putting it through its paces at a nearby computer store in Rochester, NY. I&#8217;d just spent $4000 on a CP\/M system three years earlier, and didn&#8217;t have another $10K lying around. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredenterprise\/2013\/10\/tech-time-warp-apple-lisa\/\" target=\"_blank\">Nice retrospective on poor Lisa<\/a>, who never got the respect she deserved. Market niches matter, and it&#8217;s not always possible to create your own from the quantum vacuum.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2013\/11\/04\/october-2013-sunsots-largest-jump-in-solar-cycle-24-so-far\/\" target=\"_blank\">Solar Cycle 24 is definitely double-humped, and its second peak could well be peakier than the first<\/a>. This doesn&#8217;t make it a strong cycle, by any means, but we thought the whole deal was over after the first peak in 2011. Not so.<\/li>\n<li>An amateur telescope maker in Utah bought a 70&#8243; spy satellite mirror at a scratch-and-dent auction and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-2487485\/Utah-truckdriver-builds-worlds-largest-amateur-telescope.html\" target=\"_blank\">built the world&#8217;s largest amateur telescope<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I haven&#8217;t written aliens into my SF much, at least since I first thought deeply about the subject in college. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2013\/11\/enders-game-alien-communication\/\" target=\"_blank\">This is part of the reason<\/a>. I had planned out a story in which Earth contacts an alien race with so old and rich a culture that their language consists of context-sensitive metaphors within similes within puns within knock-knock jokes. I never wrote the story because I could never figure out how to crack the problem.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.itworld.com\/hardware\/380962\/if-you-are-considering-video-card-upgrade-look-your-monitor-first\" target=\"_blank\">Your graphics card is getting faster, but there&#8217;s no guarantee that you&#8217;ll even notice<\/a>. I think this is what the term &#8220;diminishing returns&#8221; was coined to describe.<\/li>\n<li>From the Major WTF File: One of my readers sent me <a href=\"http:\/\/climatechange.carboncapturereport.org\/cgi-bin\/\/profiler?key=Jeff_Duntemann&amp;pt=2\" target=\"_blank\">this link<\/a>, and I&#8217;m still trying to figure out what these creeps are up to. I&#8217;ll post a separate entry on it when I have a little more time to research it. But look yourself up: I&#8217;d like to hear about it if you&#8217;re on there too.<\/li>\n<li>Little by little, people are starting to figure it out: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/13-nutrition-lies-that-made-the-world-sick-and-fat-2013-10\" target=\"_blank\">Fat will make you lose weight and keep you healthy. Sugar will f*(&amp;ing kill you<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I was told by a cardiologist 20-odd years ago that gum disease was related to heart disease. It seemed like a stretch at the time, but since then I&#8217;ve seen <a href=\"http:\/\/www.universityherald.com\/articles\/5322\/20131101\/brushing-your-teeth-could-prevent-heart-disease.htm\" target=\"_blank\">a number of studies indicating that it&#8217;s true<\/a>. Floss, don&#8217;t infarct!<\/li>\n<li>Slate has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/browbeat\/2013\/11\/03\/key_peele_continental_breakfast_sketch_what_s_european_about_a_hotel_breakfast.html\" target=\"_blank\">a short piece explaining what makes a continental breakfast continental<\/a>. What made me laugh was an embedded <a href=\"http:\/\/www.comedycentral.com\/shows\/key-and-peele\" target=\"_blank\">Key &amp; Peele<\/a> bit in which Peele delights in discovering Fruit Loops at his hotel breakfast counter, as though they were rare treats. Bartholomew Stypek does the same thing in <em>Ten Gentle Opportunities<\/em>: &#8220;Carolyn had gifted him with sacks of delicacies that any nobleman in the realm of Ttryngg would kill for: Doritos, Cheetos, Pringles, Ruffles, and sweets baked by elves.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/killerapps.foreignpolicy.com\/posts\/2013\/11\/05\/meet_the_marines_new_pirate_hunting_team\" target=\"_blank\">The Marines are about to begin hunting Somali pirates<\/a>. If I were a Somali pirate, I would be thinking about early retirement.<\/li>\n<li>Cities, like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=2&amp;ved=0CDYQtwIwAQ&amp;url=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=x2m_hwDlntw&amp;ei=_nxtUuWvNaG2yAGt5YGwCQ&amp;usg=AFQjCNGw_KIb7ahTc8b8QqIaohS9eQ1yog&amp;sig2=oHBTitrr2q_v3gJ7B6KouA&amp;bvm=bv.55123115,d.aWc&amp;cad=rja\" target=\"_blank\">ogres and onions<\/a>, have layers. The deepest and oldest of those layers can be forgotten by all but a few. Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/politics\/2013\/10\/new-york-city-underground-subway-danger\" target=\"_blank\">a marvelous quick tour of the some of New York&#8217;s less visible layers<\/a>. No ogres. We hope. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>$10,000. Software written in Pascal. Windowing interface remarkably like the Xerox Star&#8217;s, on which I&#8217;d been trained the year before. I spent a wistful hour putting it through its paces at a nearby computer store in Rochester, NY. I&#8217;d just spent $4000 on a CP\/M system three years earlier, and didn&#8217;t have another $10K lying [&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":[41,15,39,44,43,18,20],"class_list":["post-3011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-hardware","tag-health","tag-history","tag-humor","tag-sf","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3011","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=3011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3012,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3011\/revisions\/3012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}