{"id":3190,"date":"2014-06-27T12:42:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-27T18:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3190"},"modified":"2014-06-27T12:42:04","modified_gmt":"2014-06-27T18:42:04","slug":"odd-lots-257","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3190","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>A guy is working on <a href= \"http:\/\/build.slashdot.org\/story\/14\/06\/18\/1853208\/3-d-printing-with-molten-steel-video\" target=\"_blank\">3D printing with molten steel<\/a>, via <a href= \"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gas_tungsten_arc_welding\" target= \"_blank\">TIG welding<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m really good with words. Maybe that&#8217;s why a college friend said 40-odd years ago: &#8220;The trouble with you, Jeff, is that you&#8217;re too <em>damned<\/em> happy!&#8221; Everything is connected, I guess, and <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/the-physics-arxiv-blog\/773df682c4a7\" target=\"_blank\">now there&#8217;s science indicating that human language is biased toward happiness<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>More research on ice ages: <a href= \"http:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2014\/06\/27\/research-provides-new-theory-on-cause-of-ice-age-2-6-million-years-ago\/\" target=\"_blank\">They may be made possible by the isolation of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by the Ithsmus of Panama<\/a>. (Full paper <a href= \"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/srep\/2014\/140627\/srep05474\/full\/srep05474.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.) I&#8217;ve heard this before, but there&#8217;s more data behind it now.<\/li>\n<li>Some recently discovered fossilized poop in Spain suggests that <a href= \"http:\/\/news.sciencemag.org\/archaeology\/2014\/06\/neandertals-ate-their-veggies-their-feces-reveal\" target=\"_blank\">I&#8217;m not really a Neanderthal after all<\/a>. Bummer.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve always been of two minds about Mensa, for reasons I really can&#8217;t talk about here. <a href= \"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2014\/06\/23\/tech\/match-mensa-singles\/index.html?hpt=hp_bn5\" target=\"_blank\">Now there&#8217;s a Mensa dating site<\/a>. I think I&#8217;m of three minds about that. Maybe five.<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s an exploitable software flaw in the Curiosity rover, <a href= \"http:\/\/www.csoonline.com\/article\/2375206\/data-protection\/twenty-year-old-vulnerability-in-lzo-finally-patched.html\" target=\"_blank\">stemming from arcane math in the Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer compression algorithm<\/a>. I hope the rover isn&#8217;t running XP, or (judging by the hype) it would have been totally pnwed since April 10. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/read\/a-physicist-wants-to-build-1000-ft-walls-to-tornado-proof-the-midwest\" target=\"_blank\">This guy says he could tornado-proof the Midwest with a couple of 1,000-foot-high walls<\/a>. Me, I say, implement <a href=\"http:\/\/www.duntemann.com\/stormy.htm\" target= \"_blank\">STORMY<\/a>. Then stand back.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/health\/archive\/2014\/06\/the-dark-knight-of-the-souls\/372766\/\" target=\"_blank\">Meditation may not always be the unalloyed good that its proponents insist it is.<\/a> I&#8217;m researching this further and will do a full entry on it at some point, as it&#8217;s a matter of serious interest to me. I have a theory that meditation is only one half of a single effective psychiatric process, and without its other half it can aggravate psychosis and even cause a drift toward schizophrenia.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s <a href= \"http:\/\/www.darkroastedblend.com\/2014\/06\/antique-digital-calculators-other.html\" target=\"_blank\">a terrific collection of photos of steampunk gear<\/a> from Dark Roasted Blend. Follow the links to <a href= \"http:\/\/www.darkroastedblend.com\/2008\/09\/stunningly-intricate-curta-mechanical.html\" target=\"_blank\">the mechanical calculators page<\/a> if you haven&#8217;t seen it before. (It&#8217;s old, and I linked it from here some years back.)<\/li>\n<li>DRB publishes periodic &#8220;feel good&#8221; collections of visual odd lots that are mostly 50s and 60s nostalgia. <a href= \"http:\/\/www.darkroastedblend.com\/2014\/05\/drb-feel-good-issue-18.html\" target=\"_blank\">Here&#8217;s the latest<\/a>. Too many actresses, not enough classic cars. But if you like classic actresses, well, wow.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A guy is working on 3D printing with molten steel, via TIG welding. I&#8217;m really good with words. Maybe that&#8217;s why a college friend said 40-odd years ago: &#8220;The trouble with you, Jeff, is that you&#8217;re too damned happy!&#8221; Everything is connected, I guess, and now there&#8217;s science indicating that human language is biased toward [&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":[39,73,54,18,14,101,31],"class_list":["post-3190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-health","tag-language","tag-science","tag-sf","tag-software","tag-steampunk","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3190","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=3190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3191,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3190\/revisions\/3191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}