{"id":3244,"date":"2014-09-22T17:23:30","date_gmt":"2014-09-22T23:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3244"},"modified":"2014-09-22T17:25:45","modified_gmt":"2014-09-22T23:25:45","slug":"odd-lots-263","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3244","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>My old friend Lee Hart scratchbuilt <a href= \"http:\/\/www.retrotechnology.com\/galileo\/galileo_1802.html\" target= \"_blank\">a marvelous model of the Galileo spacecraft<\/a>, including an operating COSMAC processor that blinks out the Arecibo message on an LED.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.retrotechnology.com\/memship\/1802_spacecraft.html\" target=\"_blank\">The COSMAC 1802 was a good choice for spacecraft<\/a>, because it drew almost no power and could be radiation-hardened. It was all static CMOS, so the system clock could be slowed arbitrarily, down to audio rates, or just stopped. Alas, the contention (which I&#8217;ve shared) that there was an 1802 on the Viking spacecraft isn&#8217;t true. Bummer.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanradiohistory.com\/\" target= \"_blank\">an essentially bottomless collection of old radio literature<\/a>, including magazines, technical books and articles, and ephemera. The PDFs are of excellent quality, though I wonder how legal some of the items are. Worth a look, for the Deco artwork in the 20s and 30s magazines, if nothing else.<\/li>\n<li>And if you&#8217;re interested in toilet paper on a total lifestyle basis, <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.toiletpaperworld.com\/\" target= \"_blank\">Toilet Paper World<\/a> is just the thing. I&#8217;m not sure I even noticed that <a href= \"http:\/\/blog.toiletpaperworld.com\/where-did-all-the-colored-toilet-paper-go\/\" target=\"_blank\">tinted toilet paper existed<\/a> before they told me. And now it&#8217;s gone. I guess it&#8217;s true that 80% of the world is always below our radar.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Girandoni_Air_Rifle\" target=\"_blank\">We&#8217;ve had air rifles since&#8230;1779<\/a>. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;d heard about how the Soviets repaired their ailing Salyut 7 space station, but <a href= \"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2014\/09\/the-little-known-soviet-mission-to-rescue-a-dead-space-station\/\" target=\"_blank\">not in anywhere close to this kind of detail<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Paris used to use (and may still; the article is unclear) a sort of Indiana Jones mechanism for clearing blockages in its extra large economy-sized sewer pipes: <a href= \"http:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/the-19th-century-iron-balls-still-cleaning-the-paris-sewers\" target=\"_blank\">Rolling a 9-foot iron ball through them<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re watching sea ice levels in the Antarctic (as I am) <a href= \"https:\/\/sunshinehours.wordpress.com\/category\/antarctic-sea-ice\/\" target=\"_blank\">this site puts up very nice graphs on an almost daily basis<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/09\/21\/fashion\/the-paleo-lifestyle-the-way-way-way-back.html\" target=\"_blank\">Is there anything that hipsters can&#8217;t ruin?<\/a> (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/science-environment-29237276\" target=\"_blank\">Murder comes naturally to Chimpanzees<\/a>. The sad part is, it comes naturally to us, too. I suspect it came so naturally to the Neanderthals that they didn&#8217;t need Sap to extinctify them.<\/li>\n<li>Somehow I managed to see the first <em>Hobbit<\/em> flick four times and never noticed that <a href= \"http:\/\/img1.wikia.nocookie.net\/__cb20130207064759\/lotr\/images\/1\/18\/The-Hobbit-An-Unexpected-Journey-Bifur.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">Bifur had an axe stuck in his head<\/a>. I thought it was some sort of ornamment.<\/li>\n<li>Oh, and predictably, <a href= \"http:\/\/www.buzzfeed.com\/louispeitzman\/the-13-dwarves-in-the-hobbit-ranked-by-hotness#enlk4e\" target=\"_blank\">Buzzfeed has a stack rank of Peter Jackson&#8217;s dwarves by, um, hotness<\/a>. They should have asked some <a href= \"http:\/\/fc07.deviantart.net\/fs71\/i\/2013\/025\/c\/9\/sexy_dwarf_women_by_kiptay-d5sqavm.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">Dwarf women<\/a>; the hottest dwarves are also the ones that look the least like dwarves. Several times I was asking myself if Fili and Kili had been left in a basket on some dwarf&#8217;s front porch.<\/li>\n<li>One more and I&#8217;ll let the dwarf thing go. Separated at birth: <a href= \"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-KhNSprcHtSs\/UE9W9fvTOaI\/AAAAAAAALjw\/tshsO5a8va4\/s1600\/thcc_bofur_01.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">Bofur the Dwarf<\/a> and&#8230;<a href= \"http:\/\/www.medadvocates.org\/celebstew-\/november\/nov_062.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">Sister Bertrille<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I survived the 60s. I had all the Beatles albums. I am not and have never been a Communist. I guess this means that <a href= \"http:\/\/dangerousminds.net\/comments\/marxist_minstrels_the_beatles_want_to_sexually_hypnotize_you_into_communism\" target=\"_blank\">hypnotism is impossible<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My old friend Lee Hart scratchbuilt a marvelous model of the Galileo spacecraft, including an operating COSMAC processor that blinks out the Arecibo message on an LED. The COSMAC 1802 was a good choice for spacecraft, because it drew almost no power and could be radiation-hardened. It was all static CMOS, so the system clock [&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":[61,99,21,103,43,83,72],"class_list":["post-3244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-aerospace","tag-anthropology","tag-electronics","tag-fantasy","tag-humor","tag-radio","tag-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3244","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=3244"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3246,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3244\/revisions\/3246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}