{"id":3532,"date":"2015-10-21T10:08:53","date_gmt":"2015-10-21T16:08:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3532"},"modified":"2015-10-21T10:12:01","modified_gmt":"2015-10-21T16:12:01","slug":"odd-lots-287","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3532","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s Back to the Future Day, and apart from antigravity, well, Marty McFly&#8217;s 2015 looks more or less like the one we live in, only with better food and inifinitely worse partisan tribalism. If predicting 19 <em>Jaws<\/em> sequels is the second-worst worst flub the series made, well, I&#8217;m good with that.<\/li>\n<li>October 21 is also the day that <a href= \"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Northrop_YB-49\" target=\"_blank\">the Northrop YB-49 flying wing bomber<\/a> made its debut flight, in 1947. (Thanks to Charlie Martin for the reminder.) The YB-49 is my second-favorite undeployed bomber prototype, after the stunning <a href= \"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie\" target=\"_blank\">XB-70 Valkyrie<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s a (very) long and detailed essay by a liberal Democrat explaining <a href= \"https:\/\/medium.com\/@pullnews\/what-i-learned-about-climate-change-the-science-is-not-settled-1e3ae4712ace\" target=\"_blank\">why he went from being a climate alarmist to a global warming skeptic<\/a>. Loads of charts and links. I don&#8217;t agree with him 100%, but he makes a very sane and mostly politics-free case for caution in pushing &#8220;decarbonization.&#8221; (Thanks to Charlie Martin for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Far from melting, <a href= \"https:\/\/stevengoddard.wordpress.com\/2015\/10\/18\/greenland-blowing-away-all-records-for-ice-growth\/\" target=\"_blank\">Greenland is breaking all records for ice growth<\/a>, having gained 150 billion tons of snow and ice in the last six weeks.<\/li>\n<li>Here are <a href= \"http:\/\/www.asbpe.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/15\/try-this-starter-list-of-18-urls-when-drafting-your-next-fact-checking-guide\/\" target=\"_blank\">18 useful resources for journalistic fact-checking<\/a>. Pity that MSM journalists are unwilling to do that sort of thing anymore. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled that <a href= \"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2015\/10\/appeals-court-rules-that-google-book-scanning-is-fair-use\/\" target=\"_blank\">scanning books is legal<\/a>. The court ruled against the Authors Guild in their 2005 class-action suit against Google. The Guild intends to appeal to the Supreme Court. If the Supremes take the case, interesting things could happen. If they don&#8217;t, the case is over.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/digg.com\/2015\/myers-briggs-secret-history\" target=\"_blank\">The secret history of the Myers-Briggs personality test<\/a>. I am of three minds about Myers-Briggs. No make that nine. Oh, hell: seventeen.<\/li>\n<li>This is probably the best discussion I&#8217;ve seen (and certainly the longest) on how and why SFF fandom is actively destroying itself at the same time it&#8217;s dying of old age. Read The Whole Thing. <a href= \"http:\/\/therightgeek.blogspot.com\/2015\/04\/commentary-challenging-comfortable.html\" target=\"_blank\">Part I<\/a>. <a href= \"http:\/\/therightgeek.blogspot.com\/2015\/08\/challenging-comfortable-fictions-part.html\" target=\"_blank\">Part II<\/a>. <a href= \"http:\/\/therightgeek.blogspot.com\/2015\/10\/challenging-comfortable-fictions-part.html\" target=\"_blank\">Part III<\/a>. (And thanks to Sarah Hoyt for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Also from Sarah: <a href= \"http:\/\/www.messynessychic.com\/2015\/10\/02\/atomic-gardens-of-the-1960s-and-their-undocumented-legacy\/\" target=\"_blank\">Backyard atomic gardens of the 1950s and very early 1960s<\/a>. I love the word &#8220;atomic.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>I love it so much that, having recently bought a midcentury home, I may subscribe to <em><a href= \"https:\/\/www.atomic-ranch.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Atomic Ranch Magazine<\/a><\/em>. I&#8217;ve begun looking for a Bohr atom model to put on our mantelpiece.<\/li>\n<li>From the Elementary Trivia Department: The only way to make pink-tinted glass is to add erbium oxide to it.<\/li>\n<li>Thunderbird is getting on my bad side. It regularly pops up a box claiming that it doesn&#8217;t have enough disk space to download new messages. My SSD on C: has 83 GB free. My conventional hard drive on D: has 536 GB free. Online reports suggest that Thurderbird has a 2 GB size limit on mail folders. Still researching the issue, but I smell a long integer overflow somewhere.<\/li>\n<li>From Rory Modena: <a href= \"http:\/\/bondwine.com\/2013\/03\/12\/creative-discomfort-and-star-wars\/\" target=\"_blank\">A talented writer explains the history of the Star Wars movies, and rewrites some of the clumsier plot elements<\/a> right before our eyes. A lot of what bothered him blew right past me; I knew it was a pulp film and was in it for the starships and the robots.<\/li>\n<li>From Esther Schindler: <a href= \"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/world\/americas\/four-hundred-year-old-church-re-emerges-from-beneath-mexican-reservoir-a6698536.html\" target=\"_blank\">A Mexican church long sunk at the bottom of a reservoir is emerging from the water due to drought<\/a>. (This isn&#8217;t a rare occurrance; it happened last in 2002.) I kept hearing Debussy&#8217;s spooky tone-poem <a href= \"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=7-jmCNtgJ_g\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Engulfed Cathedral&#8221;<\/a> while reading the article.<\/li>\n<li>McDonald&#8217;s recently went to a breakfast-all-day menu, to my delight. I&#8217;m very fond of their Sausage McMuffin with Egg, which is of modest size and makes a great snack anytime. Alas, <a href= \"http:\/\/www.infowars.com\/mcdonalds-on-last-leg-as-all-day-breakfast-gimmick-implodes\/\" target=\"_blank\">adding all the new line items to the menu has caused chaos<\/a> in some smaller restaurants, and franchise owners are having second thoughts. I doubt McD is facing &#8220;imminent collapse&#8221; but I&#8217;m now wondering how long the new menu will last.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s Back to the Future Day, and apart from antigravity, well, Marty McFly&#8217;s 2015 looks more or less like the one we live in, only with better food and inifinitely worse partisan tribalism. If predicting 19 Jaws sequels is the second-worst worst flub the series made, well, I&#8217;m good with that. October 21 is also [&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":[61,156,37,46,54,18,14],"class_list":["post-3532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-aerospace","tag-copyright","tag-food","tag-psychology","tag-science","tag-sf","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3532","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=3532"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3535,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3532\/revisions\/3535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}