{"id":383,"date":"2008-05-07T11:44:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-07T15:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=383"},"modified":"2009-01-14T21:44:18","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T01:44:18","slug":"odd-lots-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=383","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Here at the condo this morning, I can&apos;t bring up squat on the                 Web because everybody&apos;s out there trying to figure out who won                 the Democratic primaries last night. So I did an absolutely unheard                 of thing: I went down to the White Hen, got some of their great                 coffee, <i>and picked up a newspaper<\/i>. What a notion.<\/li>\n<li>I&apos;m hearing more and more people say that Wi-Fi doesn&apos;t work                 as well as it used to, which is weird because microwave physics                 hasn&apos;t changed recently. But&#8230;look at how many APs Windows can                 see from wherever you are. From my kitchen table here, NetStumbler                 sensed <i>twelve<\/i> APs&#8230;and walking around inside our dinky                 little condo picked up four more. Three of the strongest signals                 were on default Channel 6\u2014and five out of sixteen were cleverly                 named &#8220;linksys.&#8221; I don&apos;t think it&apos;s the physics, folks.<\/li>\n<li>After Meetup.com went all-paid (and <i>highly<\/i> paid) I investigated                 an alternative called Gatheroo, which later (in response to another                 damfool lawsuit from somebody) became <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zanby.com\/\">Zanby<\/a>.                 <a href=\"http:\/\/zanby.blogspot.com\/2008\/04\/all-new-zanby.html\">The                 site&apos;s been redesigned<\/a> and is worth a look if you want to                 start a meatspace social network where you live. There are both                 free and paid levels of participation, and it&apos;s certainly not                 as expensive as Meetup.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.matthewsworkbench.com\/\">Matthew Reed<\/a>                 (and lots of others after him) sent me pointers to articles about                 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eetimes.com\/news\/semi\/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207403521&amp;pgno=1\">the                 recent implementation of memristors<\/a>, which are a species of                 passive electronic component postulated in 1971 but not actually                 implemented until HP researchers made some earlier this year.                 Whether this interests you varies directly by the strength of                 your passion for electronics, and whereas I understand the concept                 now, my head is still spinning trying to figure out what it implies.                 Everybody&apos;s talking about better computer memory, sure&#8230;but what                 could this do in simple analog circuits?<\/li>\n<li>Jim Strickland sent me a pointer to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=WNl0sFViaxs&amp;feature=related\">a                 YouTube video about a flame triode amplifier\/oscillator lashup<\/a>,                 and guys, you gotta see this. It&apos;s basically a vacuum tube without                 either vacuum or tube: When the electrodes get hot, it starts                 amplifying. I don&apos;t fully understand the physics yet, but this                 would be one <i>fantastic<\/i> high school science fair project.                 The question arose in our local group as to whether this could                 be considered steampunkish, and I&apos;m not sure. People in the steampunk                 era had no problems generating reasonably hard vacuum and blowing                 glass envelopes. What they had problems with was understanding                 electrons. Nonetheless, with a big enough flame and some honkin&apos;                 batteries, you could have done some impressive things back in                 1888.<\/li>\n<li>Global Cooling adherents have been sending me pointers to <a href=\"http:\/\/wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com\/\">Watts                 Up With That<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.icecap.us\/\">Icecaps.us<\/a>.                 Fascinating reading, including numerous facets of the climate                 change discussion that you won&apos;t see in Big Media. F&apos;rinstance:                 Weather monitoring installations that were built sixty or seventy                 years ago out in the leafy countryside have recently become surrounded                 by new development, buildings, pavement, etc., and as a result                 are now in the middle of heat islands. What might that do to long-term                 temperature data? Hmmmm&#8230;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here at the condo this morning, I can&apos;t bring up squat on the Web because everybody&apos;s out there trying to figure out who won the Democratic primaries last night. So I did an absolutely unheard of thing: I went down to the White Hen, got some of their great coffee, and picked up a newspaper. [&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":[],"class_list":["post-383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383","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=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":399,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions\/399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}