{"id":425,"date":"2008-04-16T19:56:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-16T23:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=425"},"modified":"2009-01-14T22:13:29","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T02:13:29","slug":"odd-lots-38","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=425","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Ok. It&apos;s April 16, and outside it&apos;s 30\u00b0 and blizzarding.                 There&apos;s about two inches on the ground already and we may get                 another 4&#8243; &#8211; 6&#8243; tonight. Would you fools please stop                 calling it &#8220;global warming&#8221; and start calling it &#8220;climate                 change&#8221; before the whole world decides we&apos;re idiots?<\/li>\n<li>In one respect the snow is welcome: <a href=\"http:\/\/ap.google.com\/article\/ALeqM5gwSSrT7-LciDlr1tYmyE9e19oX9QD90340O80\">There                 were two very bad wildfires here in the last couple of days<\/a>,                 one of them only about fifteen miles due south of me, and the                 smoke was bad enough to make my allergies go ballistic this morning.               <\/li>\n<li>Interestingly, the fire broke out about a quarter of a mile                 from where we intend to go RV camping the day after tomorrow.                 (As best we know, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mountaindalecampground.com\/Mtndle_Home.html\">the                 campground<\/a> has not seen any fire or other damage on their                 land.) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.duntemann.com\/september2006.htm#09-22-2006\">Snow                 seems to follow us on camping trips<\/a>. (That little adventure                 was on the last day of <i>summer<\/i>, people!) We&apos;re hoping this                 time will be different.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.news.com\/8301-10784_3-9918391-7.html?tag=newsmap\">Democrats                 in Congress are spearheading an effort to compel states to collect                 state taxes on out-of-state online vendors<\/a>. Far from targeting                 corporate fat cats, the effort will cost ordinary people, including                 some fairly poor ones, a great deal of money. Tell me, now: How                 is this supposed to help you win elections?<\/li>\n<li>I just bought an off-lease, nearly flawless Dell Optiplex SX270                 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with a 60 GB hard drive and a DVD-ROM&#8230;for                 $199. Computers, like books, have gotten so cheap that they&apos;re                 basically disposable. If this machine dies any time soon, I&apos;ll                 just buy another, wincing a little to imagine that my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.computercloset.org\/InterSystemsDPS-1.htm\">1978                 Intersystems DPS-1 S-100 bus machine<\/a> with a 1 MHz 8080 CPU                 cost me $3600 1978 dollars. (It was the first and still the coolest-looking                 computer I have ever owned that I did not build myself.)<\/li>\n<li>The story I could not identify in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.duntemann.com\/april2008.htm#04-10-2008\">my                 April 10, 2008 Odd Lots<\/a> (about a guy who extracted gold from                 seawater) was &#8220;The Man Who Ploughed the Sea&#8221; by Arthur                 C. Clarke, and it was a Harry Purvis story from <i>Tales from                 the White Hart<\/i>.<\/li>\n<li> From Bruce Schneier&apos;s CryptoGram comes a pointer to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestranger.com\/seattle\/Content?oid=520472\">a                 wonderful little piece<\/a> on what sorts of books bookstore shoplifters                 lift, and what sort of man a bookstore shoplifter is. (You <i>do<\/i>                 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.schneier.com\/crypto-gram.html\">subscribe to                 CryptoGram<\/a>, don&apos;t you?)<\/li>\n<li>The lyrics to one of the funniest pop songs ever to hit the                 Billboard Top 20 are (legally) online, at the author&apos;s Web site:                 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dean_Friedman\">Dean Friedman<\/a>&apos;s                 1976 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.deanfriedman.com\/lyrics\/lyrics_main.html#Ariel\">&#8220;Ariel.&#8221;<\/a>                 It&apos;s one of the few songs I would ever consent to perform in public,                 though that would require that I learn to play some kind of an                 instrument. Maybe <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/337504\/suzuki-q-chord-zero-to-musical-hero-to-zero-in-9-seconds\">this<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Bob Thompson sent me <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/daynotes\/2008\/2008-15.html#Sat\">a                 link to one of his posts<\/a> relating (as my entry for yesterday                 did) to catalogs of the 1960s, in this case the Sears Catalog.                 His comments pertaining to chemistry sets are bang-on, though                 I would add that a significant amount of the value of chemistry                 sets lay in allowing kids to imagine themselves as scientists\u2014chemistry                 has more identifiably iconic paraphernalia than almost any other                 scientific discipline\u2014and what kids can&apos;t imagine themselves                 as, they generally won&apos;t become.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ok. It&apos;s April 16, and outside it&apos;s 30\u00b0 and blizzarding. There&apos;s about two inches on the ground already and we may get another 4&#8243; &#8211; 6&#8243; tonight. Would you fools please stop calling it &#8220;global warming&#8221; and start calling it &#8220;climate change&#8221; before the whole world decides we&apos;re idiots? In one respect the snow is [&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-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425","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=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":437,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions\/437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}