{"id":4264,"date":"2020-02-07T12:55:19","date_gmt":"2020-02-07T19:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4264"},"modified":"2020-02-07T12:55:25","modified_gmt":"2020-02-07T19:55:25","slug":"odd-lots-321","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4264","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Amazon is selling hand-made (in Latvia) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B00NB0QYPQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">steampunk thumb drives incorporating copper pipe caps and a Soviet-made pentode vacuum tube<\/a>. LEDs light up the glass from the bottom of the tube when there&#8217;s power available at the USB connector. (Thanks to Bill Meyer for the pointer.)<\/li>\n<li>Tonight would be a good night to see Mercury. It&#8217;s never easy because the planet never gets too far from the Sun in the sky, but with smartphone apps like Sky Map (on all Android phones by default) it&#8217;s certainly easier than it once was. Start by finding Venus in the west, immediately after the Sun goes below the horizon. (You can&#8217;t miss Venus.) Mercury lies roughly on a line between Venus and the Sun. There are no bright stars in that part of the sky, so if you see a star near that line, it&#8217;s not a star but ol&#8217; Merc himself.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of the Sun&#8230; Here&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2020\/02\/05\/a-solar-science-timeline-sunspots-cycles-and-solar-wind\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a solid overview of the history of solar science<\/a>. It&#8217;s a long piece, and even if you choose not to read it, the photos and diagrams are worth the visit.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.universetoday.com\/144694\/betelgeuse-is-continuing-to-dim-its-down-to-1-506-magnitude\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Betelgeuse continues to dim for unknown reasons<\/a>. It&#8217;s fallen from 10th brightest star in the sky to 24th brightest. Orion is the first constellation I can clearly recall seeing, and these days, it just looks&#8230;off. This may mean it&#8217;s about to go supernova&#8230;for large values of &#8220;about.&#8221; (Hundreds or more likely thousands of years. Stars are never in a hurry.)<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve been following the coronavirus epidemic using <a href=\"https:\/\/gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com\/apps\/opsdashboard\/index.html#\/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a dashboard maintained by Johns Hopkins<\/a>. Who knows how accurate it is, but one does get a feeling that China is currently in a world of hurt. I got the link from my friend Charlie Martin, and <a href=\"https:\/\/pjmedia.com\/news-and-politics\/the-great-pestilence-panic-of-2020\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">he&#8217;s got a good article about the issues involved<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>This is a little weird, but it&#8217;s one more telltale that the technical publishing industry I loved for so long is no longer with us. I went searching for a book on installing, configuring, and customizing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mediawiki.org\/wiki\/MediaWiki\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the MediaWiki software<\/a>, and found&#8230;nothing. There&#8217;s plenty online, but I&#8217;m talking about book-length treatments. If you know of one let me know. My longstanding heuristic is that if it&#8217;s not on Amazon, it isn&#8217;t available.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.upi.com\/Odd_News\/2020\/01\/24\/Winery-spills-thousands-of-gallons-of-Cabernet-into-California-river\/4151579886245\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">How to turn a waterway into wine<\/a>. At least it wasn&#8217;t a Zinfandel.<\/li>\n<li>Ah, but this was a sweet, sweet hack: Some guy wandered around downtown Berlin pulling a little red wagon full of smartphones, all running Google Maps. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vice.com\/en_us\/article\/9393w7\/this-man-created-traffic-jams-on-google-maps-using-a-red-wagon-full-of-phones\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Wherever he happened to be during his wander, Google Maps reported a traffic jam<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>If politics bores you as much as it bores me, here&#8217;s a solid distraction from all the tiresome yelling and screaming: <a href=\"https:\/\/thehustle.co\/the-economics-of-all-you-can-eat-buffets\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets<\/a>. Eat quick: My instincts tell me that as a category buffets are not long for this world.<\/li>\n<li>Finally, you&#8217;ve heard me say that there&#8217;s funny, there&#8217;s <em>National Lampoon<\/em> funny, and then there&#8217;s <em>Babylon Bee<\/em> funny. <a href=\"https:\/\/babylonbee.com\/news\/being-outraged-by-stupid-nonsense-replaces-baseball-as-national-pastime\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">This may be one of the Bee&#8217;s best pieces yet<\/a>&#8211;given this season&#8217;s nonstop nonsense.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Amazon is selling hand-made (in Latvia) steampunk thumb drives incorporating copper pipe caps and a Soviet-made pentode vacuum tube. LEDs light up the glass from the bottom of the tube when there&#8217;s power available at the USB connector. (Thanks to Bill Meyer for the pointer.) Tonight would be a good night to see Mercury. It&#8217;s [&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":[41,53,37,15,39,43,101,13],"class_list":["post-4264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-economics","tag-food","tag-hardware","tag-health","tag-humor","tag-steampunk","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4264","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=4264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4265,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4264\/revisions\/4265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}