{"id":5510,"date":"2025-11-03T14:54:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T21:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5510"},"modified":"2025-11-03T15:14:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T22:14:07","slug":"odd-lots-360","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5510","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I stumbled onto the site <a title=\"https:\/\/thegrokipedias.com\/\" href=\"https:\/\/thegrokipedias.com\/\">https:\/\/thegrokipedias.com\/<\/a> and although everything it says seems to support Grokpedia, there\u2019s no indication that it\u2019s a property or project of X or Musk himself. Then again, Grokipedia\u2019s UI is so sparse that maybe Musk had his people create a support site that will not be updated as often as the very much in-progress Grokipedia v0.1 will be.<\/li>\n<li>Or (scratches his head here) did Musk just tell Grok to \u201ccreate a support site for Grokipedia?\u201d We don\u2019t know yet, and Musk being Musk, I wonder if we\u2019ll ever know.<\/li>\n<li>While we\u2019re still talking Halloween, here\u2019s a picture someone sent me of what I consider the best Halloween costume of all time. No, it\u2019s not AI. Look carefully:     <br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Rocketkid.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"Rocketkid\" style=\"display: inline; background-image: none;\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Rocketkid\" src=\"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Rocketkid_thumb.jpg\" width=\"200\" height=\"244\" \/><\/a><\/li>\n<li>Ok, still Halloweenish: A food site explores the science behind\u2026candy corn: <a title=\"https:\/\/www.seriouseats.com\/candy-corn-science-11838045\" href=\"https:\/\/www.seriouseats.com\/candy-corn-science-11838045\">https:\/\/www.seriouseats.com\/candy-corn-science-11838045<\/a><\/li>\n<li>One more. Just one more, promise! Here\u2019s a candy engineer (a WHAT??) explaining the science behind\u2026Snickers bars.<\/li>\n<li>After coming to some sort of confidential settlement with various publisher groups, the lawsuits are over. Yet Internet Archive still offers <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/search?query=Byte+Magazine\" target=\"_blank\">Byte Magazine in PDF format<\/a> from 1975 (when they first published) to 1998. Now, the PDFs are yuge: I downloaded May 1980, in which I had an article on the COSMAC CPU, and it was 221MB all by its lonesome.<\/li>\n<li>Here\u2019s another upbeat, not manic but still admirably energetic piece of classical music: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=pOjHAJfp2U8&amp;list=RDpOjHAJfp2U8\" target=\"_blank\">Janacek\u2019s Lachian Dance #2: \u201cBlessed.\u201d<\/a> <\/li>\n<li>Manic you want? They don\u2019t come any manicker than Vaughan Williams\u2019 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tgBHr3z-jlg&amp;list=RDtgBHr3z-jlg\" target=\"_blank\">The Running Set.<\/a> I\u2019ve linked to the piece before. It\u2019s one of my all-time favorites. I characterize it \u201cas an Irish jig on meth.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>I just discovered <a href=\"https:\/\/www.accuradio.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">AccuRadio<\/a>, and it may be a forerunner of what might be the future of radio: A free streaming service with music divided into hundreds of channels. Their classical channels are a little sparse (search failed to find Ralph Vaughan Williams or Doreen Carwithen) but the pop channels\u2014it\u2019s all there.<\/li>\n<li>Daylight Savings Time has run its course for this fall\/winter\/spring and the nation is back on Standard Time\u2014including Arizona, which never left Standard Time and hasn\u2019t for\u2026a long time. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.yahoo.com\/news\/articles\/heres-americans-feel-changing-clocks-122325941.html\" target=\"_blank\">Recent research shows that most Americans would prefer to stay on Standard Time year-round<\/a>. It\u2019s 47% opposed, 12% in favor, and 40% \u201cneutral,\u201d which I suspect simply means they don\u2019t care. Computers and phones get their time off servers. It\u2019s just the battery operated ticktockers and appliance digitals that have to be set forward and back. (We have a fair number of those and are glad they don\u2019t need fussing twice a year.)<\/li>\n<li>I\u2019ve always wondered about this: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mentalfloss.com\/language\/why-do-we-call-building-floors-stories\" target=\"_blank\">Why are the floors of buildings called \u201cstories?\u201d<\/a> Good quick explanation here. We live in a one-floor house, and the ground level is not called a \u201cstory.\u201d (I have to get my stories elsewhere\u2026)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I stumbled onto the site https:\/\/thegrokipedias.com\/ and although everything it says seems to support Grokpedia, there\u2019s no indication that it\u2019s a property or project of X or Musk himself. Then again, Grokipedia\u2019s UI is so sparse that maybe Musk had his people create a support site that will not be updated as often as the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5510","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=5510"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5514,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5510\/revisions\/5514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}