November 20th, 2010:
- Here’s how the ancient Greeks calculated the distance between the Earth and the Moon. If the notion surprises you, well, you were reading comic books during geometry class, weren’t you?
- Although I’d heard of the Millionaire Calculator, a sort of mechanical uber-sliderule used circa 1890-1940, I did not know that it had helped to discover Pluto.
- From The Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: materteral, of or pertaining to an attentive aunt–basically the female analog of avuncular. Less commonly, materterine. Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for calling them to my attention.
- I was going to cite Sion , Philip Boast’s outrageous but hugely fun riff on the whole Da Vinci Code thing, as an example of a print book you can’t buy in the US (see yesterday’s entry) but I was wrong: You can get used copies here for a dollar. No extra charge for either the zombies nor the angels with pubic hair.
- Dell has not handled its notorious SX270 capacitor problem especially well. “Hide the corrosion” might have been the company line, and the results could be Capacitorgate. That said, Dell is not the only vendor to have had this problem. (There’s a whole forum devoted to bad PC capacitors.) I’ve been lucky so far…but I’ve also switched to SX280 machines, which are not as prone to the problem.
- They Don’t Make ‘Em Like This Anymore…and when they did, I missed them. Dayum. (More if not quite as cool at Gizmodo.)
- Alfred Powell Morgan basically got me started on electronics when I was 11, through his decades-spanning series of books on electronics for boys. Here’s a nice bio sketch of the Dan Beard of electronics from the ARRL Web site.
- The late Thomas Gold (author of The Deep Hot Biosphere) may have been right. I certainly hope so.
- Honda, I know you’ll never actually build that car, so that being the case, could I have an SUV painted the same color?
- If ski season seems to have come early this year, you aren’t being singled out. It’s snowing on Comet Hartley 2. (Hey, spin that dogbone and make a habitat out of it!)
- 70 is the new 40, and zombies are the new vampires. Let’s talk about this again when I’m the new 40.
- I’ve never been a beer guy, but if I did drink beer, it would probably be this one.
- And pertinent to the above, here’s an elegant solution to a problem that I myself will never have.
- This, on the other hand, is something I could definitely get into.
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