Odd Lots
- I got an email recently from ABEBooks inviting me to their Weird Book Room. They were telling the truth, and I was not disappointed. I was a little surprised that I only own two of the titles on the list (guess which ones!) but I’ve already ordered another: How to Be Pope by Piers Marchant. I mean, c’mon, how could I not?
- I complain a lot about pocket camera latency, but check this one out: A seminal 1990 digital camera from Leica took three minutes to grab a shot. Those handles are cool, sure, but I’ll guess that a tripod works better.
- Think of Constantine at the Milvian Bridge for a moment: “In This Sign, Conquer.”
- Various party poopers emailed me this story about an Antarctic cruise ship that lost an engine and got pounded by 45-foot waves somewhere in the Drake Passage. Yes, I feel better already, thanks.
- Don’t forget the Geminids meteor shower late Monday night/Tuesday morning early. It’s probably cold where you are, but the show might be worth it.
- There will also be a total lunar eclipse the night of December 20/21.
- I used to pick up The Fortean Times at the Village Green Bookstore in Rochester, NY in the early 80s, and it was fine bathroom reading. I’m delighted to report that their Web site is still good, albeit less convenient in the bathroom. I wasn’t aware that no viable peas were found in King Tut’s tomb, but that sort of ignorance is easily corrected. Ditto the feral parrots of London, which have been there long before Jimi Hendrix made the scene and felt that it needed some color. Hey, paint’s cheaper, and it doesn’t poop on you when you’re sitting under a tree.
- I guess the primary virtue of The 100 Best Movie Spaceships is that 100 spaceships is a lot of spaceships, so just about everybody gets in. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- David Stafford provides a link to a functional re-creation of the Antikythera Device…in Lego! (I’m guessing that it’s also been done in Meccano, but I’ve not gone looking.)
- Here’s a remarkably long and detailed (for attention-challenged io9, at least) essay on the biological effects of sudden exposure to vacuum, a la Dave Bowman in 2001. As a bonus, author Geoff Landis explains (with equations) how quickly your spacecraft will lose atmosphere if punctured. I’d read this site more frequently if there were more of that and less of this.
- My old friend Neil Rest is right: These are about as cool as artistic representations of cities get. And they’re all made of techie castoffs, including cardboard. Wow! (And in the comments is a link to a chess set made of various coax connectors. Way wow!)
- I wouldn’t have thought of this: Coat a few bazillion tobacco mosaic viruses with conductive material, and you can use them make batteries with ten times the capacity of lithium-ion tech. Well, with the ongoing decline in smoking, what else are all those poor unemployed tobacco viruses gonna do? (Thanks to Roy Harvey for the link.)
- From David Stafford comes a pointer to instructions on how to determine either the speed of light or the operating frequency of your microwave oven by tormenting marshmallows.
- With that, I think I’m caught up on the Odd Lots file. More as they come in.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: books · humor · photography · science · sf · weirdness
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Jeff,
Fun stuff in Odd Lots today — led me down a number of very interesting paths. Keep it up.
Let me know how the Pope thing works for you.
Dave
PS: The Fortean Times is still a good bathroom read on an iPad!
Some comments on the “100 Best Spaceships” article lament the fact that certain ships were left off, such as the (new) Battlestar Galactica, the White Star from Babylon 5, or the TARDIS. They’re forgetting that this was “100 Best Movie Spaceships.” Those ships never appeared in theatrical movies.
Other suggestions, like the original Galactica, the Enterprise-D, or the Defiant, did appear in theatrical movies, but were better known for their TV appearances. Some of those types of ships did make the cut, like the Serenity.
In the end, that article makes a great thing for geeks to argue over.
There are many other ships I would have included. The most important to our generation being Dr Zarkov’s home brew design from the Flash Gordon serials.
Well, shucky-dern! I checked out that How to Be Pope book, and am disappointed to see that it’s merely a job-description manual. And here I thought it was gonna tell me how to BECOME the Pope!
Jeff, I see from the second entry above that it’s possible to do italics in these comments. Does one use HTML or angle-bracket codes (whatever they’re called) or what?
Oop! I mean HTML or square-bracket codes, of course (the type that are used in many forum postings).
Fun stuff, Jeff. On the weird book list, thanks for helping me with my Christmas shopping. 🙂
No luck on the meteor shower; we had cloudy skies. I’m hoping for better weather for the lunar eclipse.