Odd Lots
- If you’re considering self-publishing, here’s a site you should read, and follow.
- We’ve discovered a couple of what I guess we could call owie-hot superconductors (room temp is for wimps!) with critical transition temperatures as high as 141C. (Alas, none of the alloys contain ytterbium.) The larger site is a good resource for superconductivity freaks.
- Frank Glover pointed me to something I wouldn’t have expected: an Airbus recoverable orbital cargo module that flies back to ground with…propellers.
- Esther Schindler sends a link to an article graphing 144 years of stats on American marriage and divorce. Marriage rates are now the lowest they’ve been in recorded history.
- Matt Ridley absolutely shreds the 60-year-old war on fat and cholesterol.
- It’s possible (not easy, but possible) to turn your Windows 10 upgrade to a bootable ISO.
- Roy Tellason has a marvelous index to nearly all useful vacuum tubes, with basing, filment voltage and current, description, and uses. (Thanks to Pat for the link.)
- Don’t stop there: Roy also has indexes for 2N, 2SA, 2SB, 2SC, 2SD, 2SH-2SJ, and odd-numbered transistors. Also diodes, optoisolators, and bridge rectifiers. ICs too, in too many separate indexes to list here. Go to the index of indexes and see it all.
- The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has a summer conference teaching students how to fight campus speech codes. Applications are due by July 3, so if you’re a student or know one, the time to act is now.
- A big sorry-you-insufferable-idiots goes out to our snooty urban elite: Both malls and suburbs are doing fine, and in some places are roaring back.
- One man designed Tobor the Great, Robbie the Robot, and the Lost in Space robot, and he lived to be 100.
- More robots: Among the least-appreciated funny robots in film history are the one-eyed robotic lawnmowers that chase Jerry Lewis around in the mayhem-filled action climax of his 1962 film It’s Only Money. Here’s the original trailer. Watch it to the end, where the lawnmowers steal the scene even from Lewis.
- Presidential portraits from another universe by artist Jason Heuser. My favorite is Richard Nixon with brass knuckles punching a smilodon’s lights out, though Ben Franklin fighting Zeus while riding an American Beauty-style kite is right up there.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: aerospace · culture · education · electronics · health · humor · robots
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Useful info for creating a w10 ISO…although I will probably stay with W8.1, using Classic Shell to get rid of the “Apps” …So far, I don’t see any advantages to upgrading to 10.
The presidential portraits are great stuff.
Robby the Robot appeared in a bunch of places after his debut in Forbidden Planet, including “The Twilight Zone”, “Columbo”, and “Mork and Mindy.” He even has his own IMDB page… which oddly doesn’t list his appearance as a hot-dog vendor in the movie “Heavy Metal.”
For those who are interested, SpaceX’s next launch is Sunday 6/27/15 at around 10:21 AM eastern time. This is one where they will attempt to land the first stage on a floating platform, which came pretty close to working last time. I intend to stream it to the TV from NASA TV via my ROKU.
Well that didn’t go at all well. 8-(
Forget the ROKU/NASA TV combination, it isn’t HD. Had to hook a laptop to the TV and use the HD stream through a browser.
Which was nothing to the disappointment that followed.