Odd Lots
- In order to adfertote plus catuli, you had better facite plus catuli first. A number of very sharp people I know are working on this. Their feckless critics will doubtless help.
- September 12 was the annual peak in hurricane activity. Alas, there were no tropical depressions, tropical storms, or hurricanes anywhere on Earth. And as best I can tell from the National Hurricane Center sit, there still aren’t.
- I said this back in 2010. Now, according to a book reviewed by National Geographic, I was right. I love being right. (Thanks to Bill Roper for the link.)
- Carol and I tried several flavors of this stuff when we were in Phoenix recently, and it’s mighty good in coffee. (I also poured some of the black cherry flavor into a bottle of not-quite-meh Reisling and found it much more drinkable.) The manufacturer told me that Wal-Mart sells it, but we looked in two stores and didn’t find any. However, you can order it from Amazon.
- Here’s a nice article on the world’s first science fiction convention, held in Leeds, England, in 1937. Arthur C. Clarke and Eric Frank Russell were there.
- Reader Scott Schad put me on to a phenomenon he’s discovered on Amazon, in which somebody is concocting fake tech books and publishing them under the titles of popular books, including my own Assembly Language Step By Step. I’m looking into this, but (as if it needs saying) be careful what you buy online.
- Esther Schindler sent a link to the earliest use of the F-word, which appears in 1310. I’m guessing it goes back a little farther than that.
- What are asteroids made of? No snipes or snails, one would hope. However, 810 times the amount of ruthenium in the Earth’s crust sounds really good. (Thanks to Charlie Martin for the link.)
- While we’re talking exotic metals, here’s a YouTube video of gallium melting in someone’s hand. (It’s a slow process; FF to about 4:30, where it starts getting interesting.)
- And another showing what happens when you pour liquid gallium on your iPhone 6. I love the way the guy picks up liquid metal with his fingers and drops it on the phone. Mercury doesn’t work that way. Then again, mercury doesn’t eat aluminum phones, either.
- Gallium became a short-term character in Metal Men, the only comic book I ever paid my own money for and read regularly.
- From the ya-gotta-see-this department: My old friend Doug Rice was a designer and storyboard artist on a cartoon filk parody of the Macarena, starring the Animaniacs.
- Take a look at Pastime Projects for vacuum tube ham radio kits, mostly centering around the 6V6 power pentode. There’s an associated blog for the site, and it’s worth reading if tubes are your thing.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · electronics · filk · food · ham radio · language · physics · sf
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> fake techbooks
A few years ago I bought some “used” machinist’s books from both half.com and Amazon’s used books department. Those books are small-press, limited-run volumes that sell for $20-ish each new. (they’re typically small format and less than 100 pages)
Every one of the “used” books was brand new, never-opened, and cost $0.99 + the usual $3.98 shipping.
From a press *that* small, they might have been printing runs of a few hundred at a time at a local copy shop, so it’s not practical to point at print quality when suspecting a counterfeit… but these weren’t books you’d be likely to find in a remainder pile anywhere. I don’t think they’ve ever been available other than directly from the publisher.
So *many* brand-new “used” books… it couldn’t be all that profitable to counterfeit them at that price, and the market is small… but there are some books where it would be quite profitable. Some older S-A Design, Petersen, or Classic Motorbooks volumes originally sold for three to five dollars; they’re out of print, and you can seldom find a used copy for under $100. As you’ve written before, some of this is software-driven, but in the end, that’s what someone has to pay if they want to buy a copy. 8-1/2×11, 150 pages or so, low resolution black and white pictures… that’s trivial for modern copy machines.
Maybe I’m just suspicious and a little bit paranoid. Or maybe not…
“September 12 was the annual peak in hurricane activity. Alas, there were no tropical depressions, tropical storms, or hurricanes anywhere on Earth. And as best I can tell from the National Hurricane Center sit, there still aren’t.”
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Well! If that isn’t proof of the need to destroy our economy to reduce CO2 emission, I don’t know what is. /sarcasm