Odd Lots
- Author Nick Cole has his finger on what’s wrong with print publishing. A big chunk of it is Barnes & Noble. He says what I’ve been saying for some time: The fate of the Big 5 print publishers is tied to B&N’s. When B&N goes under, there will be blood in the streets of Manhattan.
- Great article on that 1920s curiosity, spinning-disk television, with the first actual videos I’ve ever seen of the bottle-cap sized screens in action.
- And more cool hacks, if newer ones: A home-made full-auto crossbow. Dip it in holy water and the vampires will run screaming, like they did in Van Helsing. (Thanks to Bradford C. Walker for the link.)
- The cool hacks never quit! Here’s some basic information on using an SDR dongle with the Raspberry Pi. There’s actually a lot of activity on SDR for the RPi these days. Google it, but budget an hour or two for the browsing. One note up front: Consensus is that the original RPi doesn’t have the muscle to do SDR well. Use a version 2 or 3. (Thanks to Rick Hellewell for the link.)
- The science just keeps piling up: Eating fatty foods can make you healthier and slimmer. You can do the science yourself, as I explained in a series some time back.
- The Chicago Tribune has declared that Obamacare has failed. When you lose the mainstream media, methinks it’s well and truly over.
- The history of Radithor, the first nuclear energy drink. Not a good idea, to put it mildly. Me, when I need more energy I just suck a few more Penguin Peppermints, or run up to 64th & Greenway and get a 44 oz Diet Mountain Dew. Works. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
- Yeah. Radium, the gift that keeps on giving: Madame Curie’s notebooks, furniture, clothes, and other personal effects are still radioactive, and will be for another 1,500 years or so. They’re considered national treasures by the French, and are stored in lead-lined boxes. You need to sign a waiver to unbox and view them. You go. I’ll watch the slide show.
- A nuclear energy company has applied to the NRC to build a small modular nuclear reactor. ‘Bout damned time. There is NO solution–and I mean NO with a capital NO–to global warming that is not based on nuclear. If you do not enthusiastically support nuclear energy, don’t talk to me about global warming.
- Several Spanish towns saw their first significant snowfalls in 90 years recently. One report like that means nothing. But I’m seeing more and more of them all the time. Also, teaching people that weather = climate cuts both ways; a couple of bad winters will have them thinking that the world is actually cooling.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: culture · electronics · health · history · publishing · rpi · science · weather
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If you like Raspberry Pi’s and SDR, have you seen the “Stealth Cell Tower” article?
https://julianoliver.com/output/stealth-cell-tower
Boy. I wonder how many felonies that little item could generate? The scary part is how easy it was to put together, assuming you knew the underlying tech.
The reactor on a barge photo bumped a memory for me.
There is a lot of commercial barge traffic in the Columbia River Gorge east of Portland, OR. Twice when I’ve been driving the Gorge I’ve seen an east bound barge loaded with a huge black cylinder . . . maybe 35′ in diameter and 30′ tall. The barge/tug was accompanied by a couple of Navy ships. It is unusual to see the Navy 100 miles into a river.
Took me a bit to figure they were old submarine reactors headed for burial at Hanford.
It would have been a lot of fun to watch the fleet squeeze through the locks at Bonneville, The Dalles, John Day, and McNary dams.
“There is NO solution–and I mean NO with a capital NO–to global warming that is not based on nuclear. If you do not enthusiastically support nuclear energy, don’t talk to me about global warming.”
Solar energy power generation in space used to be the next big thing a few years ago and it was my understanding that such systems could provide 24/7 base load power. Of course like all such things there were going to be downsides. I’m sure you are aware of Jerry Pournelle’s urging us to use space resources.
My problem with systems like that has been the same since the 1970s: You’re gathering gigawatts in space and sending them to Earth in a tight beam. Anything like that is bogglingly dangerous compared to nuclear on the ground. We can’t even keep network crackers out of our entirely-too-smart thermostats; can we keep them out of orbital ray guns capable of setting whole cities on fire? I’m unconvinced, especially because there is simply no real reason not to go with nuclear.
Yes, nuclear is certainly going to be the quicker and easier solution. I thought I’d just mention for reference that other solutions were thrown around back in the day – showing my age here.
There’s a trilogy by a guy named Alexis A. Gilleland, from 1981-82. Revolution from Rosinante, Long Shot for Rosinante, The Pirates of Rosinante. They’re about a space colony that gets abandoned due to economic/corporate upheaval among its sponsor nations and corporations and has to make some interesting political adaptations.
They needed a weapon, and used their spare mirror array (several million independently-steerable small mirrors) to pump a gas laser fourteen meters in diameter and a couple of kilometers long. Due to optical effects when it was in operation, it became known as the Purple Shaft…
Gilleland didn’t write much, and the Rosinante series was a bit rough around the edges, but I enjoyed it thoroughly when it came out, and the three slim volumes have made the cut through numerous reductions in my library.
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Most of the proposals I remember for orbital collectors talked about some kind of microwave power transmission to the ground. I always wondered what the losses would look like at the receiving end.
Any way you do it, to track the ground antenna from orbit, you’re still talking about an orbital platform with a steerable weapon. And we thought Mutually Assured Destruction was in the “dustbin of history…”
“You don’t need no oil, nor a Tokamac coil
“Solar stations provide Earth with juice.
“Power beams are sublime, so nobody will mind
“If we cook an occasional goose.”
(c) Higgins and Gehm, 1978
Ah, the 70s.
That spinning disk TV is pretty fascinating…amazingly crude, but a very good first effort.
regarding carbs… https://xkcd.com/
I followed the link about fatty foods to the Evening Standard – but they don’t provide a reference to the actual paper supposedly published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Who knows, they might have invented the entire story (“alternative facts”) – so disseminating this “information” is somewhat dubious. I would be very interested in reading the actual paper, but couldn’t find it.
Well, this was a failure on my part; I usually chase links down and was just in a hurry this time. I looked at the most recent issues of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and didn’t see anything that matched the description of the study.
Dr. Sultan is well-known, and kind of a maverick on the issue of treating high cholesterol with statins. I found his list of peer-reviewed publications, but given the jargon level it’s unclear to me if the paper referenced is one of these:
http://sherifsultan.ie/publications/
I’m thinking not. He may have been commenting in a news release about papers written by colleagues. That said, the same conclusions are being reached by many research teams around the world, and a consensus seems to be forming around the idea that carbs (sugar especially) not fat, are what gives us cardiovascular disease.
Thanks for pointing this out; I’ll check a little more carefully in the future.
I like the video on the full auto crossbow, especially the maniacal cackle at the end. I noticed that he uses good scientific notation for the torque of the electric drill: newton-meters. I still remember my physics prof in freshman physics working out the “real units” equivalent to a newton. It turns out it’s about a quarter pound–or more precisely pound-force since “English” units incorrectly conflate mass with weight. Anyway, a meter is ~3 feet in “real units” so a newton meter is about 3/4 foot-pound torque.