Odd Lots
- Probably because I don’t work that much in the realm of historic images, I did not know that scanned or photographic copies of public-domain images are also in the public domain, at least in the US. I’ve been gathering scans of pre-1923 artwork for possible use on book covers for several years now, but the uncertain origin (and thus the copyright status) of most of the copies themselves has given me pause. I guess it’s time to end the pause and hit Play.
- We’re currently in peak season for noctilucent clouds, which are high-altitude ice-crystal plumes of mysterious origin. Because they’re so high, they reflect sunlight long after the land beneath them is in night-time darkness. NLCs are appearing farther south recently for reasons not understood; predictably, it’s been ascribed to global warming, but some research indicates that southward excursions of NLCs are a proxy for low solar activity, which we’ve certainly been seeing the last couple of years. (Spaceweather has been covering NLCs a lot in recently weeks, with good photos.)
- Here’s an R2D2-shaped toilet paper cozy. Hey, why is this any weirder than the crocheted teal-yarn poodle-nose cozies that my Aunt Josephine used to keep her toilet paper in?
- I have a strong affection for Nebraska, and here’s an interesting article about abandoned farmsteads and structures in the western Great Plains portion of the state. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- A chap named Julian Beever may be the real master of 3-D sidewalk art. (Thanks to Roy Harvey for putting me on to him.)
- We’ve now had cheap desktop CD-R burners for at least ten years, and the lifetime of the media is supposedly about that. Here’s a reasonable article on optical disc longevity that isn’t from an industry source. Has anybody noticed any burned (not stamped) data discs from the 90s going bad yet?
- When we lived in Arizona, I used to climb an elderly neighbor’s thirty-foot-tall grapefruit tree to help her get the high-hanging fruit. I was in my early forties and that was the last time I ever climbed trees on a systematic basis. If I had to do it again, I would probably stay on the ground and build something like this.
- Has Bucky Fuller’s Cloud 9 cities concept ever been used in SF? There’s not much to be found online about them, but in brief, he was talking about geodesic spheres as much as several miles in diameter, each containing whole cities that could float via thermal lift by virtue of as little as a degree or two of temperature delta between inside and outside. I’ve been imagining Cloud 9 spheres made of drumlin parts (with possibly a Hilbert drive ring around the sphere’s equator) and I’m a little surprised that I haven’t already seen the idea used in fiction, given that Bucky wrote about it in 1960.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: hardware · humor · publishing · sf · travel
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About CD longevity.
I use an open source program to create error correction files for my CDs and DVDs. It is called Dvdisaster and seems to work very well. I tested it once by burning a cd and then actually drilled a few small holes in it with a drill. The program used the correction files and the damaged disk and soon created a new iso image file of the original cd. From the site
“CD, DVD and BD media keep their data only for a finite time (typically for many years). After that time, data loss develops slowly with read errors growing from the outer media region towards the inside.”
I keep three copies of the correction data, one copy on DVD, and the other two on USB hard drives set aside for the purpose. For very important discs I store 50% of correction data.
http://dvdisaster.net/en/
Thanks for the link on optical disks.
Note that the shelf life of 5 to 10 years for -R disks is before recording. The jury is still out of shelf life after records, but it would seem to be at least twice that.
I would be leery of using reproductions of antique and therefore out of copyright images. While I think you’re right, that the court decision in the U.S. protects you, your Lulu books are available to anyone on the planet, are they not?
-JRS