- I regret to report that Robert Bruce Thompson has left us, at age 64, of heart problems. He’s best-known for his books PC Hardware in a Nutshell and Building the Perfect PC, but he’s also written several books on astronomy and telescopes that I much admire, as well as several books on home-lab chemistry. He was one of the best technical writers of his generation, and has been blogging as long as I have, which later this year will have been 20 years.
- Apple will be releasing the source code for the Lisa OS this year. The machine came out in 1983 and didn’t sell well due to its $10,000 price tag. (That would be almost $25,000 today.) I’m interested because Lisa OS was written in…Pascal! I’ve heard rumors from the FreePascal community that a port to the Raspberry Pi is likely and might not even be especially difficult. Imagine the OS from a $25,000 machine running on a computer costing $35. I’d do that just to say I did.
- I didn’t know anything about ArcaOS until a few days ago, but it’s basically a continuation of OS/2 Warp, based on Warp 4, MCP2. Legal, not free, but also not hideously expensive, and supported to boot. If you ever used OS/2 and liked it, take a look.
- Back before we truly understood the dangers of nuclear radiation, scientists experimented with nuclear fission by moving neutron reflectors around a softball-sized core of PU-239 by hand, and recording the nuclear reaction’s strength from Geiger counter readings. This was called “tickling the dragon’s tail,” and when done clumsily, led to the death of several researchers and shortened the lives of others. Here’s a good summary.
- The last house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright before his death in 1959 is in Phoenix, and it’s for sale. Got $3.25M in your wallet? You’re set! (Thanks to my own Carol for the link.)
- Here’s an excellent long-form piece on Amazon Go, the online retail behemoth’s experiment in checkout-free B&M retailing. Take if off the shelf, toss it in your bag, and when you’re done shopping, just leave. You need an Amazon account and ideally a smartphone, but with that you’re in business. No word on when the concept will move beyond Seattle.
- The Dark Crystal is coming back to movie theaters in February. That was a butt-kickin’ movie, and I will probably hand over the $14 ticket price without a great deal of grumbling. A really big screen is worth something!
- IO9 mentioned some teasers for Cloverfield III. III? Was there a Cloverfield II? You guys never tell me anything!
- A Canadian sniper team in the Middle East nailed an ISIS terrorist at 3,871 yards. This is about 1,000 yards farther than the previous record for a sniper kill. I have a lot of respect for marksmen (my father was one) and a sense of awe before the skill of snipers at this level.
- Every time I crank up Waterfox, it asks me if I’d like it to be my default browser. Every damned time. Something appears to be redefining my default browser without my permission. This support page hasn’t been especially helpful. Haven’t cracked this one yet, but I’ll report here when I do.
- Something the AGW crowd should keep in mind: If you say that any hot summer’s day means global warming, don’t be surprised if people unroll the syllogism and assume that any cold winter’s day means global cooling. Climate isn’t simple, and we know a lot less about it than we claim.
software
Odd Lots
Gatebox Waifu, and More of the Lotus Machine
Somebody I follow on Twitter (don’t recall who) posted a link to a video about a new product out of Japan called Gatebox. It’s a little round 3-D video display roughly the size and shape of a coffee machine. An anime character lives in the display and has what seem like reasonable conversations with the user. It’s like Siri or Cortana on video, and it stirred some very old memories.
I’ve been thinking about AI since I was in college forty-odd years ago, and many of my earliest SF stories were about strong AI and what might come of it. Given how many stories I’ve written about it, some of you may be surprised that I put strong, human-class AI in the same class as aliens: not impossible, but extremely unlikely. The problems I have with aliens cook down to the Fermi paradox and the Drake equation. Basically, there may well be a single intelligent species (us) or there may be hundreds of millions. There are unlikely to be four, nine, seventeen, or eight hundred fifty four. If there were hundreds of millions, we’d likely have met them by now.
With AI, the problem is insufficient humility to admit that we have no idea how human intelligence works at the neuronal level, and hence can’t model it. If we can’t model it we can’t emulate it. Lots of people are doing good work in the field, especially IBM (with Watson) and IPSoft, which has an impressive AI called Amelia. (Watch the videos, and look past her so-so animation. Animation isn’t the issue here.) Scratchbuilt AIs like Amelia can do some impressive things. What I don’t think they can do is be considered even remotely human.
Why not? Human intelligence is scary. AI as we know it today isn’t nearly scary enough. You want scary? Let me show you another chunkette of The Lotus Machine, from later in the novel of AI that I began in 1983 and abandoned a few years later. Corum finds the Lotus Machine, and learns pretty quickly that pissing off virtual redheads is not a good idea, especially redheads whose hive minds ran at four gigahertz inside a quarter billion jiminies.
From The Lotus Machine by Jeff Duntemann (November 1983)
Corum tapped the silver samovar on his window credenza into a demitasse, and stared at the wall beyond the empty tridiac stage. So here’s where the interesting stuff starts. The crystal had been in the slot for several minutes, and the creature within had full control of the stage. Pouting? Frightened?
“Go in there and take a look around, Rags.”
“Roger,” Ragpicker replied, and a long pulse of infrared tickled the stage’s transducer.
At once, the air over the stage pulsed white and cleared. Life-size, the image of a woman floated over the stage, feet slack and toes pointed downward like the ascending Virgin. She was wrapped in pale blue gauze that hung from her hips and elbows in folds that billowed in a nonexistent wind. Her hair hung waist-long, fiery red in loose curls. One hand rested on one full hip. The other hand gripped the neck of a pitiful manikin the size of a child’s doll. The manikin, dressed in rags, was squirming and beating on the very white hand that was obviously tightening about its neck.
“He bit me, Corum. I don’t care for that.” The woman-image brought up her other hand and wrung the manikin’s neck. “We don’t need a go-between.” That said, she flung the limp figure violently in Corum’s direction. The manikin-image vanished as soon as it passed over the edge of the stage, but Corum ducked nonetheless. Corum stood, marveling. He took a sip from his demitasse, then hurled it through the image above the stage. The little cup shattered against the wall and fell in shards to the carpeting. A brown stain trickled toward the floor. The woman smiled. Not a twitch. “No thanks, Corum my love. Coffee darkens the skin.”
“I never gave the Lotus Machine a persona.”
The woman shrugged. “So I had to invent one. Call me Cassandra. Shall I predict your future?”
“Sure.”
“You will become one with me, and we will re-make the world in our image.”
Corum shivered. “No thanks.”
She laughed. “It wasn’t an invitation. It was a prophecy.”
Odd Lots
- Take a look at Visuino, which is a visual development environment for the Arduino embedded processor family. This is a beautiful thing, and makes me wish I still ran a certain magazine.
- And there’s a new default OS for the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. (Don’t try it on the earlier boards, nor the Pi Zero.) Looks good from here, and my RPi 3 will get the treatment as time allows.
- 75 years ago, there was a butt-kicking geomagnetic storm. Not exactly Carrington, but it makes me wonder how our infinitely more electronic culture would respond to such a storm today.
- Chemporn: How sodium and other twitchy elements burn.
- As of today, there are no Obamacare individual policies available in Maricopa County, Arizona. None. Granted, open enrollment does not begin until November 1, but we qualify to purchase because we’re moving interstate. Arizona officials are still reviewing a proposal from Centene to offer an HMO here, and if approved, it would be the only plan available in this county. This is not a robust healthcare marketplace. This is a law that has already imploded.
- More evidence? Here’s the firehose.
- Implosions, anybody? Great rant about the ongoing imposion of the media elite.
- Low testosterone appears to predispose men to dementia. It’s unclear (and no longer automatically asserted) that high testosterone predisposes men to prostate cancer. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)
- There is a very nice online PDF calendar generator that will create a calendar in PDF format for any string of months you might want. (The site has much else worth exploring related to calendrics.) You can add in holidays, solstices/equinoxes, phases of the moon, and so on. This pretty much makes my 1999 copy of Calendar Creator…useless. (Thanks to reader Spook for the link.)
- How The Atlantic explains Donald Trump: The media takes him literally but not seriously, and his fans take him seriously but not literally. This may in fact explain a great deal.
Odd Lots
- Lee “ArtRaccoon” Madison has posted a new page on Cafe Press with all kinds of Sad Puppies 4 swag, featuring Isaac, Ray, Frank, and robot puppy Robert. Shown above is the 15 oz. coffee mug. Mugs also come in 12 and 20 oz. sizes.
- If you’re not familiar with Sad Puppies 4, here’s the main site.
- And if you missed my summary of the Sad Puppies phenomenon last year, take a look. It’s part of an ongoing series that began here.
- Rick Hellewell informed me that the $15 Pine64 single-board computer is shipping and getting some attention. It sports a 1.2 Ghz quad-core ARM A53 as part of the Allwinner A64 SoC, plus a 500 MHz Mali-400 GPU that can do 4K video. The $15 version has 512MB of RAM; the $19 version has 1 GB, and the $29 version has 2 GB RAM. The $15 version is shipping (though, as I expected, it’s out of stock) and the two more powerful boards should be shipping by May.
- Indie authors take note: Amazon has begun pulling Kindle ebooks that have the TOC at the end of the book, and demanding that it be placed up front. Authors have been putting the TOC in the back recently so that there is more “real” content in the 10% preview, but, alas, scammers are also putting TOCs in the back to game KU by encouraging readers to immediately click to the end of the book to see what’s in it. Walter Jon Williams got stung, as I assume were many others.
- Some T-shirt firm on Amazon has begun selling T-shirts with my most famous quote on it: “A good tool improves the way you work. A great tool improves the way you think.” Alas, they didn’t cite me by name, and the underscore between the two sentences suggests it’s some sort of data-driven product bot.
- I’ve always been in the “rare Earth” camp, and intuit that Earthlike planets are rare. (There’s a book about this.) I’m not sure I ever imagined them as quite this rare, though.
- Not all cheap ham radio transceivers come from Baofeng. (See my entry for February 14, 2015.) I stumbled on a dual-band $69 mobile rig from Leixen that has promise, and can be programmed with CHIRP. What I’d really like (but don’t seriously expect to find) is a small, cheap rig that includes 50-54 MHz.
- How far back could you travel in time and still understand English? I would do better on Middle English than most, but on Old English I would be almost completely hopeless.
- You can have the ugliest house in America (practice your un-seeing exercises, folks!) for the trifling price of $850,000. Carol and I would set it up as a sort of culturally or decoratively haunted B&B, and make a fortune from people daring one another to spend a night in it.
- This is by no means news, but I’m amazed how many people are unaware of my favorite broadband speed tester. Make sure you test it using a browser with only one tab open, and ideally shut down any other machines on the same broadband line.
- A portion of the cheese you put in your omelette may be wood pulp, which is used as an anticaking agent in packaged shredded cheese. I started reading labels closely, and discovered a house brand of shredded Parmesan at the local Kroger chain, Fry’s, that doesn’t contain wood pulp. It does, however, contain calcium sulfate. Is that a win? I’m sure I don’t know. After all, sodium ferrocyanide is used as an anticaking agent, as is a lot of other scary sounding stuff.
Using GWX Control Panel to Lock Out Pesky Windows 10 Upgrade Stuff
A few days ago, a countdown timer appeared on Carol’s Win7 PC when she booted up. It told her that Windows 10 would be installed in two hours.
WTUBF?
I turned off the machine and started digging around online. A lot of people have this problem, apparently. All of us who aren’t already running Win10, of course, have been nagged mercilessly about upgrading since last summer. I don’t care if it’s free. I don’t want it now. If I want it later I’ll pay for it. But just so you know, I don’t plan to leave Win7 land before 2020. I dislike the nags, but nags are just nags. This time MS told me they were going to give me something I didn’t want and hadn’t asked for.
Uh-uh.
So. I quickly learned that the upgrade software is contained in a Windows update module called KB3035583. I turned Carol’s machine on and as soon as I could I uninstalled KB3035583. That ended the spy-movie countdown timer. Alas, the next morning the damned thing was back. The countdown timer now said Thursday, (it was Tuesday morning) which was some comfort. I still had some time to work.
I hid KB3035583. The next morning, someone (guess!) had un-hid it. Ok. This means war. I dug around a lot deeper, and found an enormous amount of cussing and bitching and suggested fixes. I tried a couple of things with mixed success. Then I stumbled upon the GWX Control Panel, by Josh Mayfield of the Ultimate Outsider site. Josh initially released it late last summer, and has been updating it periodically ever since. Josh’s instructions are pretty good, but for something a little clearer, take a look at Mauro Huculak’s article on Windows Central. He did a good job, which I know because I followed his instructions when installing GWX Control Panel on my lab machine. I had no issues, and understanding that MS was about to start messing with my wife’s PC, I installed it on her machine as well.
Like Philip Phillips says, Gone Gone Gone. We’ve not even seen the nag window since Thursday, much less the countdown timer. I quickly added GWX Control Panel to all of our other Win7 machines. Worked every time.
Now, why did Carol’s machine say it was about to install Win10, while our several others just kept nagging? We don’t know how, but Carol’s PC thought that somebody had reserved a copy of Win10. The download manager in KB3035583 had already downloaded well over a gigabyte of stuff, which I assume was all the install machinery and the OS itself. Carol doesn’t remember clicking on anything, nor do I. It’s possible that one or us selected something by mistake. MS seems to be increasingly desperate to get as many people as possible to upgrade, and its popups offer no clean way out.
Ironically, I vaguely remember reserving a copy from my lab machine way back when this business first came up. The lab machine did not have the install files and was not giving me a countdown timer. My only theory is that Carol’s PC may now be using the local IP address that my lab machine was using way back when I (may have) reserved a copy, even though that was in Colorado. It’s kind of crazy, but I have no better ideas.
I don’t have anything strong against Windows 10. I know a lot of people who like it just fine. I will probably use it eventually–once it has several years of history behind it. However, as most of you know, I do not like to be pushed. That’s the heart and soul of being a contrarian. The harder you push me, the more likely I am to go in the opposite direction.
All the usual cautions apply to GWX Control Panel. Do a full backup and a restore point before you install it, just as you would with any new software. Follow the directions closely, and do your best to understand what you’re doing. We’ve had no adverse issues with it, granted that I installed it yesterday. If anything changes tomorrow morning, well, you’ll read about it here.
Odd Lots
- Lazarus 1.6 has been released. It was built with FreePascal 3.0.0, a first for Lazarus. Mostly incremental changes, but there’s a new rev of the docked form editor that looks promising, even though it’s not quite stable yet. Wish I had more time to play with it!
- Older versions of Lazarus have run well on the Raspberry Pi for me. However, installation on the newer Raspberry Pi 2 is much trickier. This installation tutorial is almost a year old, and I haven’t yet installed Lazarus 1.4 or 1.6 on my Pi 2, but it’s the best how-to I’ve yet seen.
- From Glenn Reynolds: Indie author Chris Nuttall lays out his journey as an indie, emphasizing that all but the biggest names are being driven to indie by publishers who simply don’t understand which way the wind is blowing. Read The Whole Thing, as Glenn says.
- Back when I reviewed the Baofeng handhelds, there was some discussion in the comments about the RDA-1846S SDR chip. Gary Frerking pointed me to the HamShield project on Kickstarter, which is an Arduino add-on board (a shield, in their jargon) that uses the RDA-1846S to transceive on 2M, 220 MHz, and 450 MHz. Like the Baofeng radios, HamShield will also operate on FRS, MURS, and GMRS, though the group doesn’t say that explicitly. (This is an SDR, after all.) It’s not shipping yet, but they’ve raised a fair amount of money (well over $100,000) and appear to be making progress. Definitely one to watch.
- Cool radio stuff is in the wind these days. One of Esther Schindler’s Facebook posts led me to Beartooth, which is an SDR roughly similar to HamShield built into a smartphone battery case that snaps onto the back of your phone. Unlike HamShield, beartooth is going for FCC type acceptance and will operate on MURS. However, there’s been no activity on their Web site since mid-December and I wonder if they’re still in business. It’s not an easy hack; see this discussion from midlate 2014.
- Oh, and I remembered GoTenna, which is similar to Beartooth except that it’s limited to texts and geolocation data. (That is, no voice.) It’s a Bluetooth-powered stick that hangs on your belt and uses your smartphone as a UI, basically, and allows you to text your hiking buddies while you’re out beyond the range of cell networks. I guess that makes it a sort of HT…a Hikey-Textie. Unlike HamShield and Beartooth, GoTenna is shipping and you can get two for $300.
- Twitter continues to kill itself slowly by shadowbanning users for political reasons. What the hell is in it for them? When they collapse, something else will appear to take their place. They’re a tool. (Take it any or every way you want.) When a tool breaks, I get another tool, and generally a better one.
- In case you’ve never heard of shadowbanning…
- I stumbled on something called Roblox, which is evidently a high(er) res take on the Minecraft concept. It’s looking more and more like what I was thinking about when I wrote my “RAD Mars” piece for the last issue of Visual Developer Magazine in late 1999. Anybody here use it? Any reactions?
- Slowly but steadily, reviews are coming in on my Kindle ebooks. Here’s one that I particularly liked.
- The Obamacare exchange in Colorado “smelled wrong,” so Carol and I avoided it. We were right. (Thanks to Sarah Hoyt for the link.)
- I don’t care how many tablets and smartphones you have. Paper is not dead.
Odd Lots
- Google is banning Flash-based advertising. About damned time. Flash is and has always been a malware farm. Die, monster, die!
- Flash is the biggest risk but not the only one in terms on online ads. AdBlock Plus is very good, but makes its money by selling whitelist positions to advertisers like Taboola. Here’s how to turn off the whitelist.
- Although he doesn’t say much about it in the article itself, I see this research about the hypothalamic attack region as justification for considering tribalism born and not learned behavior. (Thanks to Tom Roderick for the link.)
- The BMI is a lie, and a deadly one. A measurement that cannot distinguish between fat and lean muscle is a lie now, has always been a lie, and will never be anything other than a lie. Furthermore, it’s been a lie for 185 years. You’d think medical science would have figured it out by now.
- Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest in 200 years. Bummer. First time I can have a reasonable HF antenna in 13 years, and it may not matter. But at least I’m now living in a warm climate.
- Nonetheless, the Sun seems remarkably active in this video showing an entire year of solar activity at 12 seconds per frame.
- What if NASA designed space travel posters? Well, um, they did. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Engadget reviews the second-gen Compute Stick 2016, which is a Windows 10 computer the size of a fat thumb drive that plugs into your TV’s HDMI port. HDMI doesn’t supply power (yet, but MHL is coming) so you still need a wall wart. However, it’s now got 2 USB ports so you can plug both keyboard and mouse into it without a hub. (Many keyboards now have USB hubs, so if you want you can put both on a single port just using the keyboard hub.) Even thought it’s as small as it is, it still has a fan. Wow.
- How they build a tunnel with giant concrete Legos and a truck with casters where a hedgehog has spines.
- The Senate has made the ban on Internet access taxes permanent. Note that this has nothing to do with sales taxes on Internet purchases, but is about taxing Internet access itself. The law, originally passed in 1998, had to be renewed annually. If the House passes it and the President signs it, the law will no longer need to be renewed every year.
- People ask me sometimes why I consider Woodrow Wilson by far the worst US President in history. Here’s only one reason. There are many more. Here’s another. He came as close to being the first American dictator as we’ve ever come. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the first link.)
- Neanderthal genes may be a mixed bag. Well, sweetheart, what isn’t?
Odd Lots
- It’s Back to the Future Day, and apart from antigravity, well, Marty McFly’s 2015 looks more or less like the one we live in, only with better food and inifinitely worse partisan tribalism. If predicting 19 Jaws sequels is the second-worst worst flub the series made, well, I’m good with that.
- October 21 is also the day that the Northrop YB-49 flying wing bomber made its debut flight, in 1947. (Thanks to Charlie Martin for the reminder.) The YB-49 is my second-favorite undeployed bomber prototype, after the stunning XB-70 Valkyrie.
- Here’s a (very) long and detailed essay by a liberal Democrat explaining why he went from being a climate alarmist to a global warming skeptic. Loads of charts and links. I don’t agree with him 100%, but he makes a very sane and mostly politics-free case for caution in pushing “decarbonization.” (Thanks to Charlie Martin for the link.)
- Far from melting, Greenland is breaking all records for ice growth, having gained 150 billion tons of snow and ice in the last six weeks.
- Here are 18 useful resources for journalistic fact-checking. Pity that MSM journalists are unwilling to do that sort of thing anymore. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
- The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled that scanning books is legal. The court ruled against the Authors Guild in their 2005 class-action suit against Google. The Guild intends to appeal to the Supreme Court. If the Supremes take the case, interesting things could happen. If they don’t, the case is over.
- The secret history of the Myers-Briggs personality test. I am of three minds about Myers-Briggs. No make that nine. Oh, hell: seventeen.
- This is probably the best discussion I’ve seen (and certainly the longest) on how and why SFF fandom is actively destroying itself at the same time it’s dying of old age. Read The Whole Thing. Part I. Part II. Part III. (And thanks to Sarah Hoyt for the link.)
- Also from Sarah: Backyard atomic gardens of the 1950s and very early 1960s. I love the word “atomic.”
- I love it so much that, having recently bought a midcentury home, I may subscribe to Atomic Ranch Magazine. I’ve begun looking for a Bohr atom model to put on our mantelpiece.
- From the Elementary Trivia Department: The only way to make pink-tinted glass is to add erbium oxide to it.
- Thunderbird is getting on my bad side. It regularly pops up a box claiming that it doesn’t have enough disk space to download new messages. My SSD on C: has 83 GB free. My conventional hard drive on D: has 536 GB free. Online reports suggest that Thurderbird has a 2 GB size limit on mail folders. Still researching the issue, but I smell a long integer overflow somewhere.
- From Rory Modena: A talented writer explains the history of the Star Wars movies, and rewrites some of the clumsier plot elements right before our eyes. A lot of what bothered him blew right past me; I knew it was a pulp film and was in it for the starships and the robots.
- From Esther Schindler: A Mexican church long sunk at the bottom of a reservoir is emerging from the water due to drought. (This isn’t a rare occurrance; it happened last in 2002.) I kept hearing Debussy’s spooky tone-poem “The Engulfed Cathedral” while reading the article.
- McDonald’s recently went to a breakfast-all-day menu, to my delight. I’m very fond of their Sausage McMuffin with Egg, which is of modest size and makes a great snack anytime. Alas, adding all the new line items to the menu has caused chaos in some smaller restaurants, and franchise owners are having second thoughts. I doubt McD is facing “imminent collapse” but I’m now wondering how long the new menu will last.
Odd Lots
- This may explain a certain amount of the drama coming out of the anti-Puppies camp…or, for that matter, a great deal of modern politics: Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD). (Thanks to Adam Baldwin for the link.)
- OMG! Global warming may mean stronger weed! (That makes it all better, right?) Colorado’s on it.
- BitTorrent recently released Bleep, a private encrypted P2P messaging system. Of special note is “whisper mode,” in which a message sent vanishes from both devices 25 seconds after it arrives. Whisper mode also blurs out the display so the message can’t be screencapped. It’s available for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac.
- Ok. This is weird: KFC in Germany developed a tray liner…that was a disposable Bluetooth keyboard. Pair it with your phone, and you can type with the same greasy fingers you’re scarfing chicken with. It was a test, and only available for a single week. Most of the tray liners, furthermore, went home with customers.
- Where’s my flying car? Well, there was once a flying Pinto. (For a little while. Until the wings came off.) I’m still not sure that counts as a flying car. (Thanks to Bill Higgins for the link.)
- Fred Richardson messaged me to say that he had built a Shive torsional wave machine, just like the one that starred in the Carl & Jerry story, “The Bell Bull Sessions.” It’s now for sale on eBay.
- I’m interested in what SFF authors have bichons. I’m one, Jim Butcher is another. Are there more? I’m also interested in bichons that appear in SFF stories. Toby from Varley’s The Golden Globe is the best-known. A bichon also appears in The Last Policeman trilogy, and, of course, my own Mr. Byte appeared in David Gerrold”s excellent “The Martian Child.” Any others?
- I recently learned of Dabble, which is basically Uber for teaching one-off courses. Would I make any money teaching Pascal/Lazarus programming? I could also try teaching SF writing, except that I’m not always sure how I do it myself.
- The Raspberry Pi Model A+ is the beating heart of the do-it-yourself PiGRRL GameBoy-like retro game console. A good video for a chance, though not a step-by-step. I love that little bitty display. (Thanks to Eben Upton for the link.)
- The opah has recently been identified as the only known fish with whole-body endothermy; that is, it’s warm-blooded.
- The National Park Service has posted a number of recordings of the Edison Talking Doll, which was a great deal like Chatty Kathy (and similarly electronics-free) except it was sold in 1890. People have commented that the dolls sound creepy or possessed. To me they sound like the women who made the recordings were shouting at the tops of their lungs to provide enough energy to move the recording needles on the wax cylinders. Listen to the recordings again and see what you think.
Odd Lots
- I’m less sure of this than the author, but it’s something to think about: Apple may not always rule; look at IBM.
- Researchers who were testing Android apps to see what-all they connected to (generally without notifying their users) found that dopey little apps of no special character were connecting to thousands of tracking sites. Then they did the obvious, and created an app that watches the other apps and logs what connections they make.
- The EM Drive makes my head hurt, though in a good way. NASA Spaceflight’s article on the gizmo doesn’t exactly make its mode of operation clear, but the fact that NASA is even testing it is reason to stand up and cheer. Somewhere in my notes is an old concept (predating The Cunning Blood by a decade, in fact) that posits an antigravity device built out of the parts in old microwave ovens and harvests energy from the quantum vacuum. It would be so vindicating if this thing works out! (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- The Atlantic takes on lifestyle panic. Don’t miss this one. (I may have been ahead of the curve when I talked about it in 2010.)
- The Sun just ain’t wakin’ up nohow. Barely a year after Cycle 24’s sunspot maximum, whatever sunspots exist are barely discernable. Last year we had the weakest peak since 1906, and the cycle as a whole may eventually become the weakest in recorded history.
- Don’t relax too much: The Carrington Event occurred during a weak solar cycle.
- Recruiters looking to discriminate against older people are now asking for “digital natives.” Lawsuits are beginning. The real problem: It’s legal to charge employers more for group health policies when their staff skews older. Outlaw age underwriting entirely, and that problem will mostly go away.
- Will TV just die already? Cable subscribers drop below Internet subscribers at Comcast. Anything you can watch on TV, you can watch on the Internet. TV is now a redundant nuisance.
- As an Army radio operator stationed in Italy, my father watched the March, 1944 eruption of Vesuvius, and called it the scariest thing he ever saw. That was 71 years ago. If (nay, when) it erupts again, we’re going to have a lot of very serious problems.
- Everybody’s aggregating this, but it sounds bogus to me: The more coffee you drink, the longer you’ll live. (Some people I know should therefore live forever.) I’ll stick with my theory: You can do worse than your genes, but you can’t do better.
- And might I also suggest, for those who attempt immortality the Folgers way, to recall the dangers of invoking the invisible, jet-packed Mr. Coffee Nerves.
- How long would one of Tesla’s new Powerwall home-power batteries keep your house running? Wired does the math.
- If you want to read Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter saga, start at the beginning. The books make much more sense if you read them in order. Baen offers the first three as an ebook bundle.
