education
- Our pool cover kept the pool at tolerable temps (mid-high 70s) until a few days after Halloween. Then the nights got cold fast, and we finally removed the cover, cleaned it off, rolled it up, and put it in the shed. Water temp is now 62 degrees. I’m sure I’ve been in water that cold, but as a successful retired person, I reserve the right not to do things I did gladly when I was in seventh grade. As for when it goes back on in the spring, well, I’m working on that. We’ll see.
- QBit is still with us, though he’s a little grumpy and not moving as fast as he used to. He does not appear to be in pain, but we’re having the mobile vet check him again at the end of the month.
- We’ll be watching fistfights about this for years still, but ongoing research is pushing consensus strongly toward the hypothesis that low-carb high-fat diets accelerate metabolism. This happens to me almost every day: Twenty minutes after my nearly zero-carb breakfast (two eggs fried in butter, coffee, sometimes bacon) I feel warmer and start to sweat under my arms.
- From the Things-Are-Not-Working-Out-As-We-Were-Promised Department: When we bought our house here in Phoenix in 2015, we immediately replaced nearly all the interior lighting with LED devices. Three years later, they’re dying like flies. (Several died within the first year.) Probably half of the incandescent bulbs we had in our Colorado house survived for all the 12 years we lived there. More efficient, yes. Long-lasting, well, I giggle.
- The Center for Disease Control warns Americans not to eat Romaine lettuce in any form. A particularly virulent form of e. coli has been found in lettuce sold in 11 states, but since the CDC doesn’t know where all the infected lettuce came from, it’s advising consumers not to eat romaine at all.
- The Dark Ages began with real darkness: In the year 536 a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland covered Europe in volcanic smog. Crops failed, famine was everywhere, and soon came Justinian’s Plague, now thought to be bubonic plage. By the time the plague faded out, half of Europe was dead. I find it fascinating that we can identify periods of prosperity by looking for lead dust in ice cores, meaning that people were mining precious metals. After nearly vanishing after 536, lead levels didn’t reach the norm again until 640.
- “Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy.” –Pam Allyn
- Statuary in ancient Greece and Rome was not always blinding white, but was often painted and sometimes gilded, and restorations of the colors are startling to moderns. Here’s an excellent long-form piece on how old statues likely appeared when they were created–and why many historians reject the idea of painted Classical statuary.
- Too much caffeine triggers the release of cortisol, which in large quantities over a period of time leads pretty directly to heart disease. Modern life is cortisol-rich enough enough without downing 6 cups a day!
- Some ugly stats quoted by Nicholas Kristof: “38 colleges, including five from the Ivy League, had more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. Over all, children from the top 1% are 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League colleges than children from the bottom 20%.” Legacy admissions have got to go.
- 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.
- Wired has a nice piece on the 1859 Carrington Event; basically, the strongest solar storm in the last 500 years, assuming ice core data is a reliable proxy for storm strength. Early landline telegraph operators actually disconnected their batteries and passed traffic solely on power induced in the lines by solar activity. Whew. Now that’s QRP!
- Alas, even with sunspot numbers hovering at 120, I’m not hearing much DX out here. I’m not even hearing the East Coast. So much for Cycle 24.
- There’s a difference between “loving reading” and “loving reading what the literary class loves to read.” We can teach the first. By teaching the second, we may teach a good many students to stop reading completely. (Thanks to Rev. Sharon Hart for the link.)
- Here be the history of Godwin’s Law.
- From the September 1922 issue of Popular Science comes a crystal radio in a corn-cob pipe, shown in one of the geekiest Roaring Twenties radio geek photos ever taken. I doubt this would work (well) but I suppose it had to be tried. (Thanks to David Stafford for the link.)
- This radio geek photo shows a set that would certainly work (schematic here) but I’m not sure he would have been let on an airliner even in 1936.
- By 1949, radio geek photos were in serious decline, but 15-year-old Hope Lange gave it a damned good try.
- By sheer coincidence, the cover of that very same issue of Popular Science cited above for the corn-cob radio shows a drawing of a “monocopter,” an unlikely but at least physically possible device modeled on maple tree seeds, which I mentioned in Odd Lots back on July 28. This should be easy to model; has anybody ever seen it done?
- Maybe I’ve been writing SF for so long that this article sounds a little obvious to me, but some of the points do need to be borne in mind by writers new to the field, particularly #3. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- This was Big News in Germany. Those people need to get out more.
- I’m not sure what it is either, but if you’re going to cite its name as PIGORASS, you’d really better expand the acronym.
- In one of my rambles around the Web looking for interestering perspectives on education, I ran across this very insightful (if possibly misnamed) blog post. My take: We are teaching an entire generation that their own blathery opinions are unassailable. Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
- From Frank Glover comes a link to recent research suggesting that too much artificial light at night correlates with higher risk of breast and prostate cancer. More research is needed, but if the answer is to go to bed early and sleep in a dark room, Carol and I have it covered.
- Rocky Jones’s Silvercup Rocket is well along on its restoration, and this page has both period and recent photos, as well as the best history of the Rocky Jones TV show that I’ve seen anywhere. (Ok, I’m biased–two of the photos are mine!)
- Many people who have read my Hi-Flier Kites article have asked me what sort of paper was used to make the dime-store paper kites of the 1960s. I’ve asked around and tried any number of papers, but now I think I’ve come fairly close with a type of paper made in Germany and called–sunuvugun–“kite paper.” For some reason it’s popular with the Waldorf school crowd, though not for making kites. You can get it in 19 1/2″ X 27 1/2″ sheets, albeit only in 100-sheet lots, from A Toy Garden. That’s a little smaller than the Hi-Flier 30″ kite, but it’ll work. As spring gets a little closer, I’ll make one and report back here.
- What the Waldorf schools do with kite paper is in fact impressive; this Flickr album scrolls through a good many photos of Waldorf traditional origami stars made with kite paper.
- From Bill Higgins comes a link to Low End Mac, a site devoted to older Mac machines, especially pre-OS/X.
- Pete Albrecht sends hope that Maurice Lenell may not be out of business, though their suburban Chicago plant will be razed to make way for yet another damned shopping mall.
- I have several reasons for opposing contact team sports in schools (as opposed to careful weight training and aerobics). This is another one.
- The three things I was afraid of as a six-year-old were robots, mummies, and volcanoes. I’ve made my peace with robots and mummies, but volcanoes still give me the willies, and our Alaskan citizens are watching another one nervously.
- In case I don’t remember to mention it tomorrow or Sunday, Puppy Bowl V on Animal Planet kicks off at 3 PM EST Sunday, 2 PM central, 1 PM Mountain. When you get good and tired of watching spoiled-brat millionaires get the crap beat out of them by other spoiled-brat millionaires, the puppies may be a blessed relief. We never miss it anymore.
