law
- This stuff has been piling up. And I’ve been tired and perhaps a little grouchy. It’s just a phase I’m going through.
- From the People-Whom-I-Had-Once-Known-About-But-Then-Forgot Department: Annie Jump Cannon, who mostly eclipsed Edward Pickering while helping to complete the Harvard Classification Scheme for stars. Annie made it into the slightly snotty but very entertaining Rejected Princesses site. (Thanks to R. K. Modena for reminding me of Annie and pointing me to Rejected Princesses.)
- Alas, it sounds a lot like Nook is circling the drain.
- Huh? A scientific expedition to the Arctic to study how global warming is melting Arctic ice had to be postponed because…there’s too much ice in the Arctic.
- And you wondered why we just bought a house in Arizona.
- Here’s how NASA keeps “new telescope smell” from destroying new space telescopes. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.) One can only speculate what garlic breath would do to them.
- A half-klick diameter radio telescope is under construction in China.
- The Supreme Court just ruled that the Feds can’t just take a raisin farmer’s raisins and give them to other people. That would be, like, theft or something. Government wouldn’t do that, right?
- So you can now keep your raisins. But watch out for your kids: The National School Lunch Program bans whole milk from school lunches but allows sugar-sweetened skim milk. Government always knows best, even if it kills you.
- Cool optical hack: Project the image of the full Moon from a telescope onto a ping-pong ball and get a 3-D model of the Moon.
- This has been around for awhile, but it’s worth bookmarking: a very big list of all the things (supposedly, if often ludicrously) caused by global warming. Science journalism makes climate science look silly and dishonest, and science generally look bad. I used to think I should have gone to journalism school. Now I’m glad I didn’t. It’s starting to sound like a dumping ground for failed Polly Sigh majors.
- Evidence? A scientist hoaxed the media by inventing a study showing that you can lose weight eating chocolate bars…and the media bought it.
- Here’s a database of POP songs used in TV commercials. It does not list (as best I can tell) commercials that were later morphed into pop songs, like “She Lets Her Hair Down” and “Come to the Sunshine,” both originally hair product ads.
- In the new film Pixels, Pac Man attacks Manhattan. The concept reminds me of a very old and really bad TV movie in which an airplane gets stuck between two days of the week, and its passengers have to confront titanic Pac-Man like monsters that eat each expired day’s reality so that the new day can be constructed on a clean backdrop. (Or something.) But damn if I can remember what movie that was.
- I’m behind on a great many things, especially fiction writing and replying to email, so bear with me until I get dug out from under the pile. Exchanging offices within a house is precisely the same as moving two offices, and that means a lot of boxes and a lot of bother, exploding intercoms being the least of it.
- I didn’t expect this wine to be as good as it actually is. About $11.
- The weather’s been beautiful here, so yesterday I was going to get out on the back deck with my Icom 736 and work the world. That was, of course, the day that sunspots basically vanished on the visible face of the Sun. What does it mean to have solar flares but no sunspots? Nobody knows.
- Thanks to many people (Jim Strickland being the first) who wrote to tell me about a “smart sand” project at MIT that is the first step toward the sort of nanoreplicator I postulated in my Drumlins stories: Tap in a 256-bit code, and some “smart dust” (very smart) in a stone bowl assembles something for you. I love it when my crazy dreams come true!
- Single-atom nanotransistors can now be reliably made, rather than hunted for. (Thanks to Roy harvey for the link.)
- From Michael Covington comes a link to a fascinating article about the other kind of abduction: abductive logic. If you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, don’t miss it!
- The Colorado state law that led Amazon to nuke my Associates account has been declared unconstitional. No word from Amazon as to whether I can have my account back.
- I would probably buy one of these if I could find one in stock somewhere.
- Jack Tramiel has left us, having created quite a raft of famous computers, including the very best forgotten computer ever.
- I checked the date on this one, but it was nine days too late to assume it’s a hoax. One might argue that solar panels are more elegant, but you can’t make buffalo spaghetti sauce in a solar panel.
- I’ve seen more dumb YouTube posts than I’m willing to admit, but this one takes the cake for sheer willful stupidity. I knew how this worked in 1959, when I was 7.
- Kids, this is futurism. All we need now are better tacos.
