railroads
- J. D. Hildebrand endorsed Contra today over at SD Times. He mentions a falling out we had in ancient times (I think 1993 or so) which I remember as being a publicity stunt. Even if it wasn’t, 20 years is plenty for a falling-out. From one J. D. to the other: You’re OK in my book. (His blog at SD is here.)
- Quite by accident, I stumbled upon a clock app written in Lua, a language which I had heard of (vaguely) but never read up on. I mean, really, does the world need YADSL? However, a closer look showed that Lua does not use almost-invisible curly brackets for structuring code and instead relies on those big, bold, evil kiddie-language END keywords. It is to rejoice. LUA for Windows is here; will report again when I fool with it a little.
- I’ve linked to this before, but it’s been a few years: Tom Swift Lives, home of some of the best fanfic I’ve ever seen, much of which is yards better than the original Tom Swift material.
- Over the past year, I’ve discovered that the most effective single pain reliever for my occasional migraines is…aspirin. I dropped Tylenol like a hot rock. Now there’s evidence that aspirin reduces the risk of cancer. Avoiding gastrointestinal bleeding is an issue, but I can’t imagine that that’s not just engineering.
- And here’s how the food industry’s quest to undercut butter and lard gave us trans fats, more heart disease, and the myth that animal fat is bad for you. I believe in evolution. We evolved eating animal fat. We did not evolve eating vegetable oils dissolved out of seeds with hexane. Q.E.D.
- I never gave this a thought, but it’s obvious if you think about it: Setting printed material in Japanese using movable type involved an immense amount of lead.
- Although I’ve never seen a railbike in action, the concept has always fascinated me, and here’s one that doesn’t need any welding. There’s no abandoned trackage convenient to me, but it’s around. My only reservation is that it must be easy to run off the rails by letting the front wheel pivot even a little bit. (In Europe railbikes are called Draisines.)
- Having killed Microsoft Reader, which I liked a great deal, MS is apparently investing in the future of the Nook. Will Reader return? Let us pray; I have a number of ebooks in that format.
- At least these Macbooks won’t be subject to trojans now. Or anything else.
- You can anodize titanium to give it a color finish using ordinary household ingredients like Coca Cola and electrons. Lots of electrons. (Alas, I don’t have enough Coke here to dunk my A-12.)
- The more I look at devices like this, the more I feel that it represents the future of high-end mobile computing. I also think it will accelerate the evolution of mobile device UIs, which are not in any shape (currently) to be productive in content creation or editing.
- This seems just, well, nuts to me, but people are using Usenet as a backup mechanism. Just bundle your stuff up in an encrypted binary file and post it to any binary group at all. With Giganews now providing 1300 days (!!) of binary retention, it could work…if you encrypt it strongly enough. (I remember the time when binary retention was six or seven days.)
- Many people have never heard of the “lineman’s splice,” which is way of joining two wires so that the join is in fact stronger than the wire itself. Now that NASA has endorsed the splice, it may see a renaissance. Only one problem: The drawing in the article is wrong. Can you spot the problem?
- I’ve always been a fan of “hi-rails,” which are small railroad vehicles used to run around the trackage looking for damage to rails and ties. Today, as often as not, they’re street pickup trucks with added small liftable flanged wheels, allowing them to operate on both rail and road. In times past, they were often street sedans with big flanged wheels and even cowcatchers. I consider them Dieselpunk, but I’ve never seen them mentioned in SFF.
- Of course, in the Steampunk era (or if your railroad was especially cheap) you had to pedal around the tracks yourself.
- An answer to a question I myself have never thought to ask: Why does it take less milk or cream to lighten iced coffee than hot coffee?
- I don’t even tweet with a keyboard yet, but with an Arduino and my trusty straight key, I’d have a long leg up on tweeting via Morse code.
- This is not the kind of glow-in-the-dark index you want to be high on, trust me.
