robots
- KBAQ, our local classical radio station here in Phoenix, is going to be playing Halloween-ish classical music this evening, from 7 to 10PM Pacific time. You don’t have to be in Phoenix to hear it; the station can be streamed for free by clicking on the Listen Live button from your Web browser.
- The hard outer coating of candy corn is made from the same stuff as the old (and now uncommon) wood finish, shellac. I.e., the lac bug, which produces a resin that can be turned into a hard coating. I used to use a lot of shellac on my home-made bookshelves. I always wondered howthehell many bugs it took to make a quart of shellac. As for lac resin in candy corn:, it can’t be too toxic, or I wouldn’t still be here.
- From the Speaking Of That Department: When I was six, my Grandma Sade gave me a Pez dispenser and a little thing of Pez candies. When I ran out of Pez, I tried putting candy corn (which we had a bag of at home) into the dispenser. The dispenser broke, to my severe annoyance. The upside is that I took it apart and discovered how it worked. That said, I’m not entirely sure I ever had another Pez dispenser.
- M&Ms are popular with astronauts, so much so that the little spheroids are on the International Space Station menu. I’ll bet the same isn’t true of candy corn.
- Stratolaunch is having excellent results with their Roc carrier plane, which is currently the largest airplane in the world. It’s basically two aircraft joined beneath a single looooooong wing, from which Stratolaunch will test-fly hypersonic aircraft. More video here, with a better view of the Roc.
- Dayum. China has developed a drone that can drop robot dogs equipped with machine guns. This very gizmo was a plot point in my unfinished novel The Molten Flesh. There was also a drone with a lethal laser, but having protagonist Ron Uhlein jump on the back of a robodog gun made for a much livelier action scene.
- Under Elon Musk’s ownership, Twitter is about to start charging bluechecks $20/month for their blue checks. My guess is that Twitter will thereafter have a lot fewer bluechecks.
- The bluecheck program has been tacky since the platform’s creation, arbitrarily separating a wholly artificial elite from the masses. If Musk changes this to provide a bluecheck to anyone presenting verification credentials and $20, the blue check will still be useful, but it will no longer confer prestige. Real prestige takes years of effort to learn. This kind of fake prestige should be the first thing to go.
- Where will the hyperventilating anti-Musk crowd go? Could to be Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky, a decentralized network of networks held together by federation. I wrote about Bluesky at some length in yesterday’s Contra entry, which would be a good starting point if you’re interested.
- My guess is that Bluesky is roughly comparable to Mastodon, a federated social network that’s been around for some time. More is on Wikipedia. It sounds good–I like decentralization–but I find it remarkable how little there is about it online.
- For the first time in US history, there will be a total eclipse of the Moon on election day, November 8 of this year. They’re calling it the Blood Moon, which has a really creepy vibe to it, considering the current chaotic state of our political gestalt, On the other hand, today is Halloween, and creepy vibes are all over the place.
- 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.
