Odd Lots
- The IBM PC turns 30 today. I had a dual-floppy 5150 and loved it. Hard to believe it came home almost thirty years ago.
- The number of retractions of dead-wrong and perhaps fraudulent scientific papers is surging, rising fifteen-fold in the last ten years. So what’s a citizen scientist to do? Probably not buy into just anything that might be in a peer-reviewed paper. (Maybe we need more peers. Or better ones.)
- Good example: There’s little or no evidence that salt causes hypertension, but that doesn’t stop certain scientists and many government functionaries from insisting that it does. (If salt did cause hypertension, I’d be…dead.)
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-I-Played-Scrabble-With-An-Expert Department: ort, which is a fancy but short word for leftover food scraps. As in, “Yesterday at 12:15 the junior-high lunchroom became an ort cloud…”
- The Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight just before dawn, but a nearly full moon will drown out many or most of the fainter traces. Hey, get up early and plop into a deck chair for a while. Assuming a clear sky, you’re almost guaranteed to see something. And there’s always next year. (Carol and I have been watching them as weather allows since 1969.)
- This is still extremely new, but it has promise: an AbiWord plug-in that exports epub files from within AbiWord. (I haven’t tested it yet.)
- Ditto for Open Office Writer. (Haven’t tested it either, but thanks to Sam’l Bassett for the link.)
- Are you the kind of reader who reads the ending in the bookstore before buying the book? (I used to be.) Apparently spoilers don’t spoil the fun of reading novels as much as most people assume.
- Who doesn’t like control panels? Here’s a wonderful album of panels from every sort of machine, from the Space Shuttle to the 1966 TV series Batmobile. Don’t miss Part 2. (Thanks to Ernie Marek for the links.)
- Wow. You used to be able to buy dynamite at the hardware store…at least if you were a farmer.
- Scott Adams thinks that boredom lies behind a lot of creativity. As we become less bored, we grow less creative. He may be right. But…how do we solve the Boredom Shortage? (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- I like butter. I like it a lot. But maybe not this much. (Thanks again to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Don’t just have your survivors give you a 21-gun salute. Be the 21-gun salute!
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · ebooks · food · health · humor · language · science · software
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When I was in collage back in the late 1960’s I had to do some reports on explosives for a class and found that the manufacturers were still publishing pamphlets and articles in trade publications about farm use of explosives.
Shortly after I had checked out every book and periodical I could find on the subject the SDS started blowing up campuses around the country. I expected the knock on the door at any time. It never came.
HOWEVER, a very few years latter I was able to play with some C-4 in a land far away. Maybe somebody HAD noticed my work.