Odd Lots
- $10,000. Software written in Pascal. Windowing interface remarkably like the Xerox Star’s, on which I’d been trained the year before. I spent a wistful hour putting it through its paces at a nearby computer store in Rochester, NY. I’d just spent $4000 on a CP/M system three years earlier, and didn’t have another $10K lying around. Nice retrospective on poor Lisa, who never got the respect she deserved. Market niches matter, and it’s not always possible to create your own from the quantum vacuum.
- Solar Cycle 24 is definitely double-humped, and its second peak could well be peakier than the first. This doesn’t make it a strong cycle, by any means, but we thought the whole deal was over after the first peak in 2011. Not so.
- An amateur telescope maker in Utah bought a 70″ spy satellite mirror at a scratch-and-dent auction and built the world’s largest amateur telescope.
- I haven’t written aliens into my SF much, at least since I first thought deeply about the subject in college. This is part of the reason. I had planned out a story in which Earth contacts an alien race with so old and rich a culture that their language consists of context-sensitive metaphors within similes within puns within knock-knock jokes. I never wrote the story because I could never figure out how to crack the problem.
- Your graphics card is getting faster, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll even notice. I think this is what the term “diminishing returns” was coined to describe.
- From the Major WTF File: One of my readers sent me this link, and I’m still trying to figure out what these creeps are up to. I’ll post a separate entry on it when I have a little more time to research it. But look yourself up: I’d like to hear about it if you’re on there too.
- Little by little, people are starting to figure it out: Fat will make you lose weight and keep you healthy. Sugar will f*(&ing kill you.
- I was told by a cardiologist 20-odd years ago that gum disease was related to heart disease. It seemed like a stretch at the time, but since then I’ve seen a number of studies indicating that it’s true. Floss, don’t infarct!
- Slate has a short piece explaining what makes a continental breakfast continental. What made me laugh was an embedded Key & Peele bit in which Peele delights in discovering Fruit Loops at his hotel breakfast counter, as though they were rare treats. Bartholomew Stypek does the same thing in Ten Gentle Opportunities: “Carolyn had gifted him with sacks of delicacies that any nobleman in the realm of Ttryngg would kill for: Doritos, Cheetos, Pringles, Ruffles, and sweets baked by elves.”
- The Marines are about to begin hunting Somali pirates. If I were a Somali pirate, I would be thinking about early retirement.
- Cities, like ogres and onions, have layers. The deepest and oldest of those layers can be forgotten by all but a few. Here’s a marvelous quick tour of the some of New York’s less visible layers. No ogres. We hope. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · hardware · health · history · humor · sf · writing
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You could use all that GPU power running Folding@Home.
I haven’t found myself in the Person DB (I can’t say that I am surprised) but I did find my dad (also not surprised):
http://nuclear.carboncapturereport.org/cgi-bin//profiler?key=james_dillard&pt=2
Also, here is something mostly unrelated (the telescope reminded me):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dark_orange/sets/72157603226919391/
Regarding your story idea, I have five words: “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” 😉
Person DB… well, oddly enough, I’m there, with a listing for coal. I thought that odd, sine I didn’t think I had ever (publically, anyhow), even mentioned coal. Come to find out I had made this blog link to a “coal powered flying boat” – obviously a bit of fantasy, but the headline was enough to warrant a listing.
http://www.craftacraft.com/blog/2011/07/29/coal-powered-flying-boat/
Bruce
In other words, the damned thing has no mechanism for telling the difference between a meaningful mention of something and a side-mention, or even something in a different context that has no meaning at all. Useless. And still creepy.
I found my name in that database, and it seems to be because you mentioned my name in your blog (which I do not mind). That part is way down the page, in the “Blog Posts” section.
The more I look at this DB, the more I can see how ‘early-stage’ this is. As it stands now, the collection process contains no intelligence, and is thus essentially useless. However, like Google, Amazon, NSA, MS, etc. the collection process is the first step. These sites (you can be sure there will be more) will be able to get financial support from clubs like ‘Sierra Club’ and other activist groups.
As long as you know where these sites are, you could conceivably keep yourself neutral by monitoring what your levels are and do web page generation. Although page-rank algorithms could make that process complex rather quickly.
“what these creeps are up to”: I’m there. Mostly for “Rich Rostrom and the Rogue Weapons Inspectors”, a LiveJournal posting Bill Higgins wrote about me and the remaindered IAEA shirts I gave away at Berserker a few years ago.
But also one of my comments at the Weasel Times. These people seem to have scraped a lot of the Web for anything that seems to have CAGW or energy-related content, and then constructed this enormous database of things mentioned on the same web page as other things. Which gets really stupid, when either or both of the things appear in sidebars.
Floss, don’t infarct!
Somewhere I saw “Floss for fertility!” I.e. gum disease may interfere with conception. (Didn’t read the article, but I definitely saw the headline.)
The Marines are about to begin hunting Somali pirates.
Uh, no, the Marines are being deployed to the coast of West Africa – Nigeria to Senegal.