Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

• The Atlantic tells us that a growth industry in NYC and other crowded cities is training dogs to sniff out...bedbugs. Dogs who can tell live bedbugs from dead earn as much as $325 an hour, and work for kibble. I got some peculiar bites on one side of my right leg while we were down in Champaign-Urbana last week for Matt's graduation, and while I can't prove that bedbugs did it, that side of my right leg is the side that contacts the bed while I sleep (as I nearly always do) on my right side.
• From Chris Gerrib comes word that The Espresso Book Machine has finally been installed in a bookstore, where it prints from a selection of half a million books on the attached server. No word on whether these are all out-of-copyright titles or what, but after what seems like decades of screwing around (I first reported on one-piece book manufacturing machines in 2001) we're finally getting somewhere.
• I've heard tell recently that Vista doesn't play nice with the Xen hypervisor. Anybody had any crisp experience there?
• William Banting's Letter on Corpulence is now available from the Internet Archive, and it's interesting as the very first detailed description of the effects of low-carb diets. Way back in 1864 Banting lost weight by eating protein and fat, and seemed surprised enough by his results to write up his experiences in detail. The more I research this, the more I'm convinced that carbs are what's killing us, and this is not new news.
• Lulu recently cut some kind of deal with Amazon to put all their books (I think; it certainly includes all of mine) in the Amazon database. However, they added five or six bucks to the cover price. Will people buy Carl & Jerry books for $21? Don't know, but somehow I doubt it.
• Machines can often see things that we can't (which is one reason that we build machines) and they're willing to share what they see with us. Sure don't look like this in an 8"...
• Ars Technica published a good article on how DRM actually makes the piracy problem worse--an insight I had years ago, and a painfully obvious one after thinking about it for a nanosecond or two.
• No rest for the weary; several people wrote to ask what I would be writing next. Not sure. I still have to get our butts back to Colorado, but once I do, I want to finish my second SF story collection, and work on Old Catholics. You can bet that I'll be posting more on Contra too, if that counts. Further than that I won't venture, though I think I'll be leaving computers alone for a little while.

• I like nuns (most nuns, if perhaps not all nuns) and I've said good things about the few that helped me get started on the road toward personal discipline and basic thinking skills. Over at the Make blog, they've got a few photos of an offering left at a monument dedicated to one Sister Nicodema: An elaborately painted wooden lightning bolt carefully delivered in an elaborately crafted custom case. No idea who she was or even where this is in the world, but somebody gets points for originality in implementing the tribute. She must have been one helluva teacher. (The great German term "geistesblitz" comes to mind.)
• I thought of another couple of Irishisms associated with my grandmother Sade Prendergast Duntemann: Kafoothering (furiously fussing with, or frantic activity generally) and curniklee, which defies easy definition but might be described as gross dirt. Both spellings are phonetic, and I'm guessing the originals are from the Irish language. I haven't myself used "curniklee" in decades, but "kafoothering" is a wonderful word that bears remembering.
• Those who don't read Contra comments on my WordPress main site may have missed Jim O'Brien's insights on "oonchick," which in Irish is spelled "oinseach," and denotes a person of pathetic foolishness or stupidity. He also suggests that since in Irish the suffix "og" means "young," a "gomog" may be a young gom, which in Irish is an idiot (or an "eejit" as Sade herself might have said.)
• The "Axis of Evil" patterns that people see in maps of the cosmic background radiation may be caused by lensing at the boundary between the solar solar wind and the slower interstellar wind. Or you can have my completely speculative opinion (not peer reviewed) that the pattern is due to the cumulative effect on the cosmic background caused by everything massive in the universe acting as a very lumpy and unevenly distributed gravitational lens. The universe is not perfectly smooth and featureless. If the cosmic background is indeed leftovers from the Big Bang, it is the farthest source of radiation possible. We're seeing it, in a sense, through slightly wrinkly glass. How could it be otherwise?
• At least we're not seeing the Blessed Mother in the cosmic background hiss... (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• I've known about the Baby Name Voyager for some time, but I don't think I've cited it here before. It's a Java app charting the popularity of names given to infants since the 1880s. The name "Jeffrey" barely existed until the 1930s, peaked about when I showed up, and then was mostly gone again by 2000. I always thought it was a bad idea. I wanted to be James, and was almost Eric. For a truly fascinating graph, though, enter a single letter, to see the relative popularity of all the names beginning with that letter. Like Q.
• I'm not a beer drinker, but down at Shop and Save, they have Russian beer in 2-liter plastic bottles. I've never before seen beer (nor anything else alcoholic) in what most people think of as soda bottles, and I always figured it was either illegal or simply a bad idea chemically. I guess not.

• Still sniffling, still congested, still coughing, and still mostly lying on my back, taking a Zicam every three hours like clockwork. I feel better generally, but the growing pile of Kleenex on the floor next to the bed provides time-trend rather than anecdotal data. This has been worse and tougher to shake than I had hoped.
• The Cassini Saturn probe can actually watch ring disturbances occur, especially those caused by the way-far-in moon Prometheus. Here's the culprit making tracks in the ring system, courtesy Astronomy Picture of the Day.
• There is a portable version of Scribus, the only open-source desktop publishing system that I respect. One key principle of degunking Windows PCs is to staythehell away from the Windows Registry, and portable apps, almost by definition, leave no fingerprints there. There's more here than most people understand, and Wikipedia's list of portable apps is a very good place to start. (I advise reading the entry talk page.) Here's another big list.
• Another key principle is to avoid software that insists on launching services all the time, having tray icons, etc. Most of these are commercial packages that are desperately trying to upsell you. Best path here is to avoid commercial software as much as possible, especially trialware and "basic" versions that are invitations to install nagware and are often very hard to get rid of.
• (Next morning.) The nose is drying out (finally) but the cough is still with me. About to head out for some yummy McDonald's iced coffee, with sugar-free vanilla flavoring, to chase a delectable Sausage McMuffin with Egg. I'm stuffing my pocketses with Kleenex, but after two days of self-enforced isolation, it's almost within my grasp: The Contrarian Breakfast of Champions!
• (Later.) It's been a bad season for the Global Warming crowd. Freeman Dyson jumped the Tiber, and now says that the whole thing is a religion. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has admitted under duress that its Antarctic bases have shown a cooling trend since 1980. Another Australian, albeit a hated Tory, penned a pretty good summary of the problems to be found when you study the data and not the dogma. Word seems to be getting out: Only 30% of Americans support cap-and-trade, which has become corrupt even before becoming law. And here's what one of the sponsors of the Waxman-Markey bill has to say about the dangers of global warming. OMG, if that tundra at the North Pole ever emerges from under the ice, we're all gonna die!
• Remember Global Cooling? I lived through it. It was scary. The lesson? We knew shit about how climate worked in 1975. And today? We know shit plus 15%. Some humility (and caution) are called for.
• (Still later.) Gosh. I really must be feeling better. The needle has climbed out of "groggy" and is rising rapidly through "puckish" on its way back to "jovial and unprovocative." Dare I hope to get all the way to "serene"? Not likely; the viruses are surrendering, but I still have 35,000 words to go on the book--and I can't find any Diet Green River!

I had a tough time sleeping after 4:30 AM this morning, probably because I slept so well the previous night. (The Powers seem to ration my sleep for reasons I've never understood. Maybe if I got a complete night's sleep every night I'd be unbearably perky, like that retro 60s babe Flo on the Progressive Insurance commercials.) So I finally gave up about 5:15 and got dressed. I went out on the back deck to see what I could see of the Moon and Venus, to find that the positioning was optimal bad vis-a-vis the huge pine tree behind the house. My eastern horizon is very good, where I have an eastern horizon--and alas, the Moon was rising right behind the tree.

However, by 6 AM the pair had cleared the tree, and were getting very close. I put my Canon G-10 on its greatest zoom, propped the camera on the deck railing, and took some shots. The sky was getting pretty light at that point and I knew I wouldn't get much contrast, but there's something a little subtle and spooky about what I did get, and I'm quite happy with the shot overall. When I knew that the occultation was only a few minutes off, I went back in and got Carol up. We both watched it from the deck, passing my 8 X 50s back and forth and marvelling at the terrific weather.

I haven't seen a lot of planetary occultations, and there's a fundamental difference between those of planets and stars: Stars are point sources of light. When a star goes behind the Moon, it blinks out instantly. Planets fade as their disks are covered by the Moon's limb over a period of a few minutes. As I watched Venus dim, I realized that this was the first planetary occultation I've watched through binoculars. Every other occasion (I think maybe three) I was watching through one of my big scopes. I regret a little not having put the 8" scope on the back deck last night, but experience has shown that the deck is not a very steady platform for observing. (And the driveway looks west, with the house blocking the eastern horizon completely.) There's something to be said for brand-new experiences. Why always do everything the same way?

• My Web article on how I designed my workshop has just been aggregated on the Make Blog.
• Here is the best summary of sunspot-less days I've yet seen. We may be coming out of a freakish-high period of solar activity; five of the ten most intense solar cycles ever recorded have occurred in the last 50-odd years.
• Even NASA admits that our near-record solar minimum may get even deeper. I guess I don't need to build that 6M vertical any time soon. (Thanks to Mark Moss for the link.)
• On the other hand, the DX can be had, with some--heh!--effort. In fact, some guys in Germany recently bounced a radio signal off of Venus and heard the echo. They used the same 2.4 GHz radio frequency as Wi-Fi--just with 6 KW of power. No word on antennas or ERP, though the words "big" and "parabolic" come to mind.
• Print-on-demand meets the magazine business with MagCloud. Basically, the magazine is printed when you order it. All pages are in full color, printed using the HP Indigo technology, with a saddle binding. The price is still steep: 20c per page, giving you a 48 page mag for $9.60. Of course, that's all content and no ads, so it's not utterly insane when you consider that a lot of modern magazines are lucky to have 48 pages of Real Stuff. The system works like Lulu for the most part, and if you have the need to publish a short, full-color booklet of some kind it might be worth a look. (Thanks to Jim Dodd for the link.)
• Pete Albrecht sent a link to some WWII posters, and the interesting one is about not using broadcast receivers. Few people know that nearly all ordinary radio receivers are also very low-level radio transmitters, courtesy of the local oscillator or oscillators in the frequency conversion stages. It's possible to detect superhet receivers at considerable distance using a good directional antenna, and this was evidently done during the War. The BBC also used to do this (and may still, for all I know) to enforce receiver licensing rules, by sending a truck around towns listening for local oscillators and logging street addresses. (I learned this from the UK pub Meccano Magazine circa 1962.)
• It's the not the fat. It's the high-fructose corn-syrup. Here's another brick in the edifice of evidence. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
• And finally, a food pyramid that I can get behind.

• I'm 77,241 words into the revision, of which about 25,000 words are new. So I now have a little less than 100,000 words to go, and I'll have a book. More has to be rewritten than I thought, but mercifully, not all of it. This is going to be almost my sole project for the next four months or so. Maybe I should get one of those writers' progress bars for WordPress, if such exists.
• I finished the second ASCII chart, for the IBM-850 code page.
• The glyph for the German sharp-s (esset) character is not called "szlig" except within HTML pages, where it appears to be a name invented for the glyph by people who do not speak German, perhaps from "sz ligature."
• Bright green Comet Lulin whistles past us today, at its closest a still-comfortable 38 million miles off, but it's apparently a fine object in even a small telescope, and can be seen with the naked eye if you're out past city lights. It's very close to Saturn in Leo. Space Weather has a nice map showing where to look, and when.
• This may be the hoax of the decade.
• And while we're talking digital TV, I've been wondering if those little USB TV receiver thingies are digital-ready--but not wondering hard enough to go research. (I watch almost no TV, but you knew that.)
• David Stafford and Jim Mischel informed me that there is an audiobook of someone reading my story "Drumlin Boiler" in what we think is Russian. ("Dramlinkskiy Kotel") It's a 50 MB MP3, so think twice about downloading it, but I would like some confirmation as to the language. Sure, it's a pirate edition, but these days I'm happy someone is reading me, even if aloud.
• Bruce Baker sent me a link to an intriguing article by Rudy Rucker on self publishing. The problem: Only your friends will buy your book. The solution: Work hard at having a lot of friends.

• Quick reminder: If I'm on your blogroll, or if you have a link to Contra on any of your pages, please check to see that the new URL is in place. Thanks!
• Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a fantastic technical animation that "assembles" the Space Station one module at a time, while displaying a timeline on the right indicating when each part was orbited and attached. I knew roughly how the thing went together, but this is almost like Cliff Notes. Takes just a couple of minutes to watch. Don't miss it!
• Again from Pete is a site with more information on steam turbine locomotives. I had heard of the Jawn Henry (That's how the Norfolk & Western spelled it) but had not seen a photo until I followed the link in the article. The main problem with coal-fired turbine electrics appears to have been coal dust in the electric motors. Makes sense, but I would never have thought of it.
• Henry Law weighed in from the UK on the merits of Marmite, the original beer yeast leftovers toast spread, as far superior to those of Vegemite. (See my entry for January 4, 2009.) I may have to let Henry duke it out with Eric the Fruit Bat over this, as I have not tasted either but will try some as soon as I don't have to buy a whole jar. Sam'l Bassett suggests that its flavor is heavy on the umami, which makes me a little nervous. I don't taste MSG at all--flavor enhancer is not a word I'd use for it--but it makes me feel almighty strange, even in very small amounts.
• The Boston Globe, of all things, published a piece stating strongly that cities are really, really really bad places to live from the standpoint of health and clear thinking. I learned that twenty years ago; nice to see that the mainstream media is giving the idea some air. Alas, their answer--more parks--is treating the symptoms, not the disease. The disease is overcrowding, and the answer is to revitalize small towns. But that's just me, and what do I know about quality of life?
• I had long known there are "large" Lego blocks called Duplo, but it wasn't until Katie Beth got a set for this past Christmas that I had ever seen Mega Bloks, a sort of "house-brand" Lego and widely despised as a cheap imitation. However, even though Mega has both a Lego and a Duplo clone, they also have Maxi Bloks, which are larger than Duplo and so large, in fact, that no adult human being is likely to be able to swallow them, much less a two-year-old. This was a good idea. I want Katie to be comfortable with the idea of building things, and Maxi Bloks make it unnecessary to wait any longer.
• The February Sky & Telescope has a very defensive editorial from Robert Naeye, countering a tidal wave of accusations that S&T has gone the way of Scientific American and has been "dumbed down" in terms of scientific content. I don't have a link to the editorial online, but its core point is so silly I groaned. Naeye basically said that "We're not getting dumber--you're getting smarter!" Um...no. You're getting dumber. I had been a subscriber for 25 years or so with just a few gaps. I think I have a sense for where it was when I came to it, versus where it is now.
• I'm editing this with Zoundry Raven, as I have since I stumbled on it a couple of weeks ago. I've used Raven enough now so that I can recommend it without significant hesitation. The Zoundry business model is interesting (albeit difficult to describe) but it's also optional--you don't need to participate to use the software.
• Hey. I didn't get this for Christmas. Neither did you. But boy, the 12-year-old in me ached a little when I saw it...
• I'm amazed that I never knew this, but the Anglican term for the Feast of the Holy Innocents (December 28) is "Childermas." He doesn't use the word, but arguably the best song James Taylor ever wrote is about the Three Kings, Herod, and the Holy Innocents. "Steer clear of royal welcomes / Avoid the big to-do. / A king who would slaughter the innocents / Will not cut a deal for you." Indeed. Avoid all kings. Keep them in chains when you can--even the ones we believe that we elect.

• Carol and I just finished the bulk of our Christmas cards. The cards we bought this year had little sparkles glued (badly) to them, and as we processed the 70-odd cards going out, the cards began shedding, and sparkles are now showing up...everywhere. I'm looking down at my shirt cuffs right now, and they're blazing like a disco ball. Next year: No sparkles!
• Illinois' illustrious governor will soon (we hope) be matriculating to the Governors' Wing at the Joliet Correctional Center, and I am displeased to announce that he went to my high school. In fact, he was a freshman when I was a senior, and his sneaky little face is in the Lane Tech 1970 yearbook. Pete Albrecht was also a freshman that year, and narrowly missed out on the cooties inherent in having a future felon governor in your homeroom. Pete tells the story at greater length (with scans from the yearbook) over at InfoBunker. (Scroll down to the December 9, 2008 entry.)
• David Beers passed along a link to what might be the absolute worst idea of 2008: Google Code's research project aimed at allowing x86 native code to run in a browser. Hoo-boy. My question: If the Cloud is so great, why risk being pwned at native-code speeds? (And isn't this what Java is for?)
• Google Books has very recently posted back issues for a number of venerable magazines, including Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, CIO, Ebony, Jet, New York, Vegetarian Times, American Cowboy, and who knows what else. (I don't see a master list of magazines.) The PM collection runs from 1905 to 2000, and isn't just a scattering of issues, but damned near all of them. So what was PM's cover story the month you were born? (Mine? "Mermaid Theater." Wow.)
• Alas, you can look at the Google Books magazine back issues, but you can't save them to disk or print them out. Or can you? (I haven't tried this yet.)
• The wonderfully named Nevada Lightning Laboratory has managed to transmit 800 watts of power across five meters' distance, besting the previous record of 60 watts across two meters, set by MIT. The technique is not new, and was patented by our boy Nikola Tesla 100 years ago. Very cool, but are my wire-frame glasses going to melt when I step into the field with my Tesla-powered laptop?
• This Friday's full Moon happens only four hours from Lunar perigee, and is the biggest of the year, 14% greater in angular diameter (not especially noticeable) and 30% brighter (way noticeable!) than the apogee Moon we saw earlier this year. That's bright, it's high, and if you've got snow all over the place, midnight will be knee-deep in moonshine. (Not that kind.)
• 200,000 inflatable breasts got lost on their way from China (where there is evidently an inflatable breast factory) to Australia (where they were to be polybagged with a men's magazine) and have only recently been found in Melbourne. Just thought you'd like to know.

Carol rode a Canadair regional jet home yesterday, and I am mysteriously a much happier man. (We have not been apart for this long in one chunk since she was in grad school in Minnesota in 1976.) I have not in consequence been much inclined to write on Contra today, but I must mention something that will be worth looking for: A three-way conjunction of Venus, Jupiter, and the crescent Moon that will be potentially visible today and especially tomorrow. See it if you can, in the west just after sunset. Spaceweather has some details. I would have looked tonight but it's sleeting here in Colorado Springs, and I got word from Gretchen that there is considerable sympathy sleet in Chicago this evening as well. But if it's clear where you are tonight or tomorrow (or the day after, for that matter) don't miss it.

• My editor at John Wiley called and indicated that they want me (finally!) to rewrite Assembly Language Step By Step for a new edition in the spring of 2010. This will be a big job, since DOS will be jettisoned completely (and real mode relegated to a hisorical footnote) and a huge chunk of the book will have to be rewritten almost from scratch. More on this in coming days.
• OEM Parts in Colorado Springs (our local surplus house) is moving to a new and larger building about 2 miles north of their current location on Palmer Park. I was there with Mike Sargent the other day and discovered that everthing was half price. Got a bunch of Compactron tubes, some NOS Miller coils, a dozen or so high-ohmage 1-W carbon resistors, and a roll of emery cloth for $22. The new address is 3029 N. Hancock. They weren't entirely sure when they new location would open. Phone first: 719-635-0771
• PC Magazine is going "all digital." That means they're dropping the print edition. The last printed issue will January 2009. I remember when that damned thing was an inch and a half thick. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• A wine to avoid: Schmitt-Sohne Relax Cool Red, which is a dornfelder so bad I drank one glass and dumped the rest. No wine has gotten that treatment since Three Thieves Zinfandel, and before that, Bully Hill's Sweet Walter, which still holds the prize as the worst single wine I have ever tried.
• Mars is evidently not as dry as we thought: Glacier-sized water-ice glaciers (and not snowdrift-sized glaciers) have been reliably detected by way of the SHARAD radar system on the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter. Some of this stuff is half a mile thick, and you can do interesting things with such quantities of volatiles, water most of all. I recall an entry in my SF story ideas file from many years ago: Somebody has begun terraforming Mars—but nobody knows who.
• While we're talking Mars, Pete Albrecht alerted me to the impending release of Christmas on Mars, a new film billed as "avant-garde SF," which in my experience generally means "filmed in somebody's basement." The major character is Major Syrtis. Nyuk-nyuk.
• And while we're talking space, it's worth noting that the average American thinks that NASA gets 25% of the $2.7T federal budget. (!!!!) The truth is 0.58%.

• Sorry to be gone so long here; I haven't felt well for some days and did not do my usual daily quota of follow-your-nose Web exploration. Part of it is the politics; I seem to be hitting the I-Can't-Stand-It-Anymore level about three weeks earlier than I did in 2004. The rest seems to be the result of eating too many MSG-laden barbecue potato chips.
• Or maybe it's all the purely amateur reporting on the current financial crisis, declaring that it's either the end of the world or already well past it. Michael Covington (who would probably win any contest for World's Sanest Man) has some perspective on both the financial crisis and the stock market's recent fall. Read them, and heed the advice printed on the front cover of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
• I learned yesterday that Herb S. Brier W9EGQ was a paraplegic and could not walk. Like John T. Frye, he lived in Indiana (Gary) and was almost entirely self-taught in electronics. Bob Ballantine W8SU wrote up a short bio on Brier, and if you ever followed his Novice columns in the 50s and 60s, do read it. The closeness of the two men's call signs (W9EGQ and W9EGV) is probably a coincidence; as best we can tell the two men did not know one another.
• If you build radios, particularly tube or crystal sets, The Radio Board is worth a look. The sheer amount of cumulative tube-hacking expertise there is mind-boggling.
• The local newspapers have been breathlessly reporting rampant theft of campaign signs from both sides of the spectrum, and now that several perps have been caught, it turns out that they were...junior high kids! Wow! (Like I couldn't have told you that.) The little snots are not being charged with anything; after all, theft is political speech. Solution: Force them to give their allowances for the next year to the parties whose signs they stole, and wear a T-Shirt printed with that party's canididate's portrait.
• Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a PDF railroad map of Illinois, containing all currently active routes.
• And while I'm at it, let me point you to Pete's photos of Stephan's Quintet, a group of five close-set galaxies (two are actually foreground objects) that are one of the meanest challenges for backyard galaxy collectors—especially if your backyard is in Costa Mesa. The group is fascinating, and this article about them is worth reading.
• From David Stafford comes an article about what it's like to be a professional term paper writer.
• Once again, The Economist proves itself to be one of the few intelligent print mags remaining by explaining why even peer-reviewed scientific journals are not as trustworthy as we would like. (The Atlantic is on my S-list again for running too much politics; maybe I'll resubscribe in December.)
• Here's a robot that carries your houseplants to a spot in the livingroom where there's more sunlight. It's unclear what happens when the robot tries to share the sunbeam with the dog. I guess it depends on the dog; QBit would tear it to shreds; Aero would lift his leg on it. Suum quique.

• Speaking of sunspots (see yesterday's entry) The Boston Globe posted a series of some of the most amazing photographs of the Sun that I've ever seen. I'm not sure there's much more I can say but go look.
• More sunspot stuff: Wikimedia has a very nice graph of sunspot peaks since we started tracking them more or less scientifically in 1749. I have sometimes wondered if better instruments built in the last 100 years have led to higher sunspot counts, simply because we can see smaller and shorter-lived spots, but supposedly that's been taken into account. My one serious quibble with the associated writeup is that it's the Wolf Minimum and not the Maunder Minimum that corresponds to the beginning of the Little Ice Age. Maunder just made it worse, and Europe's coldest era does indeed correspond to a 70-year near-absence of spots between 1645 and 1715.
• The Make Blog aggegated an item on a beambot built in...1912. It works essentially the same way as the Popular Electronics Emily robot that I built in 1966, minus the solid state current amplifier. Relays can "amplify" current in a snappy, sparky, ozone-y kind of way, and this device has a definite steampunkish air about it.
• I am two days older than musician/composer David Arkenstone, and we're both Chicago boys. Didn't know that until ten minutes ago. Will probably forget it sooner or later, but not in time to make room in my head for more useful knowledge.
• More of what my sister calls "brain sludge": I built my first kite in September 1962. How do I know this? I remember pulling a sheet of newspaper off the top of the pile in the basement, and seeing the ad announcing the premiere of "The Beverly Hillbillies," complete with an Al Hirschfield caricature of the Clampett clan in their truck. I had read of his habit of sneaking his daughter Nina's name into every one of his cartoons (I think in the Saturday Evening Post) and took time to find it. I then used the sheet in the kite, which flew well, and was the first of many to be made of newspaper, and other (odd) things. Now, howcome I can remember this so vividly, and still have to think hard about where I left my damned cellphone ten minutes ago?
• This says something about human nature, and nothing good. Me, I prefer cars that don't go off the road, though I have eaten and enjoyed a number of smoked chubs that looked very angry.
• The email consensus is that the Turtle Wax Turtle was indeed atop the Wendell Bank Building at Ashland and Ogden. One correspondent asked the obvious: "Why not email the Turtle Wax people who posted the video?" Duhh. Will do. Sorry.

• Small, short-lived sunspots are starting to turn up on a fairly regular basis. (I monitor spaceweather.com daily.) Their polarity suggests that they belong to the long-delayed Cycle 24, but they are so small as to be almost invisible without a powerful solar telescope, and many vanish within 24 hours of their initial detection. So we could still be facing something like a Maunder Minimum, with small and short-lived spots keeping the count up even with generally minimal solar activity. The coming year will be especially interesting in solar astronomy.
• I ran across a fascinating couple of homebrew radio projects, and the tube design is especially intriguing. If you understand tubes even a little bit, read the article (PDF) on the low-voltage 3GK5 "Hellenedyne" one-tube reflex AM receiver. This is like nothing I've never seen before, and it's making me itch to throw one together just to see what this peculiar tube can do.
• This is humor for deep, deep railroad geeks only, but wow: Parodies of classic locomotive designs, some of them realized as HO scale models. Ok, you may not think these are funny without knowing a little bit about railroad history, but hey, there's just something inherently silly about a locomotive painted with the legend "Wrong Island." Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
• Also from Pete: Suppose that Tolkien's Hobbits, out from under their terror of the Dark Lord, had a thousand years or so (Hobbits don't hurry) to develop a reasonable technological civilization. Their astronomical observatories might well look like this, which is in fact a working observatory in Potsdam, Germany, named for Albert Einstein (I can picture Buildo Baggins, a distant descendent of the Sackville Bagginses, analyzing variable star luminosity curves at those desks, between bites of bread spread with entirely too much butter...)
• Interestingly, the ebook edition of my Souls in Silicon collection is outselling the print edition 3 to 1. Even more interestingly, I make 23c more per copy on the ebook edition, priced at $3.99 vs. $11.99 for the print edition. This is an extremely useful dataset, and I'm tempted to drop the price on Cold Hands to $2.99 when I release it in December, just to see how it does.

Carol and I got up at 3:30 AM last night and found the skies crystal clear, so we hauled out onto the back deck in our fuzzy robes (along with a couple of doubtless-puzzled bichons) sat down in two of the patio chairs, and leaned back, facing generally east. The Perseids did not disappoint; in forty minutes we saw twenty or so, and most of them were quite bright. We didn't have access to the whole sky with the house behind us, so I'm sure we missed quite a few. Still, the count is about in line with what we've seen in past years, and for Carol and me (and the Perseids) there have been a lot of past years.

In fact, I'm pretty sure we watched them from her back yard two weeks after we met in 1969, though not at three in the morning. No matter. I see meteors almost any time I spend more than a minute or two scanning the skies, even from as light-befouled a place as the close-in Chicago suburbs. One reason Carol came to love as scruffy and odd a specimen as me was that I was willing to talk science with her. I pointed out the constellations to her, and dragged my junkbox telescope out into her driveway to show her the moons of Jupiter. Over the years, the Perseids have become something of a tradition for us.

I have a talent for pastiche, and when I was young it was almost a compulsion: If I read enough of something I almost always tried to imitate it, with greater or lesser success. During my sophomore year in the English Literature program at De Paul I was taking one damned poetry course after another, so it was inevitable that I would try my hand at poetry. During my Robert Frost period (which was roughly the last three weeks of April, 1972) I penned a lot of metered drivel in down-home country dialect. One effort was a sonnet, just so I could say I had written a sonnet. Even though I was a New Formalist long before there was a New Formalism, I knew the Prime Directive of modern poetry (Thou Shalt Not Rhyme) and withheld any rhyme until the final couplet. I gave the poem to Carol the night we watched the Perseids from my parents' summer home at Third Lake, Illinois:

Perseid

I saw a shooting star last night, you see.
It bothered me to think that golden streak
That split the sky half-raw and hung awhile
As thought to rub the wound with pale white salt
Was washed clean-gone by night's soft-rushing flood
In just the time you'd take to poke the coals.
You know, they say it's just a grain of sand
So small you'd never see it in your cup
Once all the tea was gone. I wonder now
What made God give a speck like that such spunk
While here I balk and eye our road so roundly…

You know, I think I'd not so fear the night
If, going out, I knew I'd make such light.

Carol read it appreciatively (as she always did, irrespective of what it was I had handed her) and then, giving me a peck on the check, asked, "Don't sonnets have 14 lines?"

"Well, sure!" I said, taking the sheet back from her hands. A quick count reassured me that it had...13 lines. Damn.

Ever since then, I've been famous around the house as The Guy Who Writes 13-Line Sonnets. Clearly, rhyme was good for something—like helping numerically illiterate poets keep track of the number of lines they were producing. After that, I returned to my more freeform e. e. cummings period (which had been the first three weeks of May, 1972) until I found the wisdom to understand that I was a better astronomer than I was a poet. I've stopped writing poems, but the Perseids—heh, like Carol and me, that's forever.

• I'm a sucker for a Depression-era railroad oddity called the Galloping Goose, which is a stitched-together Frankenrailcar made of bus and truck parts and other odd bits. Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a nice history/photo site, revealing something I had not known: That there's a Goose still running and giving rides, down in southwestern Colorado. Won't happen this year, but next year fersure!
• The Perseid meteors hit their peak tonight; they're very reliable and I've watched them pretty regularly for almost forty years. As with most meteor showers, they're at their best in the very very early morning, within two hours of when the sun rises. However, there will be little skysplatters going off all night long, and after the moon gets down in the west, you'll see more of them. Whenever you can get somewhere dark, break out a lawn chair or just lie back in the grass and look generally toward the east. I doubt you'll be there more than ten minutes without seeing at least one, and they can surprise you by coming in bunches. It's not as mathematical as an eclipse or an occultation. You just won't know until it happens. (PS: The Sun is still blank!)
• I accidentally deleted a bunch of fonts that I was bringing back from Chicago, but a nice free undelete app named FreeUndelete saved my clumsy bacon. It's not a no-install app, but it's pretty lightweight, and works like a champ. Free for personal use. Recommended.
• Several people have mentioned Lexcycle's Stanza ebook reader app to me in recent days. I downloaded it earlier today and installed it downstairs on the XP lab machine (it's another app that claims not to support Win2K) and I will say, it has some promise. It does require the Java Runtime, and it certainly needs to do a little growing up, but I'm glad to see any serious effort to build a universal reader app for ebooks.
• And while we're talking books, take a look at Zoomii, a Web front end for Amazon that shows books on shelves bookstore-style, though every one is face-out. (Now that's a switch!) You can zoom around and click on a book to get the details. The shelves come up zoomed back enough so that the covers are undiscernable smudges; make sure you click on the plus sign in the navigation cluster to bring the display in close enough to read them. I found this fascinating and fun (at least for the ten minutes I spent on it) though I don't know whether I'd use it except for the serendipity value. However, given that Amazon sells books that will never see the inside of a bookstore, Zoomii may bring back the importance of cover design to small and very small press books.

• I'm not quite as ga-ga as the reporter, but make no mistake: This is one of the most startling deep-space videos ever taken, of the Moon making a transit across the Earth, seen from a distance of fifty million kilometers. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
• My nephew Brian just bought a Blackberry cellphone and is trying to find a software package that will allow him to sync his Google Calendar data with the phone. This is something I've never had to do (I do not currently have a PDA nor a smartphone) and so I'm looking for suggestions.
• Eat kohlrabi, Dean Ornish: A long-term study published in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates that low-carb diets are significantly better at helping people lose weight and lower cholesterol than low-fat diets. As complex as the obesity issue is, I speak to people again and again and again who have found what we've found in their own lives: Lowering fat does not help much. Lowering carbs, and especially lowering sugar, helps a lot.
• Carol and I were down in Lincoln Park the other day, and saw saturation advertising for a wind-powered condo complex that intrigued me enough to write the Web address down across Heath Ledger's late face on the Red Eye. Take a look and read the fine print. Those well-hidden wind turbines on the roof generate up to 2% of the building's electricity. And so wind power takes its place as a techno-fetish among the terminally hip and the gorgeously clueless. Larger turbines could generate significantly more of the building's power, but the neighbors might complain—and that's not hip at all, is it?

• Good grief! Salvia is a hallucinogen! How in hell did I get to be 55 and not know that? (We used to grow it as a ground cover years ago.)
• Nick Hodges wrote to say that the Easy Duplicate Finder utility I mentioned in my June 20, 2008 entry was written in Delphi. A lot of no-install apps are written in Delphi. They're fast, compact, and don't crap DLLs into your Windows\System32 directory. Too bad they're written in a Kiddie Language™.
• Speaking of no-install apps, I've tried a few more. One good one (if of limited use) is TreeSize Free, which scans a drive or a directory tree and shows you which parts of the hierarchy are the ones that use the most drive space. Another that I've just discovered is the FastStone image viewer, which isn't quite a digital photo manager but comes pretty damned close. So far, I can recommend both.
• Jason Kaczor sent me a pointer to Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope, and it's worth a look, especially if you've got a big-screen TV that can display at least 1024 X 768 graphics. Needs XP SP2 and some middling computer horsepower, but man, what a show!
• Any time anybody anywhere experiences any weather that they don't like, environmentalists jump up and do the Global warming! Global warming! cheer—but when environmentalists block brush clearing in a fire-prone area and the whole place subsequently goes up, as Santa Cruz recently did, do we hear but a peep? Heh. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)

Sure, maybe the guy's a nut, but I'm a contrarian and I love heresies. There certainly seem to be fewer sunspots this cycle than we're used to, and cooling climate trends are definitely correlated with things like the Dalton Minimum and the Maunder Minimum. I've sometimes wondered if the Little Ice Age was "little" because we aborted it by throwing CO2 into the atmosphere in serious quantities. Absent that, we might all be cavemen in an ice wilderness by now.

Ahh. Maybe the Earth really has a little old lady named Gaia somewhere pulling strings. Maybe prescient whales (or sentient mushroom rings in the English forests) saw it coming and carefully guided the evolution of humanity so that it would control fire. Fire is addictive. Do enough of it, and you can keep the atmosphere warm through the greenhouse effect. Maybe the Earth got tired of being cold, and it evolved us because it didn't have any leg warmers.

Climate is an interesting business. The Earth seems to teeter between fire and ice, but from what we know of our geophysical history it prefers ice. If the sunspot dearth is a leading indicator of reduced solar activity, we may have a few years to do...what? Buy Hummers? Whoops. We already tried that.

Ok, ok, correlation is not causation. I'll shut up. Still... At least in Colorado Springs, this was The Winter That Wouldn't End. And it snowed in Chicago last night. If this keeps up I'm moving back to Arizona, thank you very much. I hear that when the ice sheets get as far south as Nebraska, the mammoth hunting is better there.

• Those who marveled at the quirky motion of the Big Dog quadripedal robot should not miss the (inevitable) video parody.
• And while we're watching videos, make sure you watch this one, starring a Pope Benedict XVI bobblehead identical to the one on my bookshelf. While this is what I call "gentle humor" and I suspect that Good Pope Bennie (with whom I disagree but whom I do not despise) would have laughed had he seen it, the usual grump-ass moroons who object to things like this prevailed to have the ad pulled. Fu on 'em.
• Which of course reminded me of this famous Far Side cartoon, which incensed Jane Goodall's staffers but made the great lady herself laugh. My father told me early on: Life demands a sense of humor. Only cowards cannot laugh at themselves, and only hopeless slave-collar tribalists cannot abide humor about their own leaders.
• George Hodous sent me a link to an artist who uses intersecting lasers to etch a crystal cube containing a 3-D starmap of our stellar neighborhood out to five parsecs. Nice work, and if you ever forget, he's marked the direction to the galactic core.
• Maybe this is why I started to get muscular in middle age. Thanks to Frank Glover for the pointer.
• Takahiro Kato of Japan sent me a link to his page on 12V tube work, including a 30mw transmitter he designed. It's in Japanese, and (alas) the machine translation link does about as well as machine translation links generally do. But look at his construction techniques—I haven't seen anything that clean and rational for a long time.
• Those who love The Rocketeer (whether the graphic novel or the film) will want to take a look at this, documenting a Swedish inventor who has come damned close to making it real. (Yes, he does look more like Buzz Lightyear than Cliff Secord.) No explanation here of why his pants don't catch fire, but hey, wow.
• While hunting for a new standard model thumbdrive to replace the no-longer-made Cruzer Mini I ran across this prototype. Not what I need but very cool nonetheless. Let's just hope they don't pollute it with U3.
• In thinking about non-obvious disruptive technologies, it occurred to me that using nanotech filters to separate gold from seawater could be hugely disruptive to nationalk economies if it became effective. However, with gold at about thirteen ppt (parts per trillion) in seawater, it would take a lot of nanofilm to get any useful quantity. I vaguely recall an old SF story about a guy who pulled gold out of seawater somehow. Anybody remember what that was?

Some years back I posted Jeff Duntemann's Homebrew Radio Gallery, and for reasons unclear it's become one of the most popular pages on my site. (Tube construction may not be quite dead...) So a while back I wrote up and (almost) finished a page about all the various telescopes I've built out of junk since 1966. Longtime Contra readers have seen some of the photos, but a few are new scans of prints I've had in a box for decades.

Jeff Duntemann's Junkbox Telescope Gallery sat unfinished on a thumb drive for some months, until I finally bore down and finished it a few days ago. It's not a how-to; there has never been and will probably never be a better junkbox telescope how-to than Sam Brown's classic All About Telescopes, which is in turn a compendium of shorter booklets that Brown published through Edmund Scientific in the early-mid 1960s. $14.95 is cheap for a book like this. If you ever have the least inclination to put together a scope from scratch, buy Brown's book first.

The page is mostly a photo collection, with some odd notes on how I did what I did. Note well that you don't have to grind and polish your own mirror as I did. Ready-made 8" primary mirrors can be had for $300 or sometimes less, and the rest of the scope can be, well, junk. Also note that I think Dobsonian mounts are silly: With a 2" 45° street elbow you can have something approaching an equatorial mount if you live in the US.

Building scopes like this is mostly a lost art, and there are definitely advantages to scraping up the cash for a Meade or a Celestron. (Tapping in "M31" on a keypad is less messy than lying on your back in a cowfield and sighting the nearly invisible object along the edge of the tube.) But it's a good kid project, because when you're done you—and any involved kids— will know exactly how it works, and that's worth something all by itself.