Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

• There's a useful overview of the latest Ubuntu release (9.10) here. Note the cautions about the 9.10 partitioner, especially if you have more than one SATA drive in a system destined for a clean install on a shared drive. I ran into some still-unresolved difficulties with the partitioner recently, but they seem to be machine-specific and may be due to BIOS limitations. More on that as I learn it.
• A similar site for Kubuntu 9.10 is here.
• I'm not much into costuming (or Halloween, for that matter; my sister got that gene instead) but within the genre of one-person-pretending-to-be-two, this may well be best-of-breed.
• On the other hand, this one comes close, for sheer attention to detail if nothing else.
• And while we're talking tauntauns, didja see the tauntaun sleeping bag? Authentic right down to the tauntaun guts pattern on the lining. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• 2009 is now #8 on the most-sunspotless-years-since-1849 hit parade. Ten more spotless days and we move into position #7. I'm laying odds that 2009 will eventually get into 6th place but no higher.
• God may not like the Higgs Boson, but hey, I'm not all that fond of opera. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• Here's an interesting pamphlet from 1945 on what the future of television might be. If they only knew...
• Frank Glover sent a link to an article sponsored by the ESA suggesting some SF ideas that have been realized to some extent or still may have some promise in our own (and not some alternative) future. A little breezy, but has a lot of full-color SF art and classic magazine covers. (5 MB PDF.)
• This may seem like a weird stunt, but it was (and may still be) a common thing on dairy farms. When I was 10 or 11, I watched Auntie Della milk a cow by hand one morning for the day's needs, and the barn cats (who kept the barn free of mice) would line up for their milk squirts. Auntie Della's aim was very good, and by all indications the cats were completely good with that.
• Make Magazine published a brilliant little project: A vacuum cleaner hose trap for small parts like screws and washers. (110K PDF.) Doesn't rely on magnetism, but is more like a lobster trap, in that parts enter easily but can't leave, and rattle around tellingly when the hose pulls them in.
• From the Jolly Pirate comes word of the Corsair Flash Voyager GT: A 128 GB thumb drive optimized for speed, and (according to him) capable of holding over 20,000 MP3s. $400 now...but check again in six months, heh.
• Turn the Dodge Viper logo upside-down, and what you've got is Daffy Duck.

• The University of Utah has a fascinating animation demonstrating the relative sizes of very small things. Starting at the scale of a coffee bean, you can zoom down by pushing a slider past single cells, various viruses, proteins, until you reach the carbon atom. Won't take but a minute, and has plenty of wow factor, especially if you can't picture things clearly at nanoscale.
• For all the beautiful weather and the fact that school was out, this year's Halloween saw no trick-or-treaters here on Stanwell Street until almost 5 PM. Summer from around the corner and her third-grade friends arrived in a mob at 6:30, and Dash got plenty of girl-attention, but that mostly exhausted the supply of local grade-schoolers. A few young teens came by between 7 and 8, but that about was it. The neighborhood has a fair number of teens, but we were told they were all having at-home parties, and we're good with that, though I have a mass of Milk Duds here that would probably go critical if placed in a single sufficiently large bowl.
• Carol and I went over to our next-door neighbors later in the evening. Carol wore her footie jammies and put her hair up in huge 70s rollers. I cobbled up a Ben Franklin outfit that wasn't half bad, and I carried the small pink kite tethered to a balloon stick with about two feet of string. When we walked in, the guy down the street commented, "Lost some weight, huh Ben?" "Yup," I replied. "Low-carb and all that."
• Want to haunt a house? Hire a team of scientists and an architect. Real ghosts just never show up for work when you need them.
• This is the smallest packaged PC I have ever seen. Not worthwhile, given that it lacks digital audio out, is Atom-based, and stuck on Ubuntu 8.04 (!!) but it is small.
• And if you'll settle for something only a little bit bigger, the AOpen MP45D will do a lot more.
• I may have linked to this once years ago, but it's worth running through again: The Museum of Unworkable Devices, which is bestiary of perpetual motion machines, with careful explanations of why they don't work. Lots of links to even more of the same.
• NASA has calculated the "average color of the universe"...and it's the color of my livingroom walls! (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• Finally, don't forget the contest I posted yesterday once it goes down under the fold! Keep those shortie filk schticks coming!

• It was inevitable: Be the Balloon Boy for Halloween. However, as the ad says, don't get carried away... (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• I downloaded an Xubuntu 9.04 LiveCD, and (interestingly) the OS does not appear to be able to identify my Samsung 1600 X 900 display, and thus defaults to a 4:3 something too narrow and a little too high. More interestingly still, it shows a blank field for the current display resolution in the Settings dialogs. Ubuntu and Kubuntu 9.04 have no trouble with the display, and I'm wondering if the xfce resolution is hardcoded. Either way, it didn't leave me with an especially good impression of Xubuntu.
• There's something telling about my feeling it necessary to tell you that there's a spot on the sun! I've done screen-projection sunspot observations at, um, spotty intervals since 1970, and until quite recently, sunspots were more or less always there when you wanted to look. Not so for the last two or three years, when sunspots--and band openings--have become something of a novelty.
• Heath-Zenith still exists. They make doorbells. (Thanks to Bp. Sam'l Bassett for the link.)
• Use your deordorant and become a better person. (Clean the catbox, ditto.) I've sometimes wondered what odors are actually for, and whether there's an evolutionary reason that humans are so much lousier at detecting and discriminating among them than other mammals.
• Oh, and you may be more productive with your shoes on. (If that's true, how the hell have I ever gotten anything done?)
• Wired Magazine has a cover story on the antivaxers, and whatever your views on the issue (mine are so strong as to be essentially unprintable, so don't look for them here) it's worth reading.
• The New Yorker always has clever covers, but this is the best one I've seen since the Mullahs on Segways.
• Recommended Obscure Halloween Reading for 2009: Jonathan Carroll's The Land of Laughs, which was published in 1980 but can still be had for cheap on the used book sites. The biographer of a legendary (deceased) author of children's books travels to the small Midwestern town where the author once lived and finds that fantasy is blurring into reality in some odd and very creepy ways.
• Is there a more modern technical term for those jokes/inspirational/polemic notes that people email out to their entire address book, with instructions at the bottom to send this to 10 people / 20 people / everyone you know? I call them chain letters, but wonder if their email incarnation has a geekier term attached to it.

If you've got clear weather for the next 18 hours or so and a good eastern horizon, set the alarm a little early for tomorrow and head outside just before dawn. Mercury, Venus, and Saturn will be lined up in a vertical row, with the Moon off to one side a little toward the south. There's nothing historical or unprecedented about the conjunction (which isn't hugely close) but it's a chance to take in three planets at one tight glance, assuming you can see clear down to the horizon. Mercury never gets very high nor very bright, but it has two unmistakable pointers aiming right at it: Follow the line from Saturn toward the horizon past Venus a little more than twice the distance between Saturn and Venus, and it'll be there.

My horizons have been lousy in recent days, but, ever hopeful, I'll be out on the small deck with binoculars about 6:30 tomorrow morning. Mercury will be the first of the group to drown in the rising light, so don't wait too long!

• Gizmodo has a decent overview of the jungle of Intel CPU chip families. Core, Atom, and old reliable Pentium are compared and contrasted. Good short brushup, even if you've been following along as best you can. (I cop to not paying as close attention to Core i7 as I should have been.) My one objection: Late-build Pentiums are not nearly as bad as the author suggests.
• With 225 sunspotless days, 2009 just edged past 1867 in its climb up the Most Spotless Years Since 1849 hit parade. 2009 is now in position 11. Two more spotless weeks and we'll overtake 1855 and enter the Top Ten. 2008 was a killer, now standing at #4, with 266 spotless days. Will 2009 beat that? Unlikely; there are only 77 days left in the year, and while the Sun is sleeping, the old guy isn't dead. (He throws up a few sunspecks now and then just to keep his hand in.)
• An article in today's Wall Street Journal reminded me that American author/poet Stephen Vincenet Benet wrote the postarmageddon short story "By the Waters of Babylon" in 1937, before even the possibility of nuclear weapons was understood by the general public. It stands in my mind as one of the finest SF shorts of all time, and certainly one of the most prophetic. (The story's been posted on the Web and is easily Googleable, though how legal those postings are is unclear.)
• Very nice summary of what we know about the second-largest asteroid Pallas here. Interestingly, Pallas has its own "death star" astrobleme, which can be found on most of the smaller bodies of the solar system, suggesting that during the solar system's formation everybody got pounded, and the biggish moons that survive just barely missed being turned to gravel. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
• Google just clarified its plans (a little) for Google Editions, an ereader-agnostic ebook store that will offer ebooks in a universal format based on HTML. Books will be readable offline. One suspects that Google Gears will be involved, but what sort of DRM will be slathered onto the binaries is still an open question, and in a lot of people's minds (including my own) that's the only significant question there is.
• From Michael Covington comes the suggestion (from one of his grad students) that if a coral snake were a resistor, it would have a value of 24 ohms at 20% tolerance. (Determining the snake's power dissipation we leave as an exercise for the grad student.)

• Here is the entire sky projected on a plane, and zoomable. (LINK REMOVED--SEE COMMENTS) That doesn't do it anything like justice. Cruise the image a little and gasp. (Give the site time to refresh; it's newly slashdotted.) Read the rest of the page too--it's fascinating, and full of great photos. Chile looks a great deal like Mars in some places.
• There is apparently a correlation between sleep loss and amyloid tangles in the brain, which are a key element in Alzheimer's Disease. Causation is still a little unclear, but I find it significant that in our era of Anything But Sleep, the incidence of various dementias is exploding. Be in bed by 10:00PM and keep your brain. Now there's a deal I can live with.
• Wired has an interesting retrospective on tablet computing, which I found worthwhile mostly for the mention of a steampunk-era electromechanical handwriting encode-and-transfer device, which ferdam sounds like what Sherlock Holmes would use to IM Watson.
• Here's another worthwhile perspective on the Google Books Settlement.
• A chap who calls himself the Jolly Pirate wrote to tell me that the Pirate Party is alive and well in the US (I was under the impression that it was a European thing) and some interesting links may be found on its site, many of which have nothing to do with piracy. Now, would an American instance of the Pirate Party lean left or right? (Or would it be port and starboard?) I'll be damned if I can decide...
• It's been a bad season for big-time wine critics, who can't seem to find a business model and keep getting busted in conflict-of-interest scandals. The Internet allows the crowdsourcing of critique of all sorts of things--why should wine be any different?
• Pertinent to the above: What we need is the wine implementation of the "People who liked this also liked..." mechanism I see (and use) in the book world. I very much like Campus Oaks Old Vine Zinfandel, though the 2007 vintage now in stores is a pale shadow of 2005. What would be a wine similar to that? (If you know of such a system for wine, please share.)
• There are candy Legos.
• The charger for my Kodak pocket camera is a thin little slab with two 110V power plug pins that swivel out to plug into the wall, and then swivel back into hiding when they're not needed. Why can't they build that mechanism right into the back of an ebook reader? (I was without my Sony Reader for a couple of months after I lost the charger.)
• After an unexplained absence of several weeks, Fort Carson's cannon is back. (See my entry for September 15, 2009.) Maybe the cannon was broke and they had to send it back to the factory for repairs...

• Maybe I thought of it first. I don't care. This guy did a great job. What He Said.
• I was wrong about the Alice programming environment: There is in fact a version for Linux, though the developers admit it's a little buggy and largely "proof-of-concept." (Thanks to xuwande on LiveJournal for the tip.) To me, Alice looks a lot like the primordial Alto-based Smalltalk environment described in the seminal 1977 Xerox publication, Personal Dynamic Media, and I'll install and explore the product (probably under Windows) as time allows.
• And even though this is mostly a research project (with no promises or even strong hints that it will ever become a product) the Microsoft Courier looks mighty good to me from an ebook reader standpoint. The interface is a little busy for my tastes, but we'll see how it goes. Maybe it would be a waste of the device to use it for nothing but reading ebooks, but I consider it my prerogative to waste whatever part of a device I don't consider useful.
• Maybe it's not just me. As much as I like the Kodak EasyShare pocket cameras (Carol and I each have one) the EasyShare software is hideous and has given me nothing but trouble. This seems to be a trend. Can you imagine a new Mac app from a major vendor that still needs PowerPC emulation? Egad.
• I guess it's better for a church to be full of books than empty of prople, and these guys did not do a bad job.
• Suddenly we have not one but two large sunspots visible at once, a situation not seen for over a year. Alas, I spun the dials earlier this morning, and 15 meters isn't any livelier than it usually is here, which is to say, dead.
• The Google Books Settlement may well be dead on legal grounds, something that doesn't surprise me at all. What Google needs to do now is just publish an open invitation: "Anybody who holds rights to a printed work and wants the work to be posted on Google Books under the terms below, fill out this form. We'll handle the scanning." I'd be first in line in what I'm pretty sure would be a stampede that would sooner or later bring in all the the stubbornest skeptics. The key: I'm willing to admit that my out-of-print works aren't worth much. 1% of a loaf is still better than no loaf at all.
• ADDED 9/24/2009: Here's a guy saying something that isn't often said: Google Books is a fantastic research tool, and far from being evil, the Google Books settlement was just the first (now aborted) effort at something that simply has to be done.

• When I was a (much) younger man, I wanted a '59 Chevy. Having seen this, I guess it's just as well that I didn't get one. (Thanks to Todd Johnson for the link.)
• Micropayments may not allow small creators (like me) to make money. They may not allow big huge monstrous media outlets make money either. They may not allow anybody to make much money at all. Bummer. I did have hopes...
• Oh, and the Long Tail may not be as long as we thought. Double bummer.
• Has anyone reading this ever played with the Alice language/GUI system for teaching programming? (Alas, no Linux version. Triple bummer. ) Any opinions? I have nieces who are growing up so fast...
• From Pete Albrecht comes word that Chicago's Kiddieland is closing. My father took me there in 1955 while my mom was working. We had pizza and I went on all kinds of rides. That night I puked my guts out, and my mom thought I was coming down with polio. (They don't call it the Scrambler for nothing.)
• Here's another thing I thought I might have imagined: World Of Giants , a b/w TV show from 1959 that went into syndication and used to run just before the 4:00 PM monster movie on Channel 7 in Chicago, circa 1965. At least two people must have watched this, and the other one must have been Irwin Allen. (And the guy who created the show must have read Richard Matheson.)
• Although the sun's face has been devoid of sunspots for 18 days running (and 212 days this year) there is a major sunspot on the other side of the Sun, which may rotate into view sometime tonight. I boggle a little to think that we can image a sunspot on the far side of the Sun. How this is done is interesting, and has little or nothing to do with light. Flying cars or no, we are living in the future!
• From the Not Too Clear on the Concept Dept: I just nuked a spam message pitching "herbal testosterone." Right.

• I just missed seeing a nice article on the current sunspot dearth before posting my entry for August 20, 2009. The longest stretch this solar minimum is 52 days back in 2008, and we could well exceed that come early September with no additional spots. (We're now at 45 consecutive spotless days.)
• I'm practicing rolling my eyes for the latest showing of the Mars hoax. On August 27, multitudes of people who are rumored to posess something close to human intelligence are claiming that Mars will appear the size of the full Moon. (This does the email rounds every couple of years.) Note well that if Mars were the size of the full Moon in the sky, we'd be living a disaster movie, so be very glad it's a hoax.
• Stanford University reports that media multitaskers do not in fact multitask very well. I liked this refreshingly straightforward quote in the article: "We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn 't find it." More details here from the Beeb.
• ZDNet reports on a virus, named Win32.Induc, that pulls a trick I've never heard of before: It looks for the Delphi programming environment, and infects Delphi such that any apps built by that copy of Delphi will carry the virus. I can't quite see how this manages to propagate in a herd as thin as the Delphi programming world has become, unless Delphi programmers tend to use a lot of Delphi utilities obtained from places like Torry's. (I know I did, so that's my theory.)
• Maybe you had one: A die-stamped thin steel rectangular lunchbox, usually (but not always) with completely inane artwork, often branded to TV shows, toys, and other pop-culture phenomena. The Denver Westword has a "10 worst" feature on tin lunchboxes that's worth a look. I never carried a tin lunchbox to school (we used paper bags from Certified) but I have one now very much like #1, purchased at a hamfest years ago, filled with FT-243 ham-band crystals. I've always wondered why the boxes always had little vents punched in the short end sides.
• Here's an interesting 2-tube minimal broadcast-band superhet, using 12V space-charge tubes. It's interesting enough that I might even build one, though my own holy grail is a 2-tube FM receiver. I've got the schematic (courtesy John Bauman KB7NRN) and lack only the time to hack it together.
• I'd never heard of morning glory clouds, probably because they mostly happen in a certain part of Queensland, Australia. The bigger question is why they get all the truly great Weird Stuff down there, and we have to settle for minor-league weirdness like Michael Jackson.

Just my luck: I get a decent dipole strung in the attic, and the sun gets even quieter than it was earlier this summer, when a flurry of tiny sunspots (and one lonely one I might promote from "tiny" to "small") led everyone to shout that the solar minimum was over. Not so. A few weeks ago, 2009 pushed into the top ten years of sunspot-less days since 1900. Spaceweather tells me that we've now seen 182 spotless days this year so far, pushing past 1996 into position #8 on the No-Spot Parade. (See the graph covering complete years here.) At 40 in a row, we're in very rarefied statistical territory, even at solar minima. And if we make it to the end of August without any spots, we could see a full spotless calendar month, which is even rarer.

The next milestone comes after 18 more spotless days, when 2009 hits 200 and pushes past tied years 1911 and 1923 into spot (as it were) #6. We need 59 more spotless days this year to surpass 1954 and reach #4. We may just possibly do that, but I'm predicting that that's as far as 2009 will get, since there are, after all, only 133 days left this year. But yikes! This is shaping up to be a minimum like nothing seen since 1911-1913.

It's been a cool, wet summer in Colorado Springs and, in fact, a cool, wet summer in a lot of places north of poor Texas. Maybe it's a coincidence and maybe it isn't. A quiet Sun is a cooler Sun, and we know far, far less about its effect on climate than we're willing to admit. In the meantime, well, sure, I'd like to work Tuvalu on three watts into a hairpin too--but 70 degree summer days and full reservoirs are not shabby compensation.

• Yes, I've been lax on posting, but we've taken a short vacation with Carol's family, and I'm reading PDFs of the finished pages in my book, for reasons that I don't need to go into here. I have lots to post about, but little time or energy to do it. Bear with me.
• Our new puppy now weighs five pounds and is going on eleven weeks old. He still hasn't told us his true name, but we've suggested Dash, Pascal, Dover (think "White Cliffs of") and two dozen other things, and all he wants to do is chew on Carol's slippers. At least he's learned to use the potty pad, a trick Aero never quite mastered.
• You can help classify galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey over at the Galaxy Zoo, which is one of the coolest crowdsourcing apps I've ever seen. You don't have to know anything about astronomy to classify galaxies, but people who are passionate about galaxies may find the process less boring.
• Anyone who has ever killed time with Conway's Game of Life has got to see this video, of a spaceship gun: a large, complex GoL pattern that generates moving "spaceship" automata that then crawl away toward the right. The gun seen from a height looks stable and in its own way beautiful, but at higher magnification it's full of furious activity, almost like a chaotic Pac Man game. How such things are designed escapes me completely, but this makes me wonder what larger and even more complex GoL structures exist and have not yet been designed. (Discovered?) Thanks to David Stafford for the link.
• David's hot this week: He also sent a link to an extremely intriguing article suggesting a different sort of cosmic cycle: After the Big Bang, time began running, but then gradually slows down until it stops. At that point, what had been the time dimension becomes a new space dimension, and (presumably) the whole thing blows up again with a brand-new time dimension, as a richer and in some respects more mature cosmos. Shades of Stapledon's Star Maker.
• Although we're still seeing TV spots by the late, great (ok, loud) Billy Mays, Mays has an heir-apparent: Vince Offer, who has begun to saturate off-peak Weather Channel ad space with pitches for Sham Wow and the resurrected Blitzhacker, now unfortunately called Slap Chop in the US. (Carol and I had one thirty years ago, and it was indeed useful.) Mays had a certain goofy warmth about him. Vince, well, he's just...scary.
• "Sheesh, this thing is ancient! If it breaks, where am I going to find another?"

• From the Words I Didn't Know Until Yesterday Department: Forcemeat is meat ground sufficiently fine to make it cohere with a fat base, and mixed with spices and sometimes other ingredients before incorporating in pates, stuffings, and sausages.
• The Weather Channel is running saturation-level advertising for a "3D chalk" product from Crayola, which is apparently a selection of very bright, almost day-glow colors of sidewalk chalk, plus a pair of 3-D glasses with which to view your sidewalk artwork. Done correctly, the warmer colors seem to float above the sidewalk a little. It's almost impossible to think of this product and not flash on the sequence in Disney's Mary Poppins in which the gang jumps into Bert's sidewalk chalk drawing.
• The venerable Alfred Morgan borrowed some of the circuits found in his boys' books on electronics. I found the phono oscillator circuit from The Boys' Second Book of Radio and Electronics in a 1943 Meissner data book, and now Peter Putnam sent me a link to a 1955 article in Popular Science showing something very close to the diabolical Geiger counter circuit that I tried and failed to build (out of the same book) in 1964.
• There are fake high-capacity USB thumb drives going around. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.) Nobody's making 128 GB thumb drives yet (though they will eventually) so don't fall for it.
• Also from Frank comes a link to an interview with Eric Lerner, the man who claims to have developed a new kind of fusion reactor he calls "focus fusion." I'm not enough of a particle physicist to know whether this is a scam or not (though it sure smells like one) and I hope that my readers who are particle physicists can tell me whether the physics is as dicey as the business plan.
• Our long, long sunspot drought may be coming to an end. Spot 1024 is the largest seen yet of the new Cycle 24, and the largest sunspot seen in almost a year. I guess I better start shielding the fire alarm sensor wires, so I can get on 10 meters!

• 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.