Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

• 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.

• The dairy that delivered milk to our house when I was a kid was indeed Hawthorn Mellody Farms (as verified by the Sister of Eidetic Recall) which was unusual in several ways: They had an amusement park in Libertyville, Illinois, complete with a miniature train ride, a petting zoo, Western town, and pony rides, that was a famous destination in the 50s for suburban moms with station wagons full of Boomer kids. They were the first dairy to put pictures of missing children on milk cartons. And before they went bankrupt in 1992, they were one of the largest Black-owned businesses in the country.
• Also relevant to my entry of Febraury 24, 2009: Dunteman's Dairy evidently existed before 1939. A page out of the 1937 Arlington Heights phone book from Digital Past shows an entry for Dunteman's Dairy at 830 N. Dunton Avenue in Arlington Heights. The 1936 phone book shows a listing at the same address for "L. Dunteman," so Lenard may have begun operating the dairy from his back yard (not an uncommon thing to do back then!) in that year. Prior to 1936 his listing shows yet a different address. I'll have to see what's at that address today the next time I'm in the area.
• Digital Past is a very good source if you're doing genealogy research on Chicago's northwest suburbs; awhile back I found the location and a photo of the headstone of Laura Brommelkamp Dunteman there, after looking in vain for some years. (She was the second wife of Henry Dunteman, founder of R. W. Dunteman Construction, which is still in operation in Chicago's western burbs.)
• Well, grub is still plug-ugly, but it's no longer difficult to configure. I've been using KGrubEditor for over a month now, and it makes the job a breeze. Highly recommended.
• Where's my flying car? Well, it may be here: Yet another Skycar concept, but this time it's more Mad Max than Flash Gordon. Put a big fan on the back of a go-kart, get up some speed, and then release the parawing. Off you go!
• Philip Jose Farmer has left us. Along with Heinlein, Clarke, and Keith Laumer, Farmer was one of the SF writers who inspired me to keep going and make something of myself in fiction. I still consider the Riverworld concept one of the most compelling ideas ever to surface in SF, even though the series wandered toward the end and would have been much better had it been three books (on the outside, four) instead of five.
• I was going to do a whole entry on this, but Cory Doctorow said everything I intended to say about whackjob Roy Blount Jr and the knucklehead Authors' Guild, who want money from anyone who does text-to-speech. There's nothing I can add, and as a longtime author who still makes money writing, I think I have a right to strong opinions about this. Let me quote Cory here, and cheer:

"Time and again, the Author's Guild has shown itself to be the epitome of a venal special interest group, the kind of grasping, foolish posturers that make the public cynically assume that the profession it represents is a racket, not a trade. This is, after all, the same gang of weirdos who opposed the used book trade going online."

• 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.

• Foxit Software (which sells a line of very good PDF-related software, including the Foxit Reader, which I use daily) has announced an e-ink based ebook reader, the eSlick. The device isn't being shipped yet, but there have been some early reactions in Wired and other places. I'm interested because Foxit is unlikely to claim (as most ebook enthusiasts do) that PDF is the spawn of the devil. Worth watching.
• The Loopy Idea of the Month comes from two Ohio academics who have recently patented the notion of collapsing hurricanes by flying around them in supersonic aircraft and (somehow) using the sonic boom shockwaves to scramble the storm. Apart from the fact that supersonic aircraft use fuel at a prodigous rate, I still don't quite follow the physics of how this is supposed to collapse the storm. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• Jim Strickland passed a long a detailed how-to for extracting metallic titanium from white pigment. The process is straightforward, if (as it must be) highly energetic. I think the stickier question is working the titanium after it's been isolated. Titanium is difficult to melt and very difficult to machine. I have a piece in my curio cabinet, and I'm very glad I don't have to make anything from it.
• Many people sent me the latest version of the old joke that "If Programming Languages Were Religions..." most of them lamenting that my favorite language—and my favorite religion—were not included. So it goes. I'm guessing that Pascal, like Catholicism, is patient: There will be only one programming language in use in the hereafter, and it will not be C++. You'll have to go somewhere else for that.
• The Wall Street Journal tells me that the RIAA is abandoning its mass-lawsuit strategy of copyright enforcement. It hasn't worked at reducing music piracy, and its sole effect was making the music industry bigshots look positively evil. One can only wonder why it took so long to figure this out, and whether the damage can ever really be undone.
• Here's a wry peek at what we may see come out of the Big 3 bailout. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link. Have you driven a Pelosi lately?
• Also from Pete comes word that Werner Von Braun wrote SF. This actually looks pretty good—gotta love that cover!

• 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.

• A couple of people wrote to ask for a photo of Jackie, the gawky, lovable 26-pound bichon I visited yesterday. See above, at the right end of the group. (Compare the size of Jackie's head to that of 10-pound Aero standing next to him.) Jackie is also the only bichon I have ever seen who routinely hangs his tongue out of his mouth.
• I have wondered, at times, why today should be called "Black Friday." Now I know. Egad. (Remind me to stay the hell out of Nassau County.) Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.
• This is an important article if you now have or expect to develop hypertension. Solid studies appear to indicate that nothing works quite as well as ancient, dirt-cheap diurectics.
• I happen to believe that if we do not convert essentially all our coal-fired power plants to nuclear (with solar and wind to fill in the gaps) nothing else we do matters at all in preventing climate change. Small nuclear reactors are one solution to a lot of the rational objections to nuclear energy and here's the best intro I've seen to the topic.
• I like this discussion of the possibility of re-creating the woolly mammoth from DNA scavenged from long-frozen mammoth hair. (I did not know that there was viable DNA in hair.) If Russia did the heavy lifting here and established a Pleistocene Park in Siberia, they could reap billions in ecotourism dollars. First mammoths, then mastodons, then glyptodonts, then...dare we hope...giant beaver?
• And how would the ethics sort out if we tried reassembling the DNA of a Neanderthal and using a chimpanzee or bonobo as a host species rather than a human? Saletan's good and I read him religiously, but this is a subject he could have gone much deeper on.
• While we're dithering about re-creating the woolly mammoth or Neanderthal humans, those crafty Brits have re-created a full-size and completely accurate replica of a long-extinct steam locomotive, of which no significant parts (not even hair) had survived. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the links.)
• Pete Albrecht pointed out that NewEgg is now selling 1TB hard drives for under $100. Is there any common use of that much storage other than movie rips?
• Also from Pete is a pointer to Palmer Bolt, a source he recently discovered for odd size nuts, bolts, and other small hardware.
• I sorted my sock drawer today. I really did. I am not being funny or in any way metaphorical. It's just that it's almost Christmas (when New Socks Happen) and my habit of throwing away individual socks with holes in them had made matched pairs a little scarce.

• Yesterday's Wall Street Journal and New York Times (and many other outlets) reported that the Houghton-Mifflin trade division will be "temporarily" suspending acquisitions of new books. (The textbook division, which provides most of the company's revenues, is not involved.) This comes in the wake of H-M's purchase by an Irish software company last year. I applaud; there are too many books chasing too few readers, and monster publishers are tempted to "buy" store space with co-op budgets that small publishers cannot afford, while publishing whatever they can find just to meet a preset publishing program.
• Here's a hilarious takedown of one of the most precious and irritating new-media types I've ever had the misfortune to read—with, as a bonus, a rare example of the use of the word "gnomic" in its classical sense.
• And while we're on Slate, here's a slightly lightweight item on the psychology of car-horn honking.
• Computer-hardware-as-tasteless-joke is something I've not seen before, but these guys certainly get credit for balls...
• ...and so do people who rant and rage against grade-school Pilgrims-and-Indians pageants, especially when there are plenty of American Indians who support them. (School administrators seem to exile balls to the school playground in such cases...but never mind.)
• Here's an interesting but fairly tough 33-question quiz on American history and civics. I scored 100% without "peeking," but I also read history as a hobby and actually think about politics rather than blindly wave a tribal banner. Let's say that I wouldn't have done this well had I taken the quiz right after my mostly indifferent college education. I had to guess on one question (correctly) and probe really stale memories for another. Can you guess which two questions I had trouble with? (Thanks to Terry Dullmaier for the link.)
• While trying to be a Nice Guy, I bought a bunch of CFLs after they became politically correct, only to see every damned one of them burn out in about six weeks. I lose a lot of filaments here—must be the altitude, or top secret Air Force projects at nearby NORAD—but incandescents go at least six months in the same exact sockets. Finally, an article in the engineering press about why CFLs aren't necessarily a gift from the angels. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• Where can you get "extra" Lego bricks without buying sets full of stuff you don't want? (This was and remains a serious challenge for Meccano/Erector hobbyists.) One word: Bricklink.
• Damn. I never tried Zima. Now I guess I won't get the chance.

• 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%.

• The pseudobachelor life does not become me, but I'm working on it. So far, the heuristics seem to be: Stay in touch (our cell phones are being given a workout), stay busy, and socialize whenever possible. I've also found that I must get out of the house at least once a day or I get bitterly depressed. Today, at least, I had a mission: I FedXed Carol some papers and things that she needed, and grabbed lunch at the Black Bear while I was in the area. On the way past the Shell station (hardly the low-price leader hereabouts) I noticed that regular was down to $1.99.9. I do not remember the last time I saw gas break $2.00.
• I didn't read Slate for at least a month prior to the election, because by a month prior to the election I had already heard quite enough about the election without going to Slate. Alas, Slate still isn't over the election, but here's a very good article on why we are always so angry. The author seems to see unchallengeable genetic predispositions, but I see spoilt brats: People who give rein to their anger are immature, undisciplined dorks. (Read the blogosphere for abundant examples.)
• And the severely liberal Slate has finally copped to something I learned 25 years ago in Rochester, New York: In tony urban neighborhoods where then-stylish wood stoves burned through the winter, you couldn't hardly breathe. Wood is not clean heat. Wood is filthy, borderline toxic, dangerous-to-your-children heat that does not belong in urban settings, or anywhere with more than one house to five acres. (I cop to having had a wood stove on a third-acre lot in Rochester. I was part of the problem. I apologize, and I won't make that mistake again.)
• This seems too good to be true—or at least permanently true—but it seems like a US court has thrown out most business-practice patents. (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
• Well, Manischewitz Egg & Onion Matzos are back at the local King Soopers markets. I brought home two boxes yesterday evening, and could barely get in the door before ripping one box open, slobbering a whole cracker up with butter, and stuffing it back with hazardous haste. (Had Mike Sargent not tipped me off, I doubt I would even have looked.)
• It's not just simple utilities like MozBackup. (See my entry for November 8, 2008.) AVG Antivirus triggered an alert on an essential Windows file, user32.dll, claiming it was infected with a trojan called Generic9.TBN, and recommended that users delete the file. Urrp. ClamWin is looking better all the time.
• I rented The Golden Compass at Blockbuster the other night, and I will say this: It sports the coolest steampunk backgrounds and retromechanicomagical gadgetry of any film I have ever seen, and if you're a steampunk freak, don't miss it. However, having seen it, I know precisely why it was a fantastically expensive flop: It was utterly cold, and not because much of the action took place in the perpetual arctic dusk of Svalbard. I mean it in the sense that I detected little humanity in the characters, with the single exception of the broadly-drawn Texas aeronaut, Lee Scoresby. (The anti-Catholicism of the books was so muted that the Magisterium might as well have been a crew of Sith lords in baroque attire.) When the film was over, I was awed, but depressed. That's the job of an art movie, not a big-budget, kid-oriented, special-effects blockbuster. I doubt that the remaining two volumes in the trilogy will ever be filmed.

• I got drilled and post-ed yesterday and am mostly over it. The weirdest part of the whole procedure was listening to Dr. Salcetti cranking the implant post down into my jawbone with a small tool that sounded like—and in fact actually is—a miniature ratchet driver. (We will not speak of the earlier sound, of her drill going into bone, both sounding and feeling like a drill press working its way into something gummy.)
• For the first time I managed a major-release upgrade of Ubuntu without any fussing. Going from 8.04 to 8.10 took about half an hour, but it went absolutely without incident. (In the past I've had to restart the upgrade after it froze, and once I just gave up and did a clean install after reformatting the partition.) I don't see a lot of differences in Intrepid Ibex beyond the wallpaper, which initially puzzled me. It looks like a soda glass ring on somebody's dirty leather couch arm, but after staring at it for a moment I saw the ibex. Sorry; I liked the heron better—and I tremble to think what the wallpaper will be for v9.04 Jaunty Jackalope next spring.
• Well, alas, Kubuntu didn't fare as well—the upgrade crashed somewhere partway through, and the instance (which is still shown as v8.04 in grub) will not boot. At some point I will reformat the partition and reinstall from the ISO. KDE 4 is an acquired taste, but I've watched it evolve for many years and won't stop now.
• November 2008 is the 25th anniversary of the release of Turbo Pascal 1.0. David I will be printing selected "How I discovered Turbo Pascal" stories in his blog, and although mine is well-nigh legendary (I practically had to be beaten over the head to try it) I will be writing it up and sending it to him shortly. Damn little in tech has ever affected me more than that!
• Bob Ballantine W8SU sent me a scan of John T. Frye's 1985 obituary the other day, and it was severely disturbing: Frye died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Maybe it could have been an accident, but somehow I doubt it. Too many lonely writers (Piper, Disch, and others) have died by their own hands. He is buried with his parents at Mount Hope Cemetery in Logansport. Scroll down or search for Frye in the plot listings.
• Finally, Pete Albrecht reports that the New York Daily News spoke of an election day get-out-the-vote promo in which Krispy Kreme handed out "donut-shaped stars." (See the figure caption.) I've seen these in SF (recall that long-forgotten turkey, Nova by Samuel Delaney) but never in a donut shop. Maybe Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker works there. Talk about fresh from a hot oven!

• I've posted a significant update of my Carl & Jerry page, with new material on John T. Frye, including the conclusion I've drawn (with help from 1910, 1920, and 1930 census records provided by Bob Ballantine W8SU) that Bailey Frye was not John Frye's brother. Bob also sent out a scan of W9EGV's QSL card, worked up against a 50s cover (not sure precisely what issue) of Boy's Life. New details from newspaper clippings sent me by Michael Holley flesh out the man a little. He was quite a guy. Do take a look.
• Science is good at puncturing legends, and German researchers digging around in the former backyard of Martin Luther have deflated the legend that Luther was a humble monk (and, by implication, starving) but was instead born to an upper-class family and became a prosperous man who weighed 23 stone, 8 pounds (330 pounds for us Yanks) and ate goose, young piglet, several kinds of fish, and (egad) robins. Nor did he pound his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenburg cathedral in a fury with nails, as legend holds, but instead used drawing pins—what in America we call thumb tacks. Oh, the humanity...
• While researching Marian apparitions for a seminar I'm teaching at our church in November, I ran across the Apparitions of Jesus and Mary Reference Chart. It sounds silly, but trust me: The apparition curve has gone exponential in the last 30 years, and you can't tell the Marys without a program anymore.
• I'm in the Chicago area for a few days, and found on my arrival that the legendary Choo-Choo Restaurant in Des Plaines (just down the street and around the corner from our condo) is in danger of being razed to make room for a new police station. There's a Web site for gathering protest and forwarding it to the City of Des Plaines, which apparently can either raze the Choo-Choo or the defunct Masonic temple across the street. I don't quite understand why that's a hard decision.
• Harry Helms sends word that TV Guide, which Rupert Murdoch bought ten years ago for three billion dollars, has been sold for...a buck. Boy, the magazine business is not what it used to be. (If it were, I'd still be in it.)
• Slashdot reports a bit of useful black humor, in that Codeweavers (makers of the Crossover product line) gave the Bush administration a challenge: Reduce the cost of gasoline in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon, and they would give away their products for an entire day. Well, courtesy the recent financial meltdown (which was not caused exclusively or perhaps even primarily by the Bush administration, by the way) gas has gone south of $2.79, and while the Codeweavers site has been Slashdotted into paralysis, there is a facility online whereby the firm will email you an unlock code for something. I've been meaning to try Crossover Linux for some time. Here's my chance, I guess. And gas in Colorado Springs is even cheaper than that. Inc(Boggle);

• 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.

• A chemical found in red wine may slow aging in mammals. Reservatrol is a hot item these days, and whereas there probably isn't enough in wine to have measurable effects on health or longevity, Big Pharma firm GlaxoSmithKlein paid $720M for Sirtris, a biotech firm doing research on the reservatrol family of chemicals. Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.
• Larry Steckler, who had worked for the Gernsback organization from 1957 until its bitter end in 2003, has published a 700-page biography of Hugo Gernsback. We've been waiting for a decent biography of our man Hugo for a long time, and I'll post my reaction here once I've read it.
• Bruce Baker sent me a link to photos of a (more or less) scale model of the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman built entirely in Lego. The story has been written up (in English) on the Make Blog, with more photos here. My big question with Lego (having grown up on Meccano, in which everything is bolted together with real bolts) is how such monumental Lego sculptures stay intact. Is it all friction? I've built small things with Lego, but models that come apart in your hands don't seem to me to be anything near as good as the (admittedly holey) things you make with Meccano/Erector and their ilk.
• From Don Doerres comes a link to a software defined radio (SDR) on the Web, covering a portion of the 80, 20, and 40 meter ham bands. The "waterfall" visualization is fascinating, and something that "real" radios just can't do. We're good at matching patterns, and I was able to see when a new signal appeared anywhere on the covered band out of the corner of my eye. Contesters must love SDRs!
• Michael Covington suggested that unnecessary animations are a far bigger distraction and degradation of the computing experience than windowing, and I have to agree. This is one reason I continue to use older software: Its moving parts don't move unless they have to.
• Also from Michael comes a story from the UK about the fact that 2% of the 1£ coins in circulation are counterfeit. This boggles the mind: 1£ won't even buy lunch, and making enough coins to be worthwhile must take a lot of time and work, considering that you can and probably will do time if they catch you. (Does anybody remember Bernard Wolfe's wry short story "The Never-Ending Penny"?)

• Do not—I repeat—do not buy the Greenlee Cablecaster if you're faced with running wires through difficult places. I'm running a 65-foot shortave antenna in our attic, basically throwing cords for stringing two wires from the center of the structure to each end along the long axis, and the unit was a total botch. In every single case, the fishline tied to the nifty glow-in-the-dark dart broke under the force of the spring that throws it. (I wisely tried it out in the street before I took it up in the attic.) After narrowly resisting the urge to stomp on the damned thing, I drilled a hole in a tennis ball, threaded a contractor cord through it with a large cotter pin, and lobbed the ball myself. It worked. And here's what I was dealing with. I got the ball through that maze with my own right arm, though it took fifteen minutes of bad throws. I now know what pitching practice must be like.
• Alluva sudden, egg and onion matzo crackers have simultaneously vanished from all the local supermarkets. I have not seen any for two months, after reliably seeing them in all kosher sections throughout the five years we've been here. They've been my favorite soup cracker for 25 years. I cannot figure this; if there's been a change in kosher rules or something like that, it has not reached Google yet.
• An article in today's Wall Street Journal reports studies indicating that atheists are four times more likely to believe in Bigfoot, ghosts, and the Lost Continent of Atlantis than people who go to church at least once a week. (31% vs. 8%) Faith appears to be inborn, and if you don't believe in God, well, there are plenty of other things to choose from in the marketplace of unprovable phenomena.
• I'm not sure this is proven, but I sure wish it were: A study indicating that eating vegetables shrinks your brain. (Thanks to Brook Monroe for the link.)
• And if broccoli-induced brain shrinkage isn't enough to scare you off the Whole Foods wagon, consider that organic soils are often just as contaminated with heavy metals as soils used in conventional agriculture.
• Off-brand 16GB SDHC cards are now down to $35 at NewEgg, and even name brands like SanDisk are in the $60 range. Three of those will carry every bit of data I have except for ripped ISOs, and according to a friend of mine who works in the industry we still have no crisp idea how long the data will last.
• Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I dunno; it seems mighty quiet somehow. Wait a sec...the pirates all had subprime mortgages on their ships—and they're all now underwater!

• Greg Singleton sent me a pointer to an English translation of a Russian short story done in comics format. I'm not a huge fan of comics, but the wizardry in this piece is mostly in the drawings: When I saw the large pane in which the man stands behind the boy he once was, reading the same Jules Verne book against the backdrop of Captain Nemo's ocean—the very same exact copy of the same book—I shivered.
• Another sunspot, albeit a very small one, has appeared, so we're not likely to break the 1913 record of the longest time without an observed sunspot any time soon. Also note the article on Martian dust devils, which have been dancing around the Phoenix lander and have been caught on video.
• This article on Intel's current research into programmable matter (but not the quantum dot kind, fortunately) qualifies as the worst-edited Web article I've seen in a month. Don't these people proof their work before they post it?
• The Large Hadron Collider went live the other day, and people died. Strange physics has nothing on strange psychology.
• Particle Accelerators of Unusual Size (PAUSes) loom large in a number of apocalyptic SF novels, and here's a summary collection, courtesy Frank Glover.
• Here's another reason I rather like Good Pope Benny: He's cracking down on nutcase apparitions of the Blessed Mother, which have gotten weirder and weirder and fuller of God-stomps-the-shit-out-of-everybody apocalypticism in the last sixty or seventy years, and are making the whole idea of Catholicism look bad.
• And to round out this this discussion of Apocalypses of Unusual Stupidity, I give you a list of thirty ends-of-the-world that never happened. Here's hoping that the New Agers will become so dispirited when nothing happens on December 26, 2012 that they will take up a more productive hobby, like woodburning, or breeding planaria worms.

• Stumbled across a spectacular site devoted to WW-I era military aviation. These guys restore and actually build faithful replicas of things like the Sopwith Triplane. Go through the photo albums if you have any least interest in such things.
• Harry Helms asks if Götterdämmerung will occur on September 10. Maybe in Europe, but not over here; Americans can't even spell "physics" much less Gotter...well, you know, Wagner's Really Big Show. Hey, I survived the 70s—strangelets don't bother me.
• Owen Shurson sent me a link to Magic Angle Sculptures, and forsooth, I have never seen anything quite like it before. Basically, you have bizarre 3-D sculpture things that cast morphing shadows under bright light. Watch the video.
• Don Lancaster reminded me that a "spandrel" (see my entry for September 1, 2008) is a medium-sized hunting dog that comes in two varieties: Crocker and Springy.
• Mike Reith told me about a free alternative to Camtasia Studio, for recording on-screen activity to use in demos or tutorials. I really need to study video—yeah, I know, I told myself that four years ago—and this is high on the list of video things to play around with.
• So far, I've run across only one voice-training product, Singing Coach Unlimited, a $99 item that may or may not teach harmony. (Doesn't look like it.) Many thanks to Larry Nelson for the pointer. We still may need Harmony Hero.
• I was contacted by a woman whose parents were very close friends of John T. Frye. She sent me a scanned newspaper clipping from 1962, showing Frye at his typewriter, and ferdam if he doesn't look like a grown-up version of the canonical drawing of Jerry. More on this as I digest all she sent me. I'll update the Carl & Jerry page sometime this coming week.
• Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a page of Photoshopped Far Side tributes. Alas, no sign of "Welcome to Hell. Here's your accordion."
• There will apparently be an all-electric version of the Smart Fortwo to go nose-to-nose with GM's Volt. Let's hope they call it the Ohm. Resistance is Futile.
• Eggs apparently are much healthier than we thought they were—but just tasting sweetness may cause metabolic disruptions. Crap, how will I live without Diet Citrus Drop? I shouldn't worry; by next week eggs will be deadly again and diet sodas will get a clean slate.
• I've pretty much decided that Contra and much of my other Web content will go into a CMS over the coming year. So far Drupal is the top contender. In the meantime, I'm brushing up on my CSS.

• We have lost another Duntemann, in a world where there have never been many: John Philip Duntemann of Des Plaines, Illinois died this past Monday night, of cancer. He was 83. John Phil (which is how he was known in our family) was a strong and gentle man, my father's first cousin, who raised seven children and saw them earn a collection of advanced degrees like I have never seen in a single household. (Most of the Duntemanns you see online who aren't me are his children.) John was in England during the Blitz, and tells the story of how he heard an odd noise at one point while working on a piece of construction machinery, put his wrench down, looked up, and saw the guldurndest little airplane fly thirty feet over his head, to go on another mile or so and explode. It was a Nazi V-1. He didn't know that he was experiencing history; he would say he that was just doing his job. (I'd prefer not to live that kind of history!) Godspeed, John. Mission accomplished.
• Pat Thurman K7KR sent me a link to a nice set of reviews of Chicago restaurants.
• Also from K7KR comes word that Tom Kneitel has left us. Tom was a wickedly funny writer from the heyday of CB and build-it-yourself electronics, and I used to read his column in Electronics Illustrated before I looked at anything else. (In flipping through some old issues this morning, it sounds weirdly like a blog.) Oddly, his most famous book was a small press thing about how to listen in on other people's cordless phones, which was evidently quite a hobby in the 80s and 90s, when they were basically FM walkie-talkies. He was also the grandson of cartoonmeister Max Fleischer.
• If you were ever asked to carry around $1000 as either dimes or quarters, which would you pick? Now you don't have to do the math. Hint: It's a...coin toss. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the pointer.)
• The world's longest novel is SF—and it's about mutant cicadas—or something. 12.6 million words. At least he sounds like he's having fun. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the heads-up.)
• This face-animation technology seems awesome on the face of it (as it were) but in reading the explanation, it sure starts to sound like his-res rotoscoping to me. Hey guys, do it without a model reading the lines for you, and I'll be much more impressed.
• I'm having hosting service problems here—have had them for some time, actually—and will probably jump to another service in coming months. I'm considering using Joomla to host Contra and my photo galleries, and create an online SF workshopping system. I'm tired of editing Contra by hand, but I'm unwilling to have its primary instance outside my control, as it would be if it lived entirely on LiveJournal or Blogger. Anybody out there have any thoughts on Joomla as a platform for this sort of thing?

• I lived in Scotts Valley, California for three years, and I never once heard of Axel Erlandson, an arborsculptor (that is, a person who coerces trees to grow in odd or artistic ways) who had a roadside attraction of sculpted trees in Scotts Valley from 1955 to about 1970. Not as weird as the Mystery Spot and clearly not weird enough for the Santa Cruz vicinity, the Tree Zoo was not a success, but some of those trees are mighty odd.
• There's a PDF document detailing name changes to Chicago streets here, and it explains who or what some of Chicago's streets were named after. The street where I grew up, Clarence Avenue, was named after a river in Australia. Kedvale, the street on which my grandparents lived, was an Anglicization of an Indian term for the print of a moccasin in damp ground. (Hence those shoes named "Keds.") Thanks to Pete Albrecht (another old Chicago boy) for the link.
• From the Some People Have All The Fun Dept.: Walter Jon Williams got himself and several other SF writers a tour of the NORAD facility inside Cheyenne Mountain, during this recent Worldcon. How they pulled it off isn't clear; I was told by people who have reason to know that they're just not doing tours anymore. (And sheesh, I only live about 3/4 of a mile from the Big Iron Door!) Thanks to Jim Strickland for letting me know.
• Bill Higgins sent a link to an interview with Wayne Green in ComputerWorld. Ol' Wayne is now 86 and still out there, supporting weird causes and making a ruckus--just not in the magazine business anymore. I'm fond of the guy because he bought my very first published article in the fall of 1974, and quite a few others in subsequent years. His legend counfounds historians; I've gotten many different opinions on just how much he had to do with Byte. I still have a very funny but weird little book called See Wayne Run by Gordon Williamson that suggests that he had little or nothing to do with Byte, but other people with reason to know claim otherwise. Here's some useful reminiscence/discussion; see especially the comment by Harry Helms W5HLH.