| This weekend we had weather warnings galore, for winds gusting to 120-130 kmh. It wasn't too bad though, even if trees did fall over down in Canterbury, I didn't see any damage up here (except for the obvious damage of me and the kids being stuck inside without ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sir_asbjorn for two days). Then yesterday it was so warm and sunny that I think I actually managed a bit of sunstroke - by the time I'd spent five hours in the garden and was cooking dinner, I could definitely feel that slightly woozy headache coming on. The kids were in shorts, I was in short sleeves (but gumboots and long pants were requisite in the working with punga and flax). Today, we have windwarnings again. Gusts to 150 kmh about exposed places in Wellington. It's chucking it down. And I have to say that the winds are significantly higher than they were in the weekend. A day like today just doesn't seem fit to follow a day like yesterday. Naturally, we have to go into town for that holiday program at the City Gallery, the kids have three hours with a silversmith/jeweller. And the busdrivers are on strike..... I sympathise, I really do, but this sucks! Unlike the last time there was a strike, the weather is definitely not walking weather. Everyone will have taken the car to work. There will be no parking. It's not like I can just let the kids out of the car (they're a bit young I think, to walk across civic square by themselves even if they hadn't been at risk of being blown into the harbour). Option one: Call S to see if we can at least pool resources (her two kids are booked in today as well) Option two: Call the gallery to see if we can change our booking to Thursday I foresee fire, drawn curtains and a movie marathon in our future. Or possibly play in our rooms, given how the picture windows flex in the breeze... | |
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| Was watching TV at work the other day when this comercial came on:
I laughed so hard.
Edit: I found the entire series!
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| Young Sarah is five foot nine at age 13 and literally had her feet hanging out the end of her single bed. So when the chance for her to upgrade to a queen-size bed came up, her parents grabbed it. Which meant that now they finally have a proper guest/day bed downstairs in the Music Room - just the thing for a cancer patient who is pootling around downstairs, and then suddenly REALLY wants and needs to lie down; but is so amazingly overwhelmed with the need to rest that hauling her (ever-diminishing) arse up the stairs to her bedroom seems an almost impossible task. So we had the day bed, but it needed....something. It needed to be welcoming and happy. Preferably pink (because Elley OWNS THE PINK). It needed....ah yes - it needed Couch Parasites. Jim relaxed his moratorium on cushions and so Elley said "bring your sewing machine and some fabric and we shall make many cushions." I said "We must build you a nest!" and that is what we call it now. In my usual organised (*ahem*) way, on my way out the door I threw open the door to the craft cupboard and grabbed anything in the pink, purple or floral spectrum, crammed it all into a garbage bag (I am ALL ABOUT the Classy) and landed in Elley's lounge room with my machine and tools and supplies in a large floomph!, possibly with my pinking shears gripped, buccaneer-style, between my teeth. We hit spotlight, got some velcro, snaffled a few more cushion inserts of the larger variety (it's all about Layering, Sweetie Darling Sweetie) and....ran smack bang into another way this illness has forced us all to rethink things and extend ourselves - suddenly I was the lead sewer and Elley was the one cutting and ironing and choosing colours. Freaky much? But we created eight new cushions, including getting some old, dead pillows and jamming two into one new (pretty pink) pillowcase and oh look, nice new pillows (just don't look inside the case, ok??) But the biggest success of the day was creating a polar fleece snuggle-rug just for herself - you can see it spread out in the Nest. I call it the "coconut ice" pattern after the central pink-and-white squares you can see in the photo. Elley has gotten vastly attached to her snuggle-rug and has become a little bit Linus-like in her devotion to same. Certainly she drags it with her around the house. Everyone should have their very own snuggle-rug. I might even make one for me one of these days... | |
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| Déjà vu. The unnerving sensation that you have been somewhere, or done something, before. | |
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| Quick question for the USAn election geeks: Around what time period does the count usually progress and get announced (ideally in UTC)? I want to plan to be awake and un-committed. Cheers. | |
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| http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/10/shipbuilding.html posted by Neil
Remember when Euan Kerr came out to interview me and help with the beehives? The interview is now up. There's an embeddable player that I'm going to try and embed here... -- and you can read the article, find the player and see some photos of me in a bee-suit (and a really lovely bee photo) at http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/10/03/gaiman/So the breakfast this morning in Oakland, talking to retailers, was a delight -- I wished afterwards it had been taped or filmed -- and the Booksmith Event was really fun and fine. Great acoustics and a lovely venue. (Kepler's had a giant white spider come down from the rafters to listen, during the Q&A, though.) Hi Neil, I just got home from the reading in San Francisco this evening (afternoon?). I was the Jack who asked why you have a vendetta against people named Jack. I was being snide, but thanks for answering anyways, and I'm glad it got a laugh.
I realized during the Q&A that I had another, perhaps more substantive question to ask you, and even though I was tempted to jump up in my seat and blurt it out, I figured it would be more gentlemanly to wait and send it to you via e-mail, so here goes:
I remember you saying on your blog that there was an American version and a British version of The Graveyard Book. I imagine that it's much like the Harry Potter books, with certain Britishisms and cultural indicators switched around to be easier to understand for American audiences. Or is it the other way around? I guess the question is, did you write a "British" version of the book and make it "American," or vice versa? Are there dramatic differences between them? Is one closer to your own heart?
Thanks,
Jack BaurNeither, really. I wrote a book, and said in the manuscript when I wanted words changed for the different sides of the Atlantic (for example: crib and cot, nappy and diaper) and when I wanted them the same (which was most of the time). There's a sentence about the naming of ghouls in the UK version and not in the US version (because the US editor thought it was obvious, and the UK editor didn't). ... Lots of messages from people telling me they're having difficulty finding copies of The Graveyard Book, even in shops that have it for sale -- apparently some Barnes and Nobles and Borders (and some other bookshops) haven't put it on the New Arrivals shelves but have just shelved a few copies in the children's area, or somewhere else (eg. "An FYI on the new book's availability in the chain stores. I checked at the Borders in downtown Scottsdale and they couldn't even find the four copies they supposedly had in stock. According to their info, The Graveyard Book is being shelved in the Mystery/Suspense Independent Reader section.") If any Borders or Barnes and Noble people can shed any light on this, I'd love to know more. ... I came across this and thought you might be interested.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRYXNk-qZAs
erickI am. Cannot wait to see it. What is stopmotion animation? I'm promoting Coraline to my teacher friends and have no idea what this is. I'm sure it's related to animation but what is it?
Bests,
PatriciaIt's animation where you make something and then move it a little between exposures to create the illusion of movement. There's an article about Coraline at http://news.toonzone.net/article.php?ID=26423 which may explain more. (And an interview with Henry Selick here.) Liebe Neil,
I was looking around online and saw these two prints on a website from the wonderful Todd Klein, and was just going to ask about them....
http://kleinletters.com/BuyStuffTop.html
Are these posters actually signed by you and Alan, and are they both original prints? It almost seems like $20 for each is too good to be true.They're originals and signed by us, yes. According to this excellent interview with Todd, he has about 100 of the Alan print left, and about 200 of mine... ...... This made me happy, and changed my mind about something... Mr. Gaiman I am writing you as a fan, something I must admit I rarely ever do as it feels a bit to me like I'm bothering you. I do however feel the need to write you, to thank you for two things, the first is for your story telling. Not simply your writing of books, but your reading them as well. I love listening to a well told story, and you have an ability to keep my normally wandering mind enthralled for hours. The second reason I write is because I watched Stardust the other night, and in the extras packaged with the DVD you spoke about feeling a bit guilty because something that was a simple idea in your head became the work of many many craftsmen. Well sir, I write you to tell you, that you have absolutely no reason to feel even a slight hint of guilt. I am a carpenter, and while I have never had a chance to work on a movie based on one your books, I have worked others. I have built storefronts, carriages, castles, and Japanese bridges. I have made world war two bunkers, and the offices and layers every kind of hero, villain, or overworked office drone imaginable. And let me tell you, I would never want to do anything else. If you weren't around to dream up flying pirate ships, people like me would be stuck building conservative and proper things, like little rectangles to hold books. Not that there is anything wrong with rectangles to hold books, but like every man who has ever been a 7 year old boy, I'd rather be building a flying pirate ship. On behalf of carpenters everywhere you keep thinking 'em up, and we'll keep trying to build them........... And on Monday I'm reading the first half of Chapter Seven in Los Angeles -- actually in Santa Monica. Details at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2008/10/neil-gaiman-rea.html
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| Black Doc Martens 14i boots - 14 eyelets (NO ZIP). Size UK6, so fits about a size 8 Aussie womens (depending on your feet, 7.5 to 8.5). They're old so they're the heavier leather well made docs. Made in England (yes, real Docs). Heels are at about 80%, plenty of life left. Need a polish, but at least this way you can see them as they are. $120 plus shipping (retail at $250).  | |
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| Spent another day in the garden, with the kids playing happily alongside me. Cleared out all the old weeds and creepers next to the new beds, pulled out two large flax plants and trimmed the punga of the crashed fronds. Excellent! Then the kids and I went to the garden centre to buy some berries to go in, which were duly planted. I also planted out about half of my hollyhocks along the fence line. They should make up for the loss of privacy for the neighbours.
So, aside from the vege garden, down that side I now have a random selection of hollyhock, a redcurrant (Gloria de Versailles), a black currant (Goliath), a blueberry (Petit Blue), and two Chilean Guava plants. Previously planted are a wormwood plant and a comfrey, both of which are doing very well indeed. I will get another red currant and another blueberry or two (forgot about the cross pollination thing!), maybe tomorrow.
I also added a roman chamomile to my kitchen herb garden, and a peppermint by the stairs where it looked horrenduously naked after I'd weeded, it really needs a vigourous creepy plant there, and what better than a mint? The tea camelia which is higher up there is also doing well.
There's a bit more work on the creeper down that side, and another bed to go in, but tomorrow was forecast for rain and is now forecast for gales again, so maybe not tomorrow. It's not like I don't have inside work I can do...
I need a gardening icon. | |
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| http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3040 Worlds: Controlling the Scope of Side Effects by Alessandro Warth and Alan Kay, 2008.
The state of an imperative program -— e.g., the values stored in global and local variables, objects’ instance variables, and arrays—changes as its statements are executed. These changes, or side effects, are visible globally: when one part of the program modifies an object, every other part that holds a reference to the same object (either directly or indirectly) is also affected. This paper introduces worlds, a language construct that reifies the notion of program state, and enables programmers to control the scope of side effects. We investigate this idea as an extension of JavaScript, and provide examples that illustrate some of the interesting idioms that it makes possible.
This introduces a new programming construct that's just the kind I love: they stimulate the imagination and provide simple and strong dynamic invariants to make programs easy to reason about. | |
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| http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3039 Parsing Expression Grammars: A Recognition-Based Syntactic Foundation by Bryan Ford, MIT, 2004.
For decades we have been using Chomsky's generative system of grammars, particularly context-free grammars (CFGs) and regular expressions (REs), to express the syntax of programming languages and protocols. The power of generative grammars to express ambiguity is crucial to their original purpose of modelling natural languages, but this very power makes it unnecessarily difficult both to express and to parse machine-oriented languages using CFGs. Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) provide an alternative, recognition-based formal foundation for describing machine-oriented syntax, which solves the ambiguity problem by not introducing ambiguity in the first place. Where CFGs express nondeterministic choice between alternatives, PEGs instead use prioritized choice. PEGs address frequently felt expressiveness limitations of CFGs and REs, simplifying syntax definitions and making it unnecessary to separate their lexical and hierarchical components. A linear-time parser can be built for any PEG, avoiding both the complexity and fickleness of LR parsers and the inefficiency of generalized CFG parsing. While PEGs provide a rich set of operators for constructing grammars, they are reducible to two minimal recognition schemas developed around 1970, TS/TDPL and gTS/GTDPL, which are here proven equivalent in effective recognition power.
An excellent paper! I read it for the first time today and was surprised not to find it in the LtU archive. | |
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| I got mail! My t-shirt finally arrived, yay! Only took 12 days to ship.
( piccies ) | |
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| In no order of preference, I am looking forward to:
Clear skies and fresh air
Drinking water from a tap
Milk!
Friends (old and new) & Family (actually, this comes first and foremost!)
Catching a movie
Stars
Taking Persmonster out to Orange and surrounds
Going to Woolworths
Shopping for clothes and shoes
Ease
Communication
Australian summer
Nectarines from home, God how I crave them!
I will miss:
The Bloke until he joins us in December
Hand-pulled noodles and our regular eating haunts (Xiao Wong Fu, The Elephant, Schindlers, Alameda, Da Dong...)
How cheap absolutely everything is
My friends here
Our ayi, Xiao Yi (she's awesome!)
It will be interesting to see what I add to the miss list, but I think Pers will miss this place more than I will. | |
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| Snarrrgbluhrglefnarrghmwarrgh...I love, love, .....love daylight saving, but ...adjusting to daylight saving leaves me sleepy.
My paper was submitted fifteen minutes late as had to run my youngest's swimming gear up to her school as she had left it on the porch. (With an assgnment due at that hour, it had to be something. I'm just glad it didn't involve blood or the fire brigade)
A quick peek into the submission box showed that there was an impressive stack of assignments in there, so the lateness of mine will not be penalised. Which is just as well. It's all a bit approximate to my eye, especially the middle section which should have been organised better and set under at least two more headings.
This is a bit of an experiment. I have no idea how this lecturer marks, so I may still get a top grade despite not having gone all out. Or I may barely pass. But I don;t think I can fail, unless he takes exception to the informal style I used. In any case, I do not need marks taken off for lateness!
You know, I once challenged a friend of mine to take a course of study and try to pass everything. Now, this person is extremely bright and diligent, so passing would not be an issue. More of a problem is the stress caused by their desire to do everything to the utmost, and the consequent anxiety-induced mushroom cloud over their cranium. The difficulty for them in my challenge lay in my specification that they see if they can *just* pass. No High Distinctions, no Distinctions, no Credits. Just Pass. No more. Learn as much as you like, but don't sweat the assessment tasks.
The idea holds a great deal of appeal for me in an 'evil experiment with the education system' kind of way. How little does one have to do to pass a course and obtain a qualification? That might be a scary thing to find out when one then considers the possible skill levels of qualified professionals one deals with. Scalpel, anyone?
Mrrh. Want coffee. With hot chocolate.
Need Mocha.
*crawls off to make mutant mocha* | |
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| Not a review post, more a "here's stuff I bought" post. There were a couple of books that never made it into the "stuff I bought at Kalamazoo" post because they were shipped much later. These are:
Roberts, Sara Elin. 2007. The Legal Triads of Medieval Wales. University of Wale Press, Cardiff. ISBN 987-0-7083-2107-2
The legal triads are additions to the more structured legal tracts that present related bits of information in sets of three. They aren't quite "case law", but they have something of an ad hoc feel to them. Also something of a mnemonic feel to them. Some individual triads are impenetrable without an existing familiarity with the structures of the law: "Three tongued-ones: a lord, and a justice, and a surety." While others are fairly transparent and give interesting insights into the assumptions and attitudes of everyday life: "Three things that every man is entitled to take without the permission of another: water that is not in a vessel, a stone that is not in use, and a fire from a hollow tree." I love reading through the various law texts because they give me these glimpses of everyday medieval Welsh life.
Santanach, Joan. (Trans. Robin Vogelzang) 2008. The Book of Sent Soví: Medieval Recipes from Catalonia. Barcino-Tamesis, Barcelona/Woodbridge. ISBN 978-1-85566-164-6
While I don't have a specific interest in Iberian cookery, I do tend to collect editions of medieval cookbooks just out of habit. This one, I think I'm going to explore a bit (after I finish my current detailed exploration of Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks). It has a nice balance of meat, vegetable, and grain dishes and while the taste combinations follow familiar medieval templates, there is both a simplicity yet variety among the recipes that promises some fun explorations. While browsing through the section of "sauces" (salsa in the original) it struck me that the category isn't so much "a flavored topping for another dish" but something that ranges a bit further into "side dish" territory. There's a recipe for an eggplant casserole that looks absolutely scrumptious. So many cookbooks; so little time.
So I was browsing on the Oxbow Books website to look up some publication information for the book review I was doing a few weeks ago and made the mistake of browsing the sale listings. I ended up ordering three books on Egyptian textiles: one seriously yummy, one boring, and one quirky but tangential.
Lewis, Suzanne. 1969. Early Coptic Textiles. Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford. (No ISBN)
This looked interesting but turned out to be the boring one. A exhibition catalog for an event at the Stanford Art Gallery back in 1969, it's basically a collection of decorative parts of Coptic textiles that have been snipped out of their context (literally). The pictures are all black and white. No complete garments. All fairly standard designs. Oh well.
Thomas, Thelma K. 2001. Textiles from Karanis, Egypt in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology: Artifacts of Everyday Life. Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, Ann Arbor. (No ISBN)
Another exhibition catalog, but of material straight from the digs, rather than being mediated through the amateur art collection market. Mostly fragments, but some with rather interesting designs and weaves. A large collection of textile tools, although without much supporting discussion. Not a lot of data, but a cross-section rather than a selection.
Pritchard, Frances. 2006. Clothing Culture: Dress in Egypt in the First Millennium AD. The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester. (No ISBN)
Another exhibition catalog but this is the yummy one. Lots of color plates. Whole garments, fragments, and close-ups. Lots of focus on construction details. Embroidered and appliqued ornaments as well as woven-in ones. Sprang caps up the wazoo. Detailed and extensive background discussion by one of the big names in the field. I'd going to have a lot of fun going through this one in detail. | |
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| Recently I untertook a job to refurbish an old SCA helmet.
I should have taken a photograph but in my direct way I just went ahead
and started refurbishing it.
Provenance:
The helmet was won buy St Barts participants in the Fighter Auction
Tournament at Rowany Festival A.S. 43.
Overview:
The helmet itself is a SCA version of a barrel helmet: It had one inch
occularium (eye slot) and is nominally 16 gauge steel. It had some
pierced metal plates serving as Arrowmesh.
The helmet had four main plates:
Top plate,
Front,
Upper rear,
Lower rear.
The front is formed from one piece of steel with a central vertical
ridge passing down the entire brow and vizor.
There are two series of breaths each comprising a triangular
array of quarter inch holes.
Inspection:
The main problem with the helmet is that the rivets on it were pretty
suspect for a couple of reasons. A first impression is that the whole
thing is a little too wobbly. The top of the helmet actually had bolts
instead of rivets. The rest of the helmet had something like 3/16 (about
3mm) inch rivets which I consider a bit undersized for a barrel helmet.
Additionally they are for the most part badly peened and in some cases
badly positioned. The plate steel seems a little thin for 16 gauge but
upon measuring with callipers is probably within acceptable tolerance of
the minimum gauge. The top cap was also badly made with the edges folded
over with lets cut in the edges rather than the more sound practice of
making a proper lip by forming the edge. This had the effect of
destabilizing the of the whole thing. The interior had closed cell foam
glued with contact adhesive and the interior was painted with some sort
of cream coloured paint, which was flaking off the steel to a large
degree. The exterior had the usual surface corrosion typical for steel.
Disassembly:
The old rivets were cut off with a cold chisel. The bolts holding the
top cap on had been peened over so that the the nuts wouldn't undo. Removal
was effected by grinding off the peened section of the bolt and then
undoing the nuts in the usual manner. The padding, glue and paint were
removed as much as possible.
Repair work:
Repair consists of repairing the top cap,
Replacing all the rivets,
Repositioning some of the rivets,
Smoothing some of the rough edges
Removal of interior paint,
Flaring the lower rear slightly at the bottom edge.
Polishing.
The new rivets are 9/64 diameter and will be spaced at a nominal 1 and
3/4 inches apart.
On the front plate the breaths were still slightly rough from the original drilling.
I countersunk the holes on the inside and outside to improve their smoothness.
The front was riveted on the outside edges of the occularium.
Two additional holes on each side of the occularium were filled to enhance the look of the helmet.
The front was riveted to the upper rear.
The top cap was shaped a little by hammering and the cut flaps arc
welded closed. The cap was again shaped to improve fit and the edges
evened out by hammering and grinding. The existing rivet holes in the top cap were
somewhat poorly and unevenly spaced so the holes were welded up and new holes marked and drilled.
As an aside, it's kind of interesting to try to consider the thought processes of the original maker.
Specifically, why they cut the edges of the top cap to make it easier to assemble. Metal can be shaped with a lip so that it can make the joint without then need to cut any little "lets" at all.
Steel is malleable and it is appropriate to form the edge without the need for any cuting it this way.
My wife suggsted that the top cap of the helmet had been made like that because the maker had been treating the metal similarly to clothes making where little cut would be made to the fabric when sewing together the two pieces in a compund curve, such as a shoulder.
On the other hand there are older sca armour patterns that contribute to this misconception.
Finishing up the assembly:
The top cap was riveted to the front and upper rear.
The lower rear was riveted to the front and the upper rear.
The lower rear was slightly flared and smoothed out.
The helmet was polished.
At the current stage the helmet is ready for padding and fitting of a
chin strap and Archery Mesh Visor. | |
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| I think someone has forgotten to feed our internet hamsters, they're running incredibly slowly at work today.
We're getting severely frustrated with our IT department. Apparently we're not allowed Google Earth, or Skype, or any number of useful emergency management tools. Their default answer to pretty much anything we ask for is "you're not allowed that". Incorrect answer! It's gotten to the point where we're seriously thinking about buying a separate laptop and getting mobile broadband, and installing everything we're not allowed on our work computers on it. There's this principle that we work towards - it's called resilience. And having all our eggs in IT's basket is not part of that, especially when they are obviously so good at dropping it. The number of times the servers have crashed lately... | |
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| Today is the first anniversary of the day we got to take Talia home from hospital. The day we finally got her to ourselves, no more asking permission to cuddle her, no more negotiating with nurses to be involved in her care, no more monitors and tubes, no more having to walk away from her crib to go home without her. The day we finally got to become parents.
She spent 85 days in hospital, about 8 weeks in NICU.
She came home 2 days before her due date. Having ripped out her O2 and NG tube 3 days beforehand, she came home tube free.
She's still titchy small, but we're finally getting some good weight gains adding cream and butter to all her food. She's not sleeping through the night yet, but I don't care so much, it only bothers me when she's teething and waking every two hours.
She's still very happily breastfed, all that pumping paid off.
She loves cruising around the furniture, doing her little happy-bum-dance.
She's happily saying Dadad and Mumum, and making brrrm noises for her toy cars. She leans in to kiss the characters in her favourite picture books.
She's my cheeky little imp, and it's so good to be a whole family. All through the hospital stay it was like she wasn't quite our baby, we had to ask permission to hold her, we were driven by the nurses' routines. It's all been our own life this past 12 months though.
12 months of lazy playtime on the bed in the morning.
12 months of that perfect little face with her vibrant blue eyes
12 months of that deliciously bald little head
12 months of hearing her burbling in her carseat
12 months of really breastfeeding rather than half tube feeds and some bottles
12 months of cuddles whenever we want it
12 months of a ridiculous number of photos
12 months of melt-your-heart smiles
12 months without being rehospitalised
12 months of being a proper family.
We've come such a long way, and I honestly feel incredibly lucky to have her in my life, even if she does keep me up at night. - Mood:proud
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| This is the time of year that I realise that while it may technically be 6 months to Festival, they are the crowded months, with something on every week. So I need to carve out some space for Doing Stuff or my Festival list isn't going to change for next year at all. (Such lists never get shorter, progress is when it has turnover) I also have home things to do, which also need time so they go on the list too. So, my present list of Things TO Do:
- Pizza oven (in train, buy beser blocks tonight)
- Workbench for shed, buy wood tonight too
- Sew new shoes together, they are cut out, just sew the things up!
- Finish patches for pelican cloak, one almost done, one to go.
- Order storage jars - if done son, can collect while in Canberra for cocktail party!
- Build tables one can chop on, at least 1
- Finish glastonbury chair
- Replace tent ropes with hemp ones
- Measure tent ropes
- Place order
- Splice hooks to new rope
- Fix bed so it is stronger
- Finish shift
- Make shirts for 10B
Dream list: Build wheelbarrow or cart I am sure there are more, but that is what I have thought of this morning. Time to brave that nasty weather. Or possibly wuss out and drive today. I shall check the BOM and decide. I don't want to get sick again. | |
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| - 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.
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