Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Many have asked which book I have from Dr. J. Allen Hynek's personal library (see yesterday's entry) and with only a little trepidation I'll admit that it's A. R. G. Owen's Can We Explain the Poltergeist? Hynek was interested in a lot of odd things, clearly-just like me, heh.
• People have also asked me, given that I have a cow skull and a horse vertebra on my office bookshelves, what else do I have there? Alas, nothing quite as exotic as that-except for a radio-controlled rat. If you want a list I'll give you one, but you may be disappointed. (The bones have a story that I may tell, however.)
• And alas, I have evidently misunderstood the "Ten Things..." meme (see my entry for December 7, 2007) as three of them are about other people-Irwin Scollar and my parents. They have to be about me. So I've been asked for three more. Gotta think some but if I can find three more I'll post them here somewhere.
• You can download a VMWare Appliance that-mostly-emulates the OLPC XO. I had it running within a minute of getting it downloaded, but as with any custom hardware that differs significantly from a standard PC, some of its features work differently or not at all.
• The OLPC XO has apparently scared Microsoft enough to prompt them to offer Windows XP for $3-assuming the machine's hardware is jiggered to run it-and Negroponte is predictably having none of it. Bravo. We need an adult version of Sugar for the XO, not a crippled version of Windows. (We also need other things. Future entry.)
• There are a number of other "sub-sub notebooks" that the press has been positioning as competitors of the XO, including the Classmate from Intel and the EEE PC from Asus, but none of them has a convertible display. In other words, they are clamshells only. That's not the same species of machine. In my view, to be an acceptable ebook reader, a clamshell has to pivot into a tablet.
• It is possible to have less than 5% of the brain tissue of a "normal" human being and still have an IQ greater than 100. The article is a quick summary, and while still controversial, John Lorber's research is not nutcase stuff and suggests that we know even less about the brain than we claim to. (The question thus re-emerges from its box, as hard as Carl Sagan's ghost tries to sit on the box and keep it closed: Are we computers or terminals?)
• I f you don't mind a little occasional raunch in your Web comics, this one also contains a lot of geek culture and a certain amount of math humor. It also proves Michael Abrash's point that comics are about writing, not drawing-lending further creedence to my own contention that everything is about writing. Some of the comics work better than others, but yeek! This strip hits me where I live. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for pointing it out.)
• This remarkable underground complex was dug in secret. Where the hell did they put all that dirt and broken rock?
• There is a word for "cutting large figures of horses into hillsides with spades." The word is "leucippotomy." Damn, there's a word for everything.
• By the way, an interesting way to kill some time with Google Earth is to search for Britain's hillside chalk figures by eye, beginning with the town they're near. (See the above point.) Those things are indeed big.