Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• One of the most remarkable photos of a volcanic eruption ever taken apparently happened by sheer chance, when the ISS passed over the Kuril Islands just as the Sarychev Peak volcano let loose. The rising plume literally punched a near-circular hole in the cloud cover.
• Just in case you happen to see a nuclear weapon go off, having one of these in your pocket would be handy to quantify things. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
• From Bruce Baker comes a pointer to a NYT article about the perils of being an outsourcee for an unscrupulous publisher. And so much for our textbooks being created by experts with advanced degrees.
• John Cleese's lighthearted but still informative documentary "Wine for the Confused" can now be seen on Hulu, at the cost of a few Toyota commercials. I'm good with that--and in complete agreement with Cleese that knowing good wine from great wine is not automatic, and in fact knowing good wine from bad takes more effort than most would think. Don't miss it. (Thanks to Roy Harvey for letting me know it was there; I saw it on TV a couple of years ago and much enjoyed it.)
• We may gasp at 64 GB thumb drives now, but storage technologies coming to market in the next few years will make 1 TB thumb drives not only possible but commonplace. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
• The annual amateur radio Field Day event happens this weekend, from 1800 zulu on Saturday to 2100 on Sunday. I've got the radios boxed up, and will be experimenting with a interesting rotatable dipole made from a pair of AN-45G collapsible military whip antennas, on top of a pipe mast made of four 5' sections of 3/8" pipe mounted on my ancient telescope pipe base. The rotator is my right hand, turning a greased 2" pipe joint on its own threads. I'll describe the dipole with photos if it works; if it doesn't work I'll admit failure and quietly forget about it. But if you'll be on the air, I'll be working solo from a nearby campground as K7JPD. Listen for me.
• From the Too Weird To Be True but True Anyway File: The woman who may well become our first Hispanic supreme court justice stated quite flatly in her Princeton University senior thesis that "...in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition." I'm a Polish-German-Irish-French ubermongrel who last took Spanish in 1973, and even I know better than that. So...can I be on the Supreme Court instead?