Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• 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...