Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• I'm behind on a great many things, especially fiction writing and replying to email, so bear with me until I get dug out from under the pile. Exchanging offices within a house is precisely the same as moving two offices, and that means a lot of boxes and a lot of bother, exploding intercoms being the least of it.
• I didn't expect this wine to be as good as it actually is. About $11.
• The weather's been beautiful here, so yesterday I was going to get out on the back deck with my Icom 736 and work the world. That was, of course, the day that sunspots basically vanished on the visible face of the Sun. What does it mean to have solar flares but no sunspots? Nobody knows.
• Thanks to many people (Jim Strickland being the first) who wrote to tell me about a "smart sand" project at MIT that is the first step toward the sort of nanoreplicator I postulated in my Drumlins stories: Tap in a 256-bit code, and some "smart dust" (very smart) in a stone bowl assembles something for you. I love it when my crazy dreams come true!
• Single-atom nanotransistors can now be reliably made, rather than hunted for. (Thanks to Roy harvey for the link.)
• From Michael Covington comes a link to a fascinating article about the other kind of abduction: abductive logic. If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan, don't miss it!
• The Colorado state law that led Amazon to nuke my Associates account has been declared unconstitional. No word from Amazon as to whether I can have my account back.
• I would probably buy one of these if I could find one in stock somewhere.
• Jack Tramiel has left us, having created quite a raft of famous computers, including the very best forgotten computer ever.
• I checked the date on this one, but it was nine days too late to assume it's a hoax. One might argue that solar panels are more elegant, but you can't make buffalo spaghetti sauce in a solar panel.
• I've seen more dumb YouTube posts than I'm willing to admit, but this one takes the cake for sheer willful stupidity. I knew how this worked in 1959, when I was 7.
• Kids, this is futurism. All we need now are better tacos.