Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• My old friend and fellow early GTer Rod Smith has posted a great many excellent pictures he took at Chicon 7, including a book signing that I attended.
• My mother's cat Fuzzbucket died yesterday, at 16 years and change. He outlived my poor mother by twelve years, and while skittish as a kitten eventually warmed to me. I've never had a cat (for obvious reasons, of which I have four right now) but of all the cats I've never had, Fuzzbucket was my favorite. He kept his own LiveJournal page, and the final entry brought a tear to my eye.
• For those who couldn't attend Chicon and were cut off from viewing the Hugo Awards by an idiotic copyright protection bot, you've got another chance: The award ceremony will be re-streamed tomorrow night, September 9, at 7 PM central time.
• This morning's Gazette had an ad for hearing aids, which bragged of their product having 16 million transistors. This is easier than it used to be, since all those transistors are in one container. Now, does anybody remember the days when ads bragged of radios containing six transistors?
• And while we grayhairs and nohairs are recalling transistor counts in the high single digits, does anybody remember the early Sixties scandal (reported in Popular Electronics, I think) in which Japanese manufacturers would solder additional transistors into simple superhet boards and short the leads together, just so they could advertise the box as a "ten-transistor" radio?
• Nice piece from Ars Technica on the deep history of the spaceplane.
• Bill Cherepy sent a link to a marvelous steampunk tennis ball launcher, used for getting pull-strings for antennas (and as often as not, the antennas themselves) into high or otherwise inaccessible places. Gadgets like this (albeit not in steampunk dress) have been around for a long time, and I posted a link to this one (courtesy Jim Strickland) back in March.
• Also from Bill (and several others in the past few days) comes word of a promising if slightly Quixotic attempt to preserve orphaned SF and fantasy. Here's the main site. At least they're offering money to authors and estates; most other preservation efforts (of pulp mags and old vinyl, particularly) are pirate projects most visible on Usenet.
• That said, there are projects that limit themselves to out-of-copyright pulps, like this one. One problem, of course, is knowing when a pulp (or anything else from the 1923-1963 era) is out of copyright. Copyright ambiguity only hurts the idea of copyright. We need to codify copyright and require registration, at least for printed works. I'm not as concerned about copyright's time period, as long as the owners of a copyright are known. As I've said here before, I'm apprehensive about competing with hundreds of thousands of now-orphaned books and stories.
• I don't eat much sugar anymore, but egad, there are now candy-corn flavored Oreos.