Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Someone asked me via email the other day: How thick is 16 gauge aluminum? I'm old: My first impulse was to grab my caliper and measure some. My second impulse was to google it. This answers the question, for steel as well as aluminum.
• The page cited above is part of a large and fascinating Web compilation called "How Many?" and it's a dictionary of measurement units. Other tabulations include shot pellet sizes and the Danjon scale for lunar eclipse brightness.
• Metallic cesium figures, um, explosively in my novel Drumlin Circus. You can evidently distill it on your barbecue grill. I'm guessing you shouldn't do that right before a thunderstorm, however. (Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.)
• Speaking of explosions, here's a map summarzing the legality of fireworks by state. I thought more states restricted them than actually do. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• It's not brand-new, but I stumbled on the Actobotics product line in the latest edition of Nuts & Volts. It's a very nice Erector/Meccano-ish system with more robust parts & real metal gears. No, not cheap--but neither was Meccano, at least on the scale I used it when I was building things like The Head of R&D.
• If you're interested in following the progress of the recent collapse of sunspot activity, don't forget Solar Ham. More data than SpaceWeather, and you don't to know anything about amateur radio to find it useful. Given that the peak of the current solar cycle was probably this past March, coming down so hard so fast is something of a phenomenon.
• There is a utility that finds loops in videos suitable for making animated GIFs. Sometimes technology advances the human condition and sometimes, well...
• There's something called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, and if the maps are to be believed, I may be speaking it, though it sounds New Yawkish to me. This is a tweak on Inland North American English. Somebody oughta do an app that can tell me what accent I actually have. I'm a Chicagah boy but have been told I don't sound like one. (Thanks to the Most Rev Sam'l Bassett for the link.)
• Pete Albrecht sends us a list of current and defunct bookstore chains worldwide. I spent so much money at Kroch's & Brentano's 40 years ago that the place should still be around but, alas, it's not.
• If you've secretly longed to see a photo of Alfred Hitchcock eating a giant pretzel, or classic mustard ads of the 1950s, well, it's all here. (Yes, I'm a sucker for vintage weirdness, but this is good vintage weirdness.)