Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• My old friend Lee Hart scratchbuilt a marvelous model of the Galileo spacecraft, including an operating COSMAC processor that blinks out the Arecibo message on an LED.
• The COSMAC 1802 was a good choice for spacecraft, because it drew almost no power and could be radiation-hardened. It was all static CMOS, so the system clock could be slowed arbitrarily, down to audio rates, or just stopped. Alas, the contention (which I've shared) that there was an 1802 on the Viking spacecraft isn't true. Bummer.
• Here's an essentially bottomless collection of old radio literature, including magazines, technical books and articles, and ephemera. The PDFs are of excellent quality, though I wonder how legal some of the items are. Worth a look, for the Deco artwork in the 20s and 30s magazines, if nothing else.
• And if you're interested in toilet paper on a total lifestyle basis, Toilet Paper World is just the thing. I'm not sure I even noticed that tinted toilet paper existed before they told me. And now it's gone. I guess it's true that 80% of the world is always below our radar.
• We've had air rifles since...1779. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• I'd heard about how the Soviets repaired their ailing Salyut 7 space station, but not in anywhere close to this kind of detail.
• Paris used to use (and may still; the article is unclear) a sort of Indiana Jones mechanism for clearing blockages in its extra large economy-sized sewer pipes: Rolling a 9-foot iron ball through them.
• If you're watching sea ice levels in the Antarctic (as I am) this site puts up very nice graphs on an almost daily basis.
• Is there anything that hipsters can't ruin? (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
• Murder comes naturally to Chimpanzees. The sad part is, it comes naturally to us, too. I suspect it came so naturally to the Neanderthals that they didn't need Sap to extinctify them.
• Somehow I managed to see the first Hobbit flick four times and never noticed that Bifur had an axe stuck in his head. I thought it was some sort of ornamment.
• Oh, and predictably, Buzzfeed has a stack rank of Peter Jackson's dwarves by, um, hotness. They should have asked some Dwarf women; the hottest dwarves are also the ones that look the least like dwarves. Several times I was asking myself if Fili and Kili had been left in a basket on some dwarf's front porch.
• One more and I'll let the dwarf thing go. Separated at birth: Bofur the Dwarf and...Sister Bertrille.
• I survived the 60s. I had all the Beatles albums. I am not and have never been a Communist. I guess this means that hypnotism is impossible.