• Mercury has a tail. Whodathunkit? With all that ( Read more... )

• I'm ok; stop fretting. I caught a very bad chestcold, which has ( Read more... )

• I've just added a book catalog page to my primary WordPress instance of Contra. There's a link on the title bar at the top. If you're using LiveJournal, here's the direct catalog link. From my WordPress instance you can also go direct to an individual title within the catalog by clicking on one of the cover thumbnails in the right sidebar. It's a ( Read more... )

• My Geiger counter project is still alive, but I ordered an old telephone magneto from eBay and it just got here. Now I have to work up a scheme to transform its hand-cranked 120VAC to 900VDC in the capacitor bank. Will report back once that section of the device is in the can.
• I've seen these people in used bookstores and tent sales, and although I ( Read more... )

• Quick reminder: If I'm on your blogroll, or if you have a link to Contra on any of your pages, please check to see that the new URL is in place. Thanks!
• Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a fantastic technical animation that "assembles" the Space Station one module at a time, while displaying a timeline on the right indicating when each part was ( Read more... )

After giving it much thought, I've decided I rather like gathering links and other short items into lists rather than publishing each as a separate entry. Don't know why, and I may change my mind. But for the time being, I'm continuing the ancient Contra custom.

• While in Chicago over Christmas, we watched a movie I wholeheartedly condemn: Knocked ( Read more... )

• A reader wrote to tell me that I am "MSG blind," (see my entry for July 14, 2008) which means that MSG does not affect my taste chemistry-and that people who are MSG blind are generally the people who react badly to the chemical. Alas, I can't find anything about this ( Read more... )

• Sorry for the silence here; I rarely go a week without posting but a lot of things ganged up on me. Many have noticed that I'm gradually moving toward posting less often but doing longer posts. I've discovered that it doesn't take me a great deal more time to write more ( Read more... )

• Conspiracy buffs may be interested in the contention that Hilary Clinton is a closet Republican. Horrors! Hey, are we that short of conspiracies, guys?
• People have been sending me links to bobblehead pages. Evidently, bobblers are very big in American culture. Here's ( Read more... )

• NASA is making a sort of ad-hoc satellite out of an old space suit. This is a fine piece of duct-tape engineering, and you can listen to its telemetry on 145.990 MHz FM, within the 2-meter amateur radio band. The word "telemetry" here is not quite how I mean it (old guy that I am) but that's OK: SuitSat will recite its internal condition in English ( Read more... )