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• In the wake of the recent eclipse, the best photo I've seen: One ring to woo them all!
• Although we missed seeing the thin crescent Venus on Sunday night, I saw it again last night (Monday) and through a 12mm Plossl it was spectacular. Probably the thinnest crescent I've seen in 25 years. You can discern the "horns" of the crescent easily in good ( Read more... )

• You're getting two Odd Lotses in a row for a reason. Stay tuned--I'll try and explain tomorrow, if I don't run out of Aleve.
• Bruce Eckel is returning his Kindle Fire because the damned thing will not render .mobi files. C'mon, Amazon. I mean, come on. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
• Xoom 2, where are you? Whoops, it's going to be called the ( Read more... )

• Here's a great graphic strongly suggesting that the much-denied Medieval Warm Period really existed, and was indeed a global phenomenon. (For further evidence, read The Little Ice Age, which predates the worst of the current Global Warming hatefest and thus may be considered reasonably reliable.)
• I had not heard this before: The imminent Nook ebook ( Read more... )

When I was a freshman in high school, I remember picking up an odd paper kite at Walgreen's. It was called a Glite, and was billed as a "gliding kite." I was intrigued, and as it might have cost as much as 35c, I was willing to try it. The instructions indicated that even on a completely calm day, you could pull it aloft on a string, let the string ( 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... )

• Yesterday's Wall Street Journal and New York Times (and many other outlets) reported that the Houghton-Mifflin trade division will be "temporarily" suspending acquisitions of new books. (The textbook division, which provides most of the company's revenues, is not ( Read more... )

• A chemical found in red wine may slow aging in mammals. Reservatrol is a hot item these days, and whereas there probably isn't enough in wine to have measurable effects on health or longevity, Big Pharma firm GlaxoSmithKlein paid $720M for Sirtris, a biotech ( Read more... )

• From Rich Rostrom comes a pointer to an amazing gallery of 50s-70s transistor radios and transistor radio ephemera. Almost every radio I had in that period or remember is here (including a nice one belonging to my grandmother) plus some true oddities, like phony ( Read more... )

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