~The Catch-All Drawer~

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

mini cows
In 2002, News of the Weird mentioned a Wall Street Journal dispatch from Cuba, suggesting that Fidel Castro's 1987 vision of "apartment cows" was still a ways off. (Castro had pushed farmers to breed small cows, not much larger than dogs, that families could keep in small homes and that would supply their minimum daily quantities of milk.)

Two months after that story ran, a farmer in Rockwell, Iowa, said he had bred such miniature cows but that they were not good milk producers. Cut to September 2004: An Associated Press dispatch from San Juan Y Martinez, Cuba, touted rancher Raul Hernandez, who has now apparently successfully created a small herd of 28-inch-high cows that can deliver about five quarts of high-quality milk. [Billings Gazette-AP, 9-12-04]


Tossed in by: R.G.B.
. . . Wednesday, October 27, 2004 (0) comments

Friday, October 22, 2004

Man Sends Email by Thought
A paralysed man has checked his email and played computer games using an implanted device. I hope he doesn't waste all his time thinking about Solitaire.

Tossed in by: PDQ
. . . Friday, October 22, 2004 (0) comments

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Motorcycles
My friend and room-mate in college had a motorcycle. It gave him some extra freedom and independence. He was not some burly Harley club guy, he was an accountant type, but always had something unique, as you would expect from a genuine personality like Doug, or 'Sarge" as I called him. For example he drove a BMW with a solid drive shaft instead of a chain drive, which impressed the cycle crowd, but went over my head. Doug and a friend tried to get me involved. Somehow they found a contact with a whole train car that had "WWII Indian US surplus cycles packed in cosmolene." If they could have found twenty people to buy in, they could have had them cheap, but it never happened.

Anyhow, I got an email from him lately, sort of out of the blue, and I made a page of old motorcycle pictures for him that I have collected over the years. Some of them came from a screen saver I bought 10 years ago, and others images culled from the web from time to time, popped into a directory that I didn't know what to do with. Here is the page, if you like old motorcycles.

On the motorcycle theme, I have a neighbor who posed an interesting moral question to me. I need input on this. He has a motorcycle in his garage that he has stored there, idle for years, since he got married. I guess he had been quite a risky rider in his youth, because he had promised his father he would not ride it again after he got married. He kept it, thinking that times could change things, and he really loved the bike. His father died some years ago, and still he feels he is still bound by his promise not to drive it. He clearly has doubts, and thinks there might be a statute of limitations on that sort of thing. He asked me what I thought. That's a tough one, isn't it? Leave comments please!

Tossed in by: R.G.B.
. . . Tuesday, October 19, 2004 (1) comments

Friday, October 15, 2004

Google Labs
I hate to be a Google pusher again, but it looks like they are invading into Microsoft territory with this one, so it is doubly interesting.

Background: When I studied Microsoft technical stuff, one of the installable services on their servers was a program called "Index Server". The idea was that instead of taking a long time to search for something in your database, or files, hard drives, or whatever, this index server would make an initial scan, and build an index. Then from then on it would keep track of each item as it is added, on the fly, keeping the index ready. Then when you searched for something, boom! it would be in the index, and you would immediately find it. Then, low and behold, they integrated it into Windows XP for free! You can turn it on and seach quickly.

Trouble is, it never worked well -- for me anyhow. After trying many configurations, I actually turned it off, not finding the benefit outweighing the overhead.

Now. . . . Google has offered a free PC tool to search your computer just like their web search engine. Want to find that email you wrote last year and all you remember is that you used the word "Infrastructure"? Search and ye shall find. Microsoft must be worried, and admit that their index server is not the answer, because they announced that they will have something like Google's offering "Soon."

Anyhow, try it for yourself from Google Labs

Tossed in by: R.G.B.
. . . Friday, October 15, 2004 (0) comments

Saturday, October 09, 2004

Historical Maps
Continuing on the map theme, I have downloaded old colorful maps from this David Rumsey site before. There are other collections that are similar, but this is the grandaddy --10,000 maps! It is intense, and you need to do a little navigating to get the right views. The way I do it, is I download the high res version in MrSid format, and have a viewer that reads that. Locally, the maps automatically bring in a new focused layer as you zoom in, giving you great detail, better than if you had a printed copy, and you can save any area to a jpeg for other uses.

Go to David Rumsey Historical Map Collection: "The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has over 10,000 maps online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia and Africa are also represented. Collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, children's and manuscript maps. The collection can be used to study history, genealogy and family history."

Oh, if you feel artsy and have a few rainy days of free time, Rumsey's main site, with visual images of art, photos, architecture, etc. 300,000 images, they say.

Tossed in by: R.G.B.
. . . Saturday, October 09, 2004 (0) comments

Friday, October 08, 2004

Great mapping site
I'm afraid all of the frogs in this blog may hop out of the drawer and get lost - therefore I'm providing another great mapping service, multimap.com. If you zoom in, and click aerial, you will see a transparent street map laid on top of the satellite photo. When I zoomed into my address, there was no such nifty photo, but a clear street map nonetheless. (update: looks like the satellite photos are only for UK addresses.)

Tossed in by: PDQ
. . . Friday, October 08, 2004 (1) comments

Monday, October 04, 2004

Poison Dart Frogs
Sometimes I just have to break from the trivial and post a serious link:
"20 Reasons Why Poison Dart Frogs
Make the Perfect Pet for the Vivarium...":

Tossed in by: R.G.B.
. . . Monday, October 04, 2004 (2) comments

mini cows
Man Sends Email by Thought
Motorcycles
Google Labs
Historical Maps
Great mapping site
Poison Dart Frogs