Monthly Archives: October 2012

Tab Sweep

How did the mutation that prevents lactose intolerance become so widespread so quickly?

Joss Whedon endorses Mitt Romney.

Camile Paglia endorses Jill Stein. And Revenge of the Sith. Really.

Additional evidence for the grandmother longevity hypothesis.

A recent conference asks if programmers can be artists. If so, they should start with processing.

Learn Git with the Git Immersion guided tour.

Tweak Unity with unsettings 0.08 and get rid of those pesky web results!

A new version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein (co-op edition) has been released.

On the other hand, if you’re fighting the headwinds of history, here’s a guide to installing Windows 8 with just an upgrade license. (Microsoft is fighting the headwinds too, and won’t let you easily make a clean install.)

Google Ngrams are now even awesomer.

In twenty years the number of planets outside our solar system has gone from zero to almost a thousand. But now there’s an exoplanet next door:

It turns out there’s more than one way to smash the earth and build the moon.

Concerned about Genetically modified organisms? Worried about all the land mines scattered all over the world during the past century? Maybe you can pick which one worries you more: a GM mouse has been created to detect land mines. (Apropos the above, consider this piece on GMOs and pesticide use.)

Car Stereo – Progress Report

I always dread doing work on my car. Today’s project was to install a new stereo.

I bought the car back in March. It already had an aftermarket stereo: the JVC KD-G200. There’s nothing wrong with it. I got something like it for my previous old clunker back in ’01 or ’02 so I could listen to CDs as I drove to Greeley. But that was 10 years ago, and nobody uses CDs anymore. (In seven months, I haven’t even unpacked the ones we moved here.)

What I want now is something that will let me play my iPod through the car stereo. So for my birthday, I got the BOSS 612-UA. It doesn’t have an optical disk slot. Instead, it’s got

  • AUX IN for the iPod or other consumer electronics
  • USB socket (for a thumb drive, e.g.) (and, possibly, to provide power to your iPod if you’ve got a long drive)
  • SD card slot (you can just leave it there so it’s no big deal if you forget the thumb drive)

Pretty cool, yes? Continue reading