- Apparently Bellefonte #1, a never-finished nuclear plant in northern Alabama, may be rising from the dead. I’ve seen it often while driving the road between Huntsville and Atlanta; hard to imagine that TVA will make worthwhile out of this zombie. (The Union of Concerned Scientists doesn’t think much of their proposal.)
- As many of my friends in Redmond are discovering today, it doesn’t matter how much redundancy you have inside your buildings if you have single points of failure outside the building.
- I love summer, not least because it brings tons of books by my favorite authors. On tap: new books from Clancy, Silva, and a bunch of others that I’m too lazy to look up at the moment. Bonus: it’s also time for the latest Year’s Best Science Fiction.
- Do you know the story behind the Polaroid SX-70 instant camera? My dad had one of these and it was an amazing piece of equipment. Check it out.
- Lots of people are just now catching on to what Microsoft has been pushing for a while: the death of the phone number. You don’t have to know Amazon’s IP address to use their service; why should you have to know my phone number to call me?
- If you are at all interested in the mobile device market, you should be reading this. His free analysis is so good I can only imagine what his paid stuff is like.
- “In a newly published study, three University of Oklahoma researchers report there is a higher rate of accidental deaths among whites (but not nonwhites) in the American South and West — regions where a “culture of honor” makes backing down from a challenge problematic for many males.” Well, duh. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that none of those three researchers is actually from the American South or West or they’d’ve known this already.
Thursday trivia #34
Filed under Musings
Paul's Down-Home Page 
I am delighted to have a few of my grandfather’s things. There are even a couple that I have specific memories of him using, so that’s cool.
But the only thing I really, really wanted was his SX-70. He was never without it when I was a small child, and the Polaroid magic was just the coolest thing I ever saw. No one has any idea what happened to it.
Well, you were certainly right about the single point of failure. We could see the billowing clouds of black smoke from our building, and naturally had to walk down to investigate!