- Where have I been? Chasing eclipses and home improvement contractors, for the most part. We found that a lot of people will cut down a diseased tree. The tricky part is finding someone who can dig up the stump. Also, I've been posting very short items on Facebook that in ancient times (Contra is now 19 years old, after all) would have been separate Contra entries. Finally, I've been out of sorts for other, darker reasons. (See below.)
- I will post a long-form entry on the recent total solar eclipse once my colleagues and I put together a cloud site for sharing our photos.
- Intriguing gadget: A flashlight basically printed on a sheet of paper, with two button cells and seven LED lights connected to the printed pattern. Rolling it up closes the circuit and lights the LEDs. But wait…it gets better: Because of the way the pattern is printed, the tighter you roll it, the brighter the light. Now, what magazine will be the first to include a flashlight to read it by on camping trips, bound in as the back cover?
- The sugar industry bribed Harvard University researchers to shift the blame for obesity from sugar to fat. Here's the backstory. I guess it wasn't all Ancel Keys' fault. He had lots of help from some very high places. As a direct result of that bribery, millions of people grew diabetic and died sooner than they should have. How can we guarantee that such things will never happen again? I'll hear your suggestions if you have them; I'm preparing a longer Contra entry on the topic.
- Heh. You don't escape the fattening effects of sugared sodas by drinking them with a high-protein meal. Sugar basically ruins everything.
- Now that it has bought up Whole Foods, Amazon is wasting no time cutting prices at the upscale food retailer, known among its critics as "Whole Paycheck." (Thanks to Instapundit for the link.)
- Great little rant from Jon Gabriel about weaponized offense-taking. In brief: That gun don't fire in the direction you think, bro.
- From the Words-I-Didn't-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Sortilege, meaning divination (i.e., the prediction of the future) by the drawing of an item or items from a collection. This includes the casting of bones or dice. I always understood this as cleromancy, but as I've discovered, every damfool item in the occult toolkit has at least six names.
- Good long-form article on the Clovis people, and the mysterious (and still disputed) people who were here in North America before them.
- There is now a service that will test you for genes specifically affecting nutrition, and provide advice based on the results. This includes things like food sensitivities and ideal diet. Yes, I'm skeptical, but at least we've begun to move away from the "one advice fits all" fallacy. The more I research, the more I discover that individual differences matter crucially in almost every facet of human health. This has various implications for healthcare, none of them good.
- Nice short sociology piece: We actually have two different elites vying for control of our society, the moneyed and the cultured. My take: Neither is fit to rule.
- Tribalism will be the end of our culture unless we find some way to eliminate it. My thought: criminalize not speech, but attempts to suppress speech. Fine universities heavily for failing to control protesting crowds outside a legitimate event, especially once violence erupts.
- In connection with that, a fine essay by Megan McArdle on the dangers of online mob terrorism.
- It's not just online. Just a few days ago, some crackpot pulled a Denver man out of his car and tried to stab him because the psycho thought his haircut made him look like a Nazi. That probably wasn't Antifa, but it's a mindset Antifa popularized; recall the Antifa philosophy professor who hid behind some women, then jumped out and hit a man from behind with a huge bike U-lock…and went on to hit six other people with the same lock.
- No, I don't generally cover such political ructions here, but this recent violence rattled me a little, and brought to mind China's Red Guards of the 1966-1975 timeframe. Want Red Guards? Because Antifa is how you get Red Guards.
August, 2017:
Odd Lots
The Other Fry’s
Sure, you’ve got Amazon Prime. (I do too.) But I have something that (most of) you don’t have: Fry’s Electronics. It’s a 12-mile drive from here, so I can’t just dash over anytime I want, like I can to Artie’s Ace Hardware. However, I realized after stopping in after a 15-year hiatus the other day that I need to go there more often.
Fry’s is hard to describe. It’s a double-big box store, done up in Aztec decor to look something like a pyramidal temple. It’s the ultimate nerd supply house, and has everything you might expect: motherboards, memory sticks, power supplies, cases, monitors, hard drives, Flash drives, software, and so on. Want to build your own desktop? It’s all there. However, Fry’s is remarkable for going even deeper into the wild country of the word “electronics,” right down to resistors and capacitors, soldering stations, shrink tubing and wire in any color you could name, and aluminum chassis. Good lord, they even have panel meters. Tools, wow: multitesters of every sort, needle-nose pliers, dykes (sorry; I still call them that), Dremels, Internet cable connector crimpers, and on for page upon page.
It gets a little nuts after that: toys, kites, CDs, DVDs, candy, all kinds of snacks, light bulbs, night lights, swamp coolers, refrigerators, camping gear, CB radios (!!), and fifteen varieties of fidget spinner. There was a display of something I truly don’t understand: body shapers (which is I think the generic term for things like Spanx) printed to look like bluejeans. Yes, I know, there are plenty of women nerds…but underwear in a resistor shop?
Crazy world.
Why was I there? I’ve noticed over the past year that the Mozilla codebase has grown ever more memory-hungry. Waterfox has taken to gagging with just six or seven tabs open. I’ve been meaning to add more RAM to my quadcore for some time, on general principles. It started out as an XP machine, and so had a scant 4 GB since I bought it. Now I had an excuse. Windows 7 Pro 64-bit can manage 192 GB of RAM, so throwing 16 GB at it is no big deal. But since I dropped those sticks into the quad, I haven’t heard the least little feep out of Waterfox.
Excellent prices, overwhelming selection, and people in the aisles who know what they’re talking about. Still another expression of the boggling richness of Phoenix’s retail sector. Fry’s Electronics is legally unrelated to Fry’s supermarkets, but was created by the sons of the man who founded the supermarket chain. If you’re ever in town for some reason, make sure you go over there. If you do, call me and I’ll come along.
Buy some hot pink shrink tubing. Dare ya!
