December 17th, 2017:
- Lazarus 1.8 is out, based on FreePascal 3.0.4. No staggeringly important updates, but a lot of really good (if smaller) improvements. There’s a color-outline syntax highlighter that makes it easier to spot the BEGIN/END pairing in large, heavily nested code blocks. I’ve only begun to use it (much time being taken up by general Christmasing these days) but I’ll report further impressions as I have them.
- Mike Cernovich published a list of 40 life principles he learned before he turned 40. I have a few quibbles (particularly with numbers 2 and 34) but overall it’s a list worth meditating on. I did something like this back in 2013, with good response. Several people have suggested expanding my list into a short Kindle ebook, but lordy, I have novels to finish.
- A recent Australian study suggests that eating red meat is linked to a halving of the rates of depression in women. The researchers can’t quite force themselvem to say that eating fat is a good thing, but I’ll forgive them that. We’re fat, diabetic, and dying young because governments demonized fat and forced a low-fat, high-carb, high-sugar diet on us forty-odd years ago. Governments just hate to be caught killing their own citizens. And governments provide a lot of the funding for such studies. Who wants to lose funding by pissing off the government?
- And it’s not just women. Yet another study finds that vegetarian men are more depressed than men who eat meat. We evolved eating meat. You can’t fool Mother Evolution.
- More evidence that fat does not cause endothelial disfunction. (Basically, pathologies of the inner lining of blood vessels.) Sugar does it all by its lonesome.
- Atlas Obscura points us to the grave of New England’s last vampire. Considering what the townfolk did to her, I’m not sure I want to know about the fates of the supposed vampires who came before her. Moral panic…do we know something about that these days?
- Trump needn’t do anything about it; Obamacare’s individual mandate is slowly repealing itself. When the cheapest plan costs more than 8% of an individual’s income, the mandate no longer applies. Plans are becoming so expensive so quickly that even some people with six-figure incomes are now exempt from the mandate. Bascally, fewer and fewer people can afford even the cheapest policies available in their areas, and thus go uninsured…and increasingly, unpenalized.
- Finding Bigfoot has been a bear. Well, wait: Maybe Bigfoot is a bear, at least out in Yeti country in the Himalayas.
- For reasons unclear to me, the name “Mr. Mxyzptlk” popped into my head some weeks back. He’s a minor character in the Superman universe, a Loki-leprechaun sort of cross who seems to exist solely to annoy Superman. I hadn’t seen him since reading other Fox Patrollers’ comics on Boy Scout campouts 50-odd years ago, so I did a Google search to remind myself what he looked like. And man, there are a whole lot of Mr. Myxyptlk concepts out there. There’s even a Bizarro world version. How comics freaks keep track of the elements of their comics worlds completely escapes me.
- Here’s the funniest thing I’ve seen since Anara said “Woof” on The Orville.
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