Odd Lots
- 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.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: comics · health · health insurance · humor · pascal · programming · weirdness
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Re your quibble with #34. You’re lucky. I’ve read some of the your relevant articles and posts over the decades…and you are indeed lucky. For the average relationship, he’s right.
As far as #2, it might be expanded by introducing an aphorism from the Chassidic Rabbi and Philosopher Rabbi Bunim of Peshischa [1765-1827]: Every person needs two pockets. In one should be a note “The world was created for my sake” [which is a statement of responsibility, not arrogance]. In the other, a note “I am but dust and ashes.” The trick is, when to take out which note. The seems to be the paradox referred to in item #3.
I can see that, though I might have a different interpretation. “The world was created for my sake” is always true, for every human being ever born. It’s a warning against despair. On the flipside, “I am but dust and ashes” is also true, and might well mean, “Don’t get cocky!” Me, I would rephrase it slightly, as “I am but stardust and ashes,” meaning that we are mortal, but that there is always a little touch of the infinite in us.
From a height, I think Mike understands that a lot of us swing between arrogance and despair. I’ve been lucky in that I’m wedged a little south of arrogance, which is pretty much where I want to be. My mother, on the other hand, basically died of despair, for personal reasons that I will not relate here. It was in her genes, and it’s the part of her that I most fear in my own. (I am like her in a great many other ways.)
All that said, a few quibbles do not invalidate a fine meditation on life in our modern world. Mike’s on to something, and his book Gorilla Mindset reminded me of the work of psychologist Albert Ellis, whom Carol saw speak at a convention in the early 70s. He says that a great deal depends on your internal narrative; i.e., what you tell yourself inside your head can become true, whether you want it to or not. I have to reread his books, and when I do I’ll have something to say about them here.
Seen this?Science Confirms the ‘Sugar Coma’: Non-Fruit Sugar Slows Brain Activity
Sugar: is there anything it can’t do to us?