- Twitter has apparently decided to roll out the long-rumored 280-character tweet limit to everyone. I got the upgrade a couple of days ago. Some of my friends say they still don’t have it. Keep checking. There’s no reason for them to be specifically giving me any gifts.
- I hate politics and rarely talk about it, but given that this is the 100th anniversary of Soviet Communism, it’s time to reflect on the fact that Marxism is the greatest generator of mass murder in the history of the planet. Marxism killed at least 94,000,000 people in the 20th century alone, and is still killing them. Why do people keep falling for it? My theory: It’s in our genes, as an unintended consequence of tribalism. I’d write more about this if it weren’t so damned depressing.
- I was told 25 years ago that oral health is somehow connected to heart health. My dentist at the time couldn’t explain it, but the correlation had been seen. Some new research suggests that fats generated by a mouth bacterium may cause or aggravate atherosclerosis.
- Sugar feeds cancer cells. I’m pretty sure we knew this…but there is some new research clarifying the affinity between sugars and tumors.
- Pertinent to the above: A deeper explanation of aerobic glycolysis, also called the Warburg Effect, which governs how cancer cells generate energy.
- Massive CO2 take-up by cooling oceans during ice ages has come dangerously close to starving forests and other plant ecosystems of this essential gas. Our last ice age damned near killed us all by dropping CO2 levels to 180 ppm, close to the bare minimum required to sustain plant life.
- I’m not kidding, and in this case the Grauniad is speaking sooth: Facebook is telling us we can help them prevent revenge porn…by sending them nude pictures of ourselves. They’re going to generate hashes from them and then scan their bazillion posts per hour for matches. That sound you hear in the background is the world’s hackers sharpening up their server exploits.
- From the Can’t-Win-For-Losing Department: The Boys Scouts are opening up some of their programs to girls, and the Girl Scouts are screaming bloody murder.
- For am epic textbook example of a fisk of a hokey story, check out Danger Onion’s dissection of the recent tale of two women who were adrift for several months in the Pacific.
science
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- ESR did an interesting long-form essay on that very peculiar nootropic drug, Modafinil, which he takes for cerebral palsy. It sounds extremely useful, but for the property that the more you use it, the less effective it is. That’s why most people who use it illegally do so only on exam days, when heightened cognition can literally make or break your future. As always with ESR, it’s worth reading the whole thing, and that includes the comments.
- The Sun has been blank now for five days, and in today’s image I don’t even see any plages, much less spots. The coming solar minimum is going to be early, and from all appearances deep.
- I’m looking for a source of sockets for Ryobi 1 18v rechargable batteries, which are the packs driving most Ryobi cordless hand tools. I want to build my own gadgets using Ryobi 1 packs, and it would be handy to buy sockets rather than having to scavenge dead Ryobi tools. I doubt that Ryobi sells them (having looked at their product line in vain) and I’m now hoping somebody has created them via 3-D printer.
- The American Heart Association says that animal fats can kill you. (These guys actually consider margarine healthier than butter!) Really? Or might it just maybe have something to do with the fact that the AHA takes significant money from major vegetable oil manufacturers? If you see anything from the AHA, pass it by. It’s tainted (if not entirely fake) science.
- Gut biome bacteria may have significant effects on cognition. Numerous crude jokes suggest themselves here, none of which I will make.
- More people are leaving Illinois than moving to it, and the disparity is the greatest in the country. Illinois has some of the highest property taxes in the nation, along with exploding unfunded pension obligations that will drive all taxes higher in the near future. Carol and I are very glad we got out when we did.
- Good summary of recent progress on new designs for nuclear reactors. I’ll be blunt here: If you’re more afrad of nuclear power than global warming, I see no reason to be afraid of global warming at all.
- While researching lucid dreaming for my novel-in-progress, I happened upon a how-to guide for…astral sex. Thanks, but having sex with random astral beings doesn’t sound like an especially good idea to me.
- We’ve seen gadgets that purport to enable lucid dreaming for years, but a new generation is coming, with better tech and probably better chances. Insomniac that I am, I suspect what they do best would be keeping me awake.
- WikiBooks has a book on lucid dreaming induction methods and I’ve found it intriguing. There’s lots to try, but my suspicion is that the best lucid dreamers are probably born with it.
- I don’t often do politics here, but the left-leaning Guardian has a very insightful explanation of why the American media will never make any headway in their desperate (and failing) war against Donald Trump. Basically, journalists here are herd-running tribalists who simply don’t care how they come across to ordinary Americans, who are becoming numb to the topic and ever more frequently tuning them out.
Odd Lots
- Solar cycle 24 is crashing, and we’re still three years from Solar minimum. 24 really does look to be the weakest cycle in 100 years or more.
- And if you don’t think the Sun influences Earth’s climate, read this, about the Sun’s indirect effects on climate and why they make climate so hard to predict.
- I doubt the payback would be more than the cost of the equipment and the electricity, but you can mine bitcoin with a Raspberry Pi–or better yet, a whole farm of them. (Run them from a solar panel?)
- Speaking of the RPi: I burned a new NOOBS micro-SD last week, and used it to install the latest stock Raspbian. What I discovered is that this latest release has a terrible time detecting any monitor that isn’t straight HDMI. I’ve been using the RPi with older 4:3 DVI monitors through an adapter cable ever since I got my first board, and the board had no trouble figuring out the size of the raster. I’ve screwed around with the config file with only partial success; even telling the board precisely what mode your monitor speaks (1600 X 1200, 75 Hz) doesn’t guarantee correct video.
- When I was much younger I wanted a PDP-8. And then a PDP-11, which I almost got because Heathkit actually made a hobbyist PDP-11 desktop. I settled for an S-100 8080, because there was actually software for it. I recently stumbled on a hobbyist PDP-8 system based on Intersil’s IM6120 chip. It’s not hardware you can buy; you download the PCB design and the software, get somebody to make the board (not hard these days) and then stuff it yourself. Runs FOCAL-69 and OS/8. Paleocomputing at its best!
- From the It’s-Dead-But-the-Corpse-Is-Still-Twitching Department: Aetna is pulling out of the Obamcare exchanges entirely next year, citing $200M in losses.
- You won’t believe where Earth’s atmospheric xenon comes from! (Actually, you will…but you have to say that these days because clicks.)
- Excellent long-form piece on why we should fear an ideologically uniform elite. From the article: “If you really want to live in a world without tyranny, spend less time trying to show others why you are right and more time trying to show yourself why you are wrong.” Bingo. Because no matter what you think, you are always wrong. About everything. Nothing is simple. Nobody has the whole story. Ambiguity is everywhere. Certainty is poison.
- How many times do we have to say this? Eat fat to lose weight.
- We could use more research here (can’t we always?) but it’s certainly possible: Eating more salt may help you lose weight. Could be; I determined by experiment that salt doesn’t affect my blood pressure, so it couldn’t hurt to try.
- A correlation has been found between consuming lowfat or nonfat dairy products and Parkinson’s disease. No such correlation is seen with full-fat dairy products. My guess: Your brain is mostly made of fat, and people who eat low-fat dairy tend to eat low-fat everything. So this is yet another reason to go low-carb high fat, even if you don’t need to lose weight. Fat is a necessary nutrient!
- After decades of difficult research, scholars have finally decoded the lyrics to the “O Fortuna” movement of Carmina Burana. And…they aren’t in medieval Latin at all. (Thanks to Sarah Hoyt for the link.)
Odd Lots
- A study performed almost fifty years ago has come back into the light, in which half of a reliable (i.e., institutionalized) sample population was fed saturated animal fat, and the other half was fed vegetable oils. After almost five years researchers found that low cholesterol was not heart-healthy. For every observed 30 point drop in cholesterol, overall mortality went up 22%. Step away from the corn oil!
- Again, not new (from 1998) but intriguing: A study showed that people on a high-fat diet exhibited a better mood than those on a low-fat diet. I’m always in a better mood when things taste better, and fat tastes better than almost anything else you could name.
- We are slaughtering so many sacred cows these days: A brand-new study shows that only 20-25% of people exhibit BP sensitive to sodium. And not only that: Among the others, the ones who ate the most salt were the ones with the lowest blood pressure.
- OMG: Cheese is as addictive as crack! Actually, it’s not. And today’s fake science is brought to you by a former vice-president of PETA. Yes, scientists have a constitutional right to vent politicalized nonsense and swear fealty to political parties and ideologies. I have a constitutional right to mark down their credibility if they do.
- I’ve been saying for a long time that counting calories is worthless, based on research that goes back almost sixty years. If The Atlantic piles on, I suspect the debate is over.
- For her eighth birthday recently, I gave my niece Julie three books on the visual programming language Scratch. Julie, who, when her mother told her she was too young for roller skates, tried to make her own out of Lego. I’m not sure what she’ll do with it…but trust me, she’ll think of something. (Thanks to Joel Damond for the link.)
- Due to an intriguing gadget called an isotope ratio mass spectrometer, we can say with pretty reasonable confidence that human beings were top-of-the-food-pyramid carnivores long before we ever domesticated plants. Yes, it’s a long-form piece. Read The Whole Thing.
- Look at the US Drought Monitor. I remember when much of California and Nebraska were dark brown. If this be climate change, let us make the most of it.
- This may be funnier if you’re deep into RPGs, but I found it pretty funny nonetheless. I suspect that I dwell somewhere in the Diverse Alliance of Nice Guys. And hey, that’s where Space Vegas is.
- Beware the Bambie Apocalypse! (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
Splendor in the Grass
(Classical reference in the headline, as Glenn Reynolds would say.) Well. Today is 420 Day and in Colorado, at least, it’s something of a state holiday. Carol and I watched an entire industry come out of nowhere over the last few years, since the historic recreational marijuana referendum in 2012, with legalization actually happening on January 1, 2014.
Counties and municipalities were allowed to opt out, and (of course) Colorado Springs did. Much of Colorado, in fact, opted out, which makes it all the more remarkable that the state banked over $150M in tax revenue in 2016 alone.
If any of the dire predictions from the antigrass side came true, I didn’t hear about it. The big problem with traffic accidents in Colorado (as in most places these days) is texting, not toking. Shops require a photo ID just to come in the door, so teen purchases are unlikely. (This doesn’t mean some don’t get it from older friends, not like that’s a whole new thing.) The new labeling rules are all to the best, since now you have at least some sense for what you’re getting, and how much. This didn’t help journalist and old-school stoner Maureen Dowd back in 2014, who ate a whole THC-infused candy bar at once and freaked out bigtime. She wasn’t an outlier; others have reported similar issues. (My stoner friends tell me the answer is vape sticks, which vaporize a tincture without combustion, so that you’re not inhaling smoke.) Inhaling smoke or steam is for several reasons better than eating the stuff: You feel the effects sooner and so can stop when you’ve gotten as high as you care to be. Also, some research indicates that digestion involves the liver and changes the chemical mix that gets into the bloodstream, and not necessarily in a good way.
Maureen Dowd (who’s five months older than I) might have stumbled a little because the stuff she used to smoke in the ’70s was ditch weed compared to what’s being grown today. There’s a good book on this: Supercharged by Jim Rendon, which explains how selective breeding has sent the THC content of weed through the roof in recent decades. That would certainly give me pause; I took two hits off a joint in 1975 and was depressed for days afterwards. (Maybe that was just me; Carol was away at grad school and I was very lonely.)
Given its recent legalization in other states (California especially) recreational weed has the, um, whiff of destiny about it. Arizona had a measure on the ballot last fall, which narrowly failed, 48%-52%. I was boggled that it came that close, which leads me to believe that we’ll get it here the next time it comes up for a vote. I’m all in favor of that, seeing it as I do in the light of Prohibition, which was a titanic mistake that basically created both organized crime and our culture of intrusive government. Marijuana became illegal at the federal level in 1937 (though some states had outlawed it before that) which means that the nation did just fine for almost forty years after the weed became established here.
Black markets are never good. Yes, I suppose we have to weigh the consequences of widespread use against the criminal violence that black markets invariably generate. There is research linking marijuana use to schizophrenia, especially use by teens and young adults.Causality is still in dispute, but the correlation is there. Is that worse than ruining young lives with prison terms, or seeing them die in drug wars? I’m unconvinced. My Uncle Louie drank himself to death, as do many others every year, yet we tried prohibition of alcohol and it was a disaster. There may be no good answers. There may be no answers at all. The issue still hangs in front of us. Once the biggest states go to legalization it will become academic, and a coterie of Republican congressman are trying to get the Federal Government out of the pot enforcement business entirely and kick the whole things back to the states, where it belongs. I expect to live long enough to see whether legal weed is a blessing or a menace. As usual, I’m betting on blessings, especially once research on the plant ceases to be illegal. As with black markets, no good ever comes of ignorance, especially government-imposed ignorance.
The photo above is the sign for Maggie’s Farm, a medical marijuana dispensary in Colorado Springs, not far from where we lived. The property is a little ratty, but oh, that street address is solid gold.
Odd Lots
- I had some fairly sophisticated oral microsurgery about ten days ago, and it kind of took the wind out of me. That’s why you’re getting two Odd Lots in a row. I have things to write about long-form but have only recently found the energy to write at all. Promise to get a couple of things out in the next week.
- Some researchers at UW Madison are suggesting that sleep may exist to help us forget; that is, to trim unnecessary neural connections in order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the brain. Fair enough. What I really want to know (and am currently researching) is why the hell we dream. I doubt the answer to that is quite so simple.
- Ultibo is a fork of FreePascal/Lazarus that creates custom kernel.img files for the Raspberry Pi, allowing direct boot into an embedded application without requiring an underlying OS. I haven’t tried it yet (still waiting on delivery of a few parts for a new RPi 3 setup) but it sounds terrific. Bare metal Pascal? Whoda thunkit?
- Humana just announced that it is leaving the ACA exchanges after 2017. As I understand it, that will leave a fair number of counties (and some major cities) with no health insurance carriers at all. Zip. Zero. Obamacare, it seems, is in the process of repealing itself.
- NaNoWriMo has gone all political and shat itself bigtime. You know my opinions of such things: Politics is filth. A number of us are talking about an alternate event held on a different month. November is a horrible month for writing 50,000 words, because Thanksgiving. I’m pushing March, which is good for almost nothing other than containing St. Patrick’s Day. (Thanks to Tom Knighton for the link.)
- Paris has been gripped by rioting since February 2…and the US media simply refuses to cover it, most likely fearing that it will distract people from the Flynn resignation. Forget fake news. We have fake media.
- I heard from a DC resident that there was also a smallish riot in Washington DC today, and so far have seen no media coverage on it at all.
- Cold weather in Italy and Spain have caused vegetable shortages in the UK. Millions of small children who would supposedly never know what snow looked like may now never know what kale looks like. Sounds like a good trade to me.
- Trader Joe’s now sells a $5 zinfandel in its house Coastal brand, and it’s actually pretty decent. Good nose, strong fruit. Seems a touch thin somehow, but still well worth the price.
- I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Gahan Wilson’s cartoons in Playboy and National Lampoon, but Pete Albrecht sent me a link to an interview with Wilson that explains why he did certain things the way he did, like his brilliant series called “Nuts” about how the world looks and feels to small children.
Odd Lots
- Author Nick Cole has his finger on what’s wrong with print publishing. A big chunk of it is Barnes & Noble. He says what I’ve been saying for some time: The fate of the Big 5 print publishers is tied to B&N’s. When B&N goes under, there will be blood in the streets of Manhattan.
- Great article on that 1920s curiosity, spinning-disk television, with the first actual videos I’ve ever seen of the bottle-cap sized screens in action.
- And more cool hacks, if newer ones: A home-made full-auto crossbow. Dip it in holy water and the vampires will run screaming, like they did in Van Helsing. (Thanks to Bradford C. Walker for the link.)
- The cool hacks never quit! Here’s some basic information on using an SDR dongle with the Raspberry Pi. There’s actually a lot of activity on SDR for the RPi these days. Google it, but budget an hour or two for the browsing. One note up front: Consensus is that the original RPi doesn’t have the muscle to do SDR well. Use a version 2 or 3. (Thanks to Rick Hellewell for the link.)
- The science just keeps piling up: Eating fatty foods can make you healthier and slimmer. You can do the science yourself, as I explained in a series some time back.
- The Chicago Tribune has declared that Obamacare has failed. When you lose the mainstream media, methinks it’s well and truly over.
- The history of Radithor, the first nuclear energy drink. Not a good idea, to put it mildly. Me, when I need more energy I just suck a few more Penguin Peppermints, or run up to 64th & Greenway and get a 44 oz Diet Mountain Dew. Works. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
- Yeah. Radium, the gift that keeps on giving: Madame Curie’s notebooks, furniture, clothes, and other personal effects are still radioactive, and will be for another 1,500 years or so. They’re considered national treasures by the French, and are stored in lead-lined boxes. You need to sign a waiver to unbox and view them. You go. I’ll watch the slide show.
- A nuclear energy company has applied to the NRC to build a small modular nuclear reactor. ‘Bout damned time. There is NO solution–and I mean NO with a capital NO–to global warming that is not based on nuclear. If you do not enthusiastically support nuclear energy, don’t talk to me about global warming.
- Several Spanish towns saw their first significant snowfalls in 90 years recently. One report like that means nothing. But I’m seeing more and more of them all the time. Also, teaching people that weather = climate cuts both ways; a couple of bad winters will have them thinking that the world is actually cooling.
Odd Lots
- Eating red meat will not hurt your heart. This is not news to people who’ve been paying attention. Alas, meat has been slandered as deadly for so many years that we’re going to be shooting this lie in the head for decades before it finally bleeds to death.
- There are at least two efforts underway to back-breed the aurochs, a very large and ill-tempered ruminant that went extinct in 1627. I made use of aurochs in The Cunning Blood; the Moomoos (basically, cowboys on Hell) had difficulty herding them until they domesticated the mastodon and rode mastodons instead of horses.
- Who will fact-check the fact-checkers? In truth, there is no answer to this question, which heads toward an infinite regress at a dead run. Nobody trusts anybody else in journalism today. To me, this means that journalism as an industry might as well be dead.
- Even the New York Times is willing to admit that cold weather is 17 times deadlier than warm weather. This is one reason we moved to Arizona: Winters have been nasty in Colorado for several years, and I have an intuition that flatlining solar activity may make things a lot colder before they get warmer.
- Russian scientists evidently agree with me. And y’know, the Russians might just know a few things about cold weather.
- The Army is accelerating development of a railgun compact enough to fire from something the size and shape of a howitzer. 10 rounds per minute, too. With one of those you could poke a lot of very big holes in very big things in a very big hurry. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)
- Can’t afford a howitzer railgun? How about a snowboard powered by ducted fans? The idea is cool. Watching the guy put it together in fast-motion is cooler.
- SF writer Paul Mauser suggests that publishing’s gatekeeper function has been crowdsourced on the indie side, and I agree. You can’t always tell if an indie book is good before you buy it. Guess what? You can’t always tell if a print book is good before you buy it. Manhattan’s imprints can barely pay the rent and want interns to work in editorial for free. Warning: It’s handy to have gatekeepers who know how gates work, and why.
- Gatekeepers? Where were the gatekeepers when Kaavya Viswanathan allegedly cribbed a whole novel together from other authors’ work and then sold it to Little, Brown for half a million bucks?
- Pertinent to the above: There’s a very nice site devoted to plagiarism, which is evidently a far bigger problem than I would have guessed.
- An obscure author (of three memoirs) claimed that indie publishing is “an insult to the written word.” Watch Larry Correia lay waste to her essay. Don’t be drinking Diet Mountain Dew while you read it, now. Green stuff pouring out of your nose is generally embarrassing.
- This item is probably not what you think it is. The manufacturer could probably have used a little gatekeeping on the product design side.
Odd Lots
- I’m ok; stop fretting. I caught a very bad chestcold, which has had me spending a lot of time in bed for the past week or so, time I might otherwise have spent writing. Before that, I was trying to figure out how to obtain health insurance in a county where the cheapest plan costs $25,000 a year, with a $14,000 deductible. It’s been a yukky month, let’s say.
- Deciding what to write has been a challenge. People are complaining about the (lack of) size of my backlist, so what I really need to be doing is writing a few short novels, but writing them quickly. After all, Larry Correia’s two-word formula for success in SFF is “Be Prolific!” An ambitious novel set in the Gaean universe might take me 18 months. Drumlin Circus took me six weeks. I need to do that again. And again. And again after that.
- Spending time in zero-G is evidently bad for your eyeballs. Not yet precisely sure why, but it may be another case of humans being evolved for a particular environment, like, well, gravity.
- So far as we can tell, the efficiency of the Em Drive is related to the Q of the resonant cavity. What, then, might happen if we coated the interior of the truncated cone with a room-temperature superconductor? No, I don’t necessarily believe that it works. But damn, I sure hope it does. And as I said about cold fusion, even if the Em Drive isn’t actually a drive, it could be something else interesting and possibly useful. Research needs to continue.
- Lazarus 1.6.2 has been released. It’s all bug fixes, but still worth having.
- Giving children whole milk (rather than lowfat or skim) makes them leaner and generally healthier. Lowfat and skim milk are a scam. Producers tell you skim milk is healthy, sell you the skim milk, and then sell the cream to somebody else. Don’t fall for it. Skim milk is fed to pigs because it keeps them eating.
- Eggs are good too: Eating one egg a day reduces your risk of stroke by 12%. I eat two. Fried in butter. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
- In 1919, big chunks of Boston were leveled by a tsunami of…molasses. This is one of my favorite episodes from American history, and here’s a good summary.
- As Glenn Reynolds said of this link, Choose your poison: Craft beer sales are dropping in states where recreational marijuana is legal.
- Testable predictions are the key to solid science. A University of Arizona scientist has told us that within ten years, climate change will wipe out all human life on Earth. Let’s put it on our calendars and show him how much we f&$@** love science, whaddaya say? We could make it the biggest story of 2026. The man deserves to be famous for such hard-hitting research.
- There should be plenty of takers: A global UN poll asking what people around the world consider important shows that climate change comes in dead last.
- A separate poll shows that Americans are more afraid of clowns than climate change. After thinking about it for a second…I am too.
- Cross a hot tub with a roller coaster and you get…what? I’m still not sure riding a roller coaster dressed in nothing but a towel couldn’t have, well, unintended consequences.
- It’s this simple, really: Fake news is news your tribe disagrees with. Keep that in mind when the scrubbing starts.
Odd Lots
- Take a look at Visuino, which is a visual development environment for the Arduino embedded processor family. This is a beautiful thing, and makes me wish I still ran a certain magazine.
- And there’s a new default OS for the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. (Don’t try it on the earlier boards, nor the Pi Zero.) Looks good from here, and my RPi 3 will get the treatment as time allows.
- 75 years ago, there was a butt-kicking geomagnetic storm. Not exactly Carrington, but it makes me wonder how our infinitely more electronic culture would respond to such a storm today.
- Chemporn: How sodium and other twitchy elements burn.
- As of today, there are no Obamacare individual policies available in Maricopa County, Arizona. None. Granted, open enrollment does not begin until November 1, but we qualify to purchase because we’re moving interstate. Arizona officials are still reviewing a proposal from Centene to offer an HMO here, and if approved, it would be the only plan available in this county. This is not a robust healthcare marketplace. This is a law that has already imploded.
- More evidence? Here’s the firehose.
- Implosions, anybody? Great rant about the ongoing imposion of the media elite.
- Low testosterone appears to predispose men to dementia. It’s unclear (and no longer automatically asserted) that high testosterone predisposes men to prostate cancer. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)
- There is a very nice online PDF calendar generator that will create a calendar in PDF format for any string of months you might want. (The site has much else worth exploring related to calendrics.) You can add in holidays, solstices/equinoxes, phases of the moon, and so on. This pretty much makes my 1999 copy of Calendar Creator…useless. (Thanks to reader Spook for the link.)
- How The Atlantic explains Donald Trump: The media takes him literally but not seriously, and his fans take him seriously but not literally. This may in fact explain a great deal.
