health
- 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.
- 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.
- Our night-time low here dropped into the 50s last night for the first time since we got back here in late July. The pool water is now down to 81, sigh. Autumn is icumin in; cul sinks the pul.
- One reason I’ve never written a sequel (much less a series) is that I have a terror of becoming boring by writing about the same people in the same setting multiple times. Pam Uphoff discusses this well on MGC. It’s not inevitable, but it has to be done…carefully. (I’ve dipped my toes in the water by writing several stories and a short novel set on the Drumlins World.)
- Melatonin may act against migraines. If that’s an issue for you, give it a shot…but keep in mind that melatonin does affect your sleep cycles, and taking it any time except before bed can be hazardous. Also, when I was trying it for insomnia after Coriolis imploded, my sleep timing went nuts, which isn’t typical but is clearly a possible side effect.
- The sugar industry bribed scientists back in the ’60s to push the blame for obesity from sugar to fat. Furthermore, the scientists they bribed were at all-powerful Harvard. Lessons: Science is corruptible (we knew that, from science fraudster Ancel Keys) and Harvard is just an ordinary university with a highly inflated rep and 35 billion dollars.
- I’m an inflation hawk. Here’s a good explanation of why. (Also see Adam Fergusson’s superb book When Money Dies .) I have a postage stamp here on my desk from Weimar Germany with the value 50 million marks, to remind me what’s at stake. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)
- Measuring sea level accurately (like, to millimeter accuracy) is well-nigh impossible for a whole ravening horde of reasons. The studies mentioned suggest that AGW contributes very little to sea level changes, and what contribution is real may not be determinable. (Thanks for the link go to Charlie Martin.)
- More from the sagacious McMegan: It’s almost impossible to determine how many people have gained insurance because of Obamacare. It might be 15 million people. It might be 20 million. Or 10 million. The problem, of course, is that it shot the policies out from under millions of other people (Carol and I included), who were enraged because we were promised from The Very Top that this simply would not happen. Period. End of story.
- Here’s a good, detailed explanation from Dr. Eades of the glycemic index and why it may not be as useful a measure as we’ve come to think. It’s probably a lot more useful than the BMI, which is not only worthless but damaging.
- From Esther Schindler comes word that American cheese is not as bad as you think. Then again, as with tomato soup and other things we had incessantly when I was a kid, I may have had quite enough of it, thanks.
- Heads up: Today is the last day you can register (for free) to vote for the Dragon Awards, which will be presented at DragonCon next weekend. The Hugo Awards have made their preferences clearly known; for the cast-out Puppy cohort the Dragons are every bit as good and probably better.
- The least affordable American cities, and how much you need to be making to buy a home in them. Do you need to live in Silicon Valley to have a satisfying career? No. Whatever salary you make will go direct to landlords, or to long-time homeowners who will take your million+ and retire. Get Thy Ass Unto Omaha.
- Zerohedge posted a chart showing how much Obamacare premiums are going up in 2017, by state. Carol and I have been paying $20,000 per year for premiums since the ACA killed our pre-ACA policy. (Didn’t somebody important say we could keep our plan if we liked it?) This is starting to make Medicare look good. (Thanks to Charlie Martin for the link.)
- The FTC is going after a large publisher of nominally peer-reviewed scientific journals, claiming that almost no peer review is done on the articles. Also, people named as editors by the publisher were often not affiliated with the firm in any way. Sigh. Peer review is not any sort of gold standard these days. I’m thinking it might be a zinc standard, or perhaps a tin standard.
- People scratch their heads when I say that Woodrow Wilson was the worst US President ever. He is also the most-bleached. The reasons I loathe him begin with his racism but are mostly about his hatred of the US Constitution. He came as close as any President ever did to being a dictator, and that’s precisely what he wanted to be.
- Here’s a map depicting every cargo ship in the world and where it was going at the displayed time. Yes, yes, the map is from 2012, but it’s a good illustration of how goods move around the world. I don’t see any action in the Northwest Passage, but there are ships going up and down the coast of Greenland, and a few crossing under South America through Tierra Del Fuego.
- Here are some photos of more Tarzans and Janes than I’ve ever seen in one place, gathered at LACon in 1975 for the 100th birthday of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
- Heh. I was a big Tarzan fan in grade school. And I actually met Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. In fact, I think she may have been about to ask me down to the bar for a drink. Or maybe not; and I wonder if I missed a chance to make a fascinating new friend that night.
- Friday was International Boron Appreciation Day, and in the excitement of National Dog Day, I missed it. How could you blame me? There wasn’t a mule in sight. (Thanks again to Charlie Martin for the link.)
- Today is Go Topless Day. Why don’t they have a National Ytterbium Appreciation Day? I can go topless any time, but damn, ytterbium gets no respect at all!
- Whew. We’re in Phoenix, now permanently, with the Colorado house on MLS. Much remains to be done, but the immense project of getting our house emptied and ready to sell has been nailed. The Smaller But Still Significant Truck Full of Stuff has emptied itself into our living room, and we have a week or two of sorting and sifting and putting away. Overall, we’re in good shape.
- Iconic Mad Magazine cartoonist Jack Davis has died, at 91. I’ll readily admit that I used to read Mad while I was in high school, though not where my parents could see me. Humor mattered to me, as it does to this day. The only Mad artist who rivaled him in my view was Mort Drucker, who is still with us. (“I don’t believe your ears either, Mr. Spook.”)
- I’m wondering if it would be possible to write a Windows-like user shell for Windows 10 IOT, which is available for the RPi. (You would be perfectly justified, this time at least, in asking “Why would you want to do that? Answer: Because it would be a cool hack, and it would probably annoy Microsoft, which is always a plus.)
- Do you see the sunspot? I don’t see the sunspot.
- We have now gone a record 129 months without a major hurricane making landfall on the US mainland. One of my friends continues to argue that Superstorm Sandy was a major hurricane because of the damage it caused. Ok…except “major hurricane” is a technical term in climate science, with a technical definition: Class 3 or above. Sandy was Class 2 when it hit the Atlantic Coast, and not a hurricane at all when it did the most damage. We’re talking about sustained wind speed, which is the only way we have to objectively classify hurricanes and get a handle on hurricane trends over time.
- I got the impression (see above) that I was supposed to bow my head and whisper, “Hurricane Sandy was a horrible tragedy,” every time I talked about hurricane physics. Uhhhh…no. That’s like requiring me to say, “Nuclear bombs are horrible things,” every time I talk about the physics of nuclear fission. Sorry. Not gonna happen. Emotion has no place in science, except to politicize discussion and demonize dissent.
- Where do Americans smoke the most weed? No points for guessing Colorado, though central Maine has a surprising constituency. What else do you do during those interminably miserable winters? (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
- Speaking of which, Donald Trump supports allowing states to legalize marijuana, a position neither our president nor Hillary Clinton has taken. This is truly the weirdest presidential election in my considerable lifetime.
- To be honest, I’m more interested in nootropics. Here’s a light article worth citing because it mentions a nootropic I had not heard of before: L-theanine.
- Which is best used in conjunction with the oldest and probably best nootropic of all. Drinking coffee significantly reduces the risk of suicide. Well, caffeine raises mood, therefore acting against depression, and depressed people are those mostly likely to kill themselves.
- Oh, and coffee acts against prostate cancer, too. I never drank coffee regularly until I was 33. I hope that wasn’t too late.
- We had numerous Nash Ramblers when I was a kid. The company just turned 100, even though they became AMC and got devoured by Chrysler years ago. Nash did a lot of good stuff, some of it far earlier than their competition.
- Why do I have to say this so much? Genuine virtue does not need signaling. I’ve come to the conclusion that all signaled virtue is fake. The rest of us are onto you. Just stop.
- A reminder: I try to credit anyone who sends me an interesting link when I post Odd Lots entries. If you don’t want to be credited by name for whatever reason, please tell me.
- Azounding is a brand-new announcement and promotion site for indie SFF. I’m participating, but with hauling stuff up and down stairs all the time, I really haven’t had the energy to get a promo together so far. But it’s definitely a site to check at least every few days lest you miss some countdown deals.
- More evidence that cholesterol has little if any link to heart disease, from a study that was done 40 years ago and never completely published. I smell Ancel Keys disease here, and I’m guessing tens of millions of people have died from it. (Thanks to Tom Roderick and several others for the link.)
- Neal Rest sends a link to another article on the same topic: Records found in dusty basement undermine decades of dietary advice.
- And still another, from reason.com. No, red meat and dairy is not a death sentence. It might in fact buy you additional years of life.
- Diseases out of Africa may have accelerated the Neanderthals’ demise. Or maybe they dawn-raided themselves into extinction. Or a billion other things. If God ever allows me to ask him ten questions, that’ll be #1.
- From Esther Schindler: NASA has released a new gravity map of Mars. How much ytterbium is in the Martian mascons? Restless minds want to know.
- Also from Esther: Women book air travel earlier than men, saving more money…and older people book the earliest of all. (Is that because time just goes faster for us?)
- Is it just me, or would calling #2531 a sunspot stretch the truth maybe a little? As I always ask in situations like this, What would Edmond Halley see?
- Gary Frerking sent me over to LumaStream LED lighting, which is developing a low-voltage lighting infrastructure that avoids the need to downconvert 120VAC to 12VDC in each bulb by doing the conversion up front. It looks like they’re targeting commercial lighting, but they’ve clearly proven out the idea that low-voltage DC systems can work.
- There’s a word for almost everything else in the English language; there should be a word for “the sadness that comes upon a tech writer when he must tip over a hundred pounds of his now-obsolete tech books (the ones he himself wrote) into the recycle bin.”
- A widely linked-to article speculates on how the ancient Egyptians could have made pyramid-building easier by turning their titanic rectangular blocks into dodecagons (12-sided polygons, done using rope and logs) and rolling them instead of dragging them. Problem is, a number of people misread the piece and said “dodecahedron” instead of “decagon” in their links. Geometry matters, people.
- Via Cory Doctorow: Original illustrations from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. 1864. Cool, but one wonders if they went a trifle cheap on the artist.
- My asshat alma mater is banning chalk, because somebody might get the vapors reading the word “Trump” in chalk. Sorry, fools. This is not what a real university does. I loathe Trump, but free speech trumps that, as it were. You get none of my money. And I will slander you mercilessly until the end of my days.
- It appears that Learning Computer Architecture with the Raspberry Pi is a live project and will be published sometime late summer. (I don’t think the June date given on Amazon is realistic.) I’ll keep you posted.
- An art student built this bogglingly complex mechanical clock out of…wood. It doesn’t just tell the time–it writes out the time every minute. I think he’s in the wrong curriculum. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- From Charlie Martin: Are black holes really quantum computers? Depends on whether there really are gravitons.
- Also from Aeon, an article that agrees with what I’ve been saying for years: Even if LENR (i.e., cold fusion) isn’t actually fusion, it might be something interesting and useful, and research should continue.
- I’ve also been saying this for years: Fruit juice is no healthier than soda. Both are nearly all sugar, and both will eventually kill you. Fruit juice is basically fruit-flavored sugar; all the stuff that might conceivably be good for you (fiber, mostly) is thrown away.
- It gets worse: New research suggests that long-term vegetarian diets predispose people to heart disease and cancer. It’s complicated; read the whole thing, and then consider this item from phys.org, which may be the research that the other article is talking about. What Cornell was researching were evolutionary adaptations to different diets, and if you eat against your evolution, you may be causing yourself problems. That seems reasonable to me.
- Something about this purely textual clock appeals to me.
- Here we have Wayne’s Radios, which focuses on vintage radios, some deco, most midcentury modern, all of them interesting. Oh, and a few dinner plates for flavor. Or something.
- Nonetheless, if you’re going out to dinner, insist on plates. Because eating dinner out of vintage radios can be hazardous to your health.
- This is by far the worst wine I’ve ever tasted. The runner-up was evidently so bad they don’t make it anymore. No other wine I’ve ever tried was even in their ballpark.
- Is there now or has there ever been a wintergreen cream cordial? I’ve kept an eye open for years for something that tastes like Canada mints and is the color of Pepto Bismol. Why? Because contrarian.
- Lazarus 1.6 has been released. It was built with FreePascal 3.0.0, a first for Lazarus. Mostly incremental changes, but there’s a new rev of the docked form editor that looks promising, even though it’s not quite stable yet. Wish I had more time to play with it!
- Older versions of Lazarus have run well on the Raspberry Pi for me. However, installation on the newer Raspberry Pi 2 is much trickier. This installation tutorial is almost a year old, and I haven’t yet installed Lazarus 1.4 or 1.6 on my Pi 2, but it’s the best how-to I’ve yet seen.
- From Glenn Reynolds: Indie author Chris Nuttall lays out his journey as an indie, emphasizing that all but the biggest names are being driven to indie by publishers who simply don’t understand which way the wind is blowing. Read The Whole Thing, as Glenn says.
- Back when I reviewed the Baofeng handhelds, there was some discussion in the comments about the RDA-1846S SDR chip. Gary Frerking pointed me to the HamShield project on Kickstarter, which is an Arduino add-on board (a shield, in their jargon) that uses the RDA-1846S to transceive on 2M, 220 MHz, and 450 MHz. Like the Baofeng radios, HamShield will also operate on FRS, MURS, and GMRS, though the group doesn’t say that explicitly. (This is an SDR, after all.) It’s not shipping yet, but they’ve raised a fair amount of money (well over $100,000) and appear to be making progress. Definitely one to watch.
- Cool radio stuff is in the wind these days. One of Esther Schindler’s Facebook posts led me to Beartooth, which is an SDR roughly similar to HamShield built into a smartphone battery case that snaps onto the back of your phone. Unlike HamShield, beartooth is going for FCC type acceptance and will operate on MURS. However, there’s been no activity on their Web site since mid-December and I wonder if they’re still in business. It’s not an easy hack; see this discussion from midlate 2014.
- Oh, and I remembered GoTenna, which is similar to Beartooth except that it’s limited to texts and geolocation data. (That is, no voice.) It’s a Bluetooth-powered stick that hangs on your belt and uses your smartphone as a UI, basically, and allows you to text your hiking buddies while you’re out beyond the range of cell networks. I guess that makes it a sort of HT…a Hikey-Textie. Unlike HamShield and Beartooth, GoTenna is shipping and you can get two for $300.
- Twitter continues to kill itself slowly by shadowbanning users for political reasons. What the hell is in it for them? When they collapse, something else will appear to take their place. They’re a tool. (Take it any or every way you want.) When a tool breaks, I get another tool, and generally a better one.
- In case you’ve never heard of shadowbanning…
- I stumbled on something called Roblox, which is evidently a high(er) res take on the Minecraft concept. It’s looking more and more like what I was thinking about when I wrote my “RAD Mars” piece for the last issue of Visual Developer Magazine in late 1999. Anybody here use it? Any reactions?
- Slowly but steadily, reviews are coming in on my Kindle ebooks. Here’s one that I particularly liked.
- The Obamacare exchange in Colorado “smelled wrong,” so Carol and I avoided it. We were right. (Thanks to Sarah Hoyt for the link.)
- I don’t care how many tablets and smartphones you have. Paper is not dead.
- Google is banning Flash-based advertising. About damned time. Flash is and has always been a malware farm. Die, monster, die!
- Flash is the biggest risk but not the only one in terms on online ads. AdBlock Plus is very good, but makes its money by selling whitelist positions to advertisers like Taboola. Here’s how to turn off the whitelist.
- Although he doesn’t say much about it in the article itself, I see this research about the hypothalamic attack region as justification for considering tribalism born and not learned behavior. (Thanks to Tom Roderick for the link.)
- The BMI is a lie, and a deadly one. A measurement that cannot distinguish between fat and lean muscle is a lie now, has always been a lie, and will never be anything other than a lie. Furthermore, it’s been a lie for 185 years. You’d think medical science would have figured it out by now.
- Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest in 200 years. Bummer. First time I can have a reasonable HF antenna in 13 years, and it may not matter. But at least I’m now living in a warm climate.
- Nonetheless, the Sun seems remarkably active in this video showing an entire year of solar activity at 12 seconds per frame.
- What if NASA designed space travel posters? Well, um, they did. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Engadget reviews the second-gen Compute Stick 2016, which is a Windows 10 computer the size of a fat thumb drive that plugs into your TV’s HDMI port. HDMI doesn’t supply power (yet, but MHL is coming) so you still need a wall wart. However, it’s now got 2 USB ports so you can plug both keyboard and mouse into it without a hub. (Many keyboards now have USB hubs, so if you want you can put both on a single port just using the keyboard hub.) Even thought it’s as small as it is, it still has a fan. Wow.
- How they build a tunnel with giant concrete Legos and a truck with casters where a hedgehog has spines.
- The Senate has made the ban on Internet access taxes permanent. Note that this has nothing to do with sales taxes on Internet purchases, but is about taxing Internet access itself. The law, originally passed in 1998, had to be renewed annually. If the House passes it and the President signs it, the law will no longer need to be renewed every year.
- People ask me sometimes why I consider Woodrow Wilson by far the worst US President in history. Here’s only one reason. There are many more. Here’s another. He came as close to being the first American dictator as we’ve ever come. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the first link.)
- Neanderthal genes may be a mixed bag. Well, sweetheart, what isn’t?
- The Army Corps of Engineers turned off Niagara Falls in 1969. It was surprisingly easy to do.
- One of the reasons Americans got so fat starting about 1980 may be the explosion in the use of vegetable oils from about that time. It’s not simply solvents left over from seed-oil extraction, nor the estrogen-mimicking properties of soybean products, including oil. It’s a subtle matter involving the balance of two chemicals that allow our mitochondria to do their job. This piece is long and in places quite technical, but it may be the most important article on health I’ve seen in the last several years.
- A Harvard study suggests that moderate coffee drinking correlates with longevity. This is good news, but I wonder if it’s less about the coffee than about what I call “lifestyle panic” on the part of people who abstain from coffee…and almost everything else.
- Deep frying vegetables makes them more nutritious than boiling them. Stop the presses: Fat is good for you!
- Somebody told me about this, but I lost the referral: The Raspberry Pi has a hardware random-number generator on its SoC that generates true (not pseudo) random numbers from thermal noise in analog components. There’s now a driver allowing programmers to use it, and the article shows the difference between true random and pseudorandom numbers with some very nice graphics.
- This is why Americans don’t think global warming is a serious problem. When the elites start acting like they believe it’s a serious problem, I may start thinking it’s a serious problem too. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)
- CO2 isn’t all bad news: New science from Australia suggests that more CO2 improves tree growth and drought tolerance. I keep wondering if higher CO2 levels are bad news at all.
- Also from Glenn Reynolds: The 17 equations that changed the course of history.
- From Cedar Sanderson: Magnetically levitating bonsai trees. I couldn’t see that without thinking of The Little Prince.
- Rickets, a bone disease causing crippling limb defomity in children, is coming back worldwide. The disease is caused by vitamin D deficiency, and researchers suspect that its resurgence may be due to parents’ irrational fear of dairy products and sunlight.
- The 27 Worst Things About Stock Photo University. And he doesn’t even mention how every last person attending there is drop-dead gorgeous and thin as a rail.
- Just when you thought that shabby chic was firmly and permanently planted in the trash can, Anthropologie starts selling a shabby chic trash can. This is meta. Or ironic. Or meta-ironic. Or maybe just dumb.
- From the There Are More Things In Heaven And Earth, Horatio Department: bull penis canes. (I am not making this up. I doubt I could make this up, and I am pretty damned good at making things up.)
