{"id":3990,"date":"2017-12-17T15:49:06","date_gmt":"2017-12-17T22:49:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3990"},"modified":"2017-12-17T15:49:07","modified_gmt":"2017-12-17T22:49:07","slug":"odd-lots-313","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3990","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lazarus-ide.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Lazarus 1.8 is out, based on FreePascal 3.0.4<\/a>. No staggeringly important updates, but a lot of really good (if smaller) improvements. There&#8217;s <a href= \"http:\/\/wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org\/Lazarus_IDE_Tools#Outline\" target=\"_blank\">a color-outline syntax highlighter<\/a> that makes it easier to spot the <strong>BEGIN\/END<\/strong> pairing in large, heavily nested code blocks. I&#8217;ve only begun to use it (much time being taken up by general Christmasing these days) but I&#8217;ll report further impressions as I have them.<\/li>\n<li>Mike Cernovich published <a href= \"https:\/\/medium.com\/@Cernovich\/40-tips-4oth-birthday-mike-cernovich-db4491192b64\" target=\"_blank\">a list of 40 life principles he learned before he turned 40<\/a>. I have a few quibbles (particularly with numbers 2 and 34) but overall it&#8217;s a list worth meditating on. <a href= \"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3018\" target=\"_blank\">I did something like this back in 2013<\/a>, with good response. Several people have suggested expanding my list into a short Kindle ebook, but lordy, I have novels to finish.<\/li>\n<li>A recent Australian study <a href= \"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/9158235\/Red-meat-halves-risk-of-depression.html\" target=\"_blank\">suggests that eating red meat is linked to a halving of the rates of depression in women<\/a>. The researchers can&#8217;t quite force themselvem to say that eating fat is a good thing, but I&#8217;ll forgive them that. We&#8217;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 <em>hate<\/em> 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?<\/li>\n<li>And it&#8217;s not just women. <a href= \"https:\/\/www.acsh.org\/news\/2017\/11\/10\/vegetarian-men-are-more-depressed-are-steaks-treatment-12129\" target=\"_blank\">Yet another study finds that vegetarian men are more depressed than men who eat meat<\/a>. We evolved eating meat. You can&#8217;t fool Mother Evolution.<\/li>\n<li>More evidence that fat does <em>not<\/em> cause endothelial disfunction. (Basically, pathologies of the inner lining of blood vessels.) <a href= \"https:\/\/twitter.com\/DrEades\/status\/935205874745925632\" target= \"_blank\">Sugar does it all by its lonesome<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Atlas Obscura points us to <a href= \"https:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/places\/grave-mercy-brown\" target= \"_blank\">the grave of New England&#8217;s last vampire<\/a>. Considering what the townfolk did to her, I&#8217;m not sure I want to know about the fates of the supposed vampires who came before her. Moral panic&#8230;do we know something about that these days?<\/li>\n<li>Trump needn&#8217;t do anything about it; <a href= \"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/454096\/repeal-obamacares-individual-mandate-its-repealing-itself\" target=\"_blank\">Obamacare&#8217;s individual mandate is slowly repealing itself<\/a>. When the cheapest plan costs more than 8% of an individual&#8217;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&#8230;and increasingly, unpenalized.<\/li>\n<li>Finding Bigfoot has been a bear. Well, wait: <a href= \"https:\/\/www.popsci.com\/yeti-myth-himalayan-brown-bear\" target= \"_blank\">Maybe Bigfoot <em>is<\/em> a bear<\/a>, at least out in Yeti country in the Himalayas.<\/li>\n<li>For reasons unclear to me, the name &#8220;Mr. Mxyzptlk&#8221; popped into my head some weeks back. He&#8217;s a minor character in the Superman universe, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mister_Mxyzptlk\" target=\"_blank\">a Loki-leprechaun sort of cross who seems to exist solely to annoy Superman<\/a>. I hadn&#8217;t seen him since reading other Fox Patrollers&#8217; comics on Boy Scout campouts 50-odd years ago, so I did a Google search to remind myself what he looked like. And man, <a href= \"https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=mr.+myxlplyx&amp;source=lnms&amp;tbm=isch&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwjKmc3Z05HYAhVYwWMKHTMKDKMQ_AUICigB&amp;biw=1600&amp;bih=1038\" target=\"_blank\">there are a <em>whole<\/em> lot of Mr. Myxyptlk concepts out there<\/a>. There&#8217;s even <a href= \"http:\/\/superfriends.wikia.com\/wiki\/Mr._Kltpzyxm\" target=\"_blank\">a Bizarro world version<\/a>. How comics freaks keep track of the elements of their comics worlds completely escapes me.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"https:\/\/politics.theonion.com\/dazed-mike-pence-wakes-up-15-miles-outside-d-c-after-a-1821079320\" target=\"_blank\">Here&#8217;s the funniest thing I&#8217;ve seen<\/a> since Anara said &#8220;Woof&#8221; on <em>The Orville<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s a color-outline syntax highlighter that makes it easier to spot the BEGIN\/END pairing in large, heavily nested code blocks. I&#8217;ve only begun to use it (much time being taken up by general Christmasing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[67,39,178,43,90,32,72],"class_list":["post-3990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-comics","tag-health","tag-health-insurance","tag-humor","tag-pascal","tag-programming","tag-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3991,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3990\/revisions\/3991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}