- Amazon is selling hand-made (in Latvia) steampunk thumb drives incorporating copper pipe caps and a Soviet-made pentode vacuum tube. LEDs light up the glass from the bottom of the tube when there’s power available at the USB connector. (Thanks to Bill Meyer for the pointer.)
- Tonight would be a good night to see Mercury. It’s never easy because the planet never gets too far from the Sun in the sky, but with smartphone apps like Sky Map (on all Android phones by default) it’s certainly easier than it once was. Start by finding Venus in the west, immediately after the Sun goes below the horizon. (You can’t miss Venus.) Mercury lies roughly on a line between Venus and the Sun. There are no bright stars in that part of the sky, so if you see a star near that line, it’s not a star but ol’ Merc himself.
- Speaking of the Sun… Here’s a solid overview of the history of solar science. It’s a long piece, and even if you choose not to read it, the photos and diagrams are worth the visit.
- Betelgeuse continues to dim for unknown reasons. It’s fallen from 10th brightest star in the sky to 24th brightest. Orion is the first constellation I can clearly recall seeing, and these days, it just looks…off. This may mean it’s about to go supernova…for large values of “about.” (Hundreds or more likely thousands of years. Stars are never in a hurry.)
- I’ve been following the coronavirus epidemic using a dashboard maintained by Johns Hopkins. Who knows how accurate it is, but one does get a feeling that China is currently in a world of hurt. I got the link from my friend Charlie Martin, and he’s got a good article about the issues involved.
- This is a little weird, but it’s one more telltale that the technical publishing industry I loved for so long is no longer with us. I went searching for a book on installing, configuring, and customizing the MediaWiki software, and found…nothing. There’s plenty online, but I’m talking about book-length treatments. If you know of one let me know. My longstanding heuristic is that if it’s not on Amazon, it isn’t available.
- How to turn a waterway into wine. At least it wasn’t a Zinfandel.
- Ah, but this was a sweet, sweet hack: Some guy wandered around downtown Berlin pulling a little red wagon full of smartphones, all running Google Maps. Wherever he happened to be during his wander, Google Maps reported a traffic jam.
- If politics bores you as much as it bores me, here’s a solid distraction from all the tiresome yelling and screaming: The economics of all-you-can-eat buffets. Eat quick: My instincts tell me that as a category buffets are not long for this world.
- Finally, you’ve heard me say that there’s funny, there’s National Lampoon funny, and then there’s Babylon Bee funny. This may be one of the Bee’s best pieces yet–given this season’s nonstop nonsense.
Odd Lots
Short items presented without much discussion, generally links to other Web items
Odd Lots
Odd Lots
- Our pool cover kept the pool at tolerable temps (mid-high 70s) until a few days after Halloween. Then the nights got cold fast, and we finally removed the cover, cleaned it off, rolled it up, and put it in the shed. Water temp is now 62 degrees. I’m sure I’ve been in water that cold, but as a successful retired person, I reserve the right not to do things I did gladly when I was in seventh grade. As for when it goes back on in the spring, well, I’m working on that. We’ll see.
- QBit is still with us, though he’s a little grumpy and not moving as fast as he used to. He does not appear to be in pain, but we’re having the mobile vet check him again at the end of the month.
- We’ll be watching fistfights about this for years still, but ongoing research is pushing consensus strongly toward the hypothesis that low-carb high-fat diets accelerate metabolism. This happens to me almost every day: Twenty minutes after my nearly zero-carb breakfast (two eggs fried in butter, coffee, sometimes bacon) I feel warmer and start to sweat under my arms.
- From the Things-Are-Not-Working-Out-As-We-Were-Promised Department: When we bought our house here in Phoenix in 2015, we immediately replaced nearly all the interior lighting with LED devices. Three years later, they’re dying like flies. (Several died within the first year.) Probably half of the incandescent bulbs we had in our Colorado house survived for all the 12 years we lived there. More efficient, yes. Long-lasting, well, I giggle.
- The Center for Disease Control warns Americans not to eat Romaine lettuce in any form. A particularly virulent form of e. coli has been found in lettuce sold in 11 states, but since the CDC doesn’t know where all the infected lettuce came from, it’s advising consumers not to eat romaine at all.
- The Dark Ages began with real darkness: In the year 536 a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland covered Europe in volcanic smog. Crops failed, famine was everywhere, and soon came Justinian’s Plague, now thought to be bubonic plage. By the time the plague faded out, half of Europe was dead. I find it fascinating that we can identify periods of prosperity by looking for lead dust in ice cores, meaning that people were mining precious metals. After nearly vanishing after 536, lead levels didn’t reach the norm again until 640.
- “Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy.” –Pam Allyn
- Statuary in ancient Greece and Rome was not always blinding white, but was often painted and sometimes gilded, and restorations of the colors are startling to moderns. Here’s an excellent long-form piece on how old statues likely appeared when they were created–and why many historians reject the idea of painted Classical statuary.
- Too much caffeine triggers the release of cortisol, which in large quantities over a period of time leads pretty directly to heart disease. Modern life is cortisol-rich enough enough without downing 6 cups a day!
- Some ugly stats quoted by Nicholas Kristof: “38 colleges, including five from the Ivy League, had more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%. Over all, children from the top 1% are 77 times more likely to attend Ivy League colleges than children from the bottom 20%.” Legacy admissions have got to go.
Odd Lots
- In response to numerous queries: QBit is still alive, and still pretty frisky, considering that our vet suggested he would be gone by now. Yes, his lymph nodes are still swelling, and we won’t have him for a whole lot longer, but he’s fighting lymphoma pretty well. We’re giving him a supplement called Apocaps, that supposedly accelerates apoptosis in cancer cells. I’ll keep you posted.
- A new study involving more than a million patients pretty much drives the last nail into the coffin of cholesterol alarmism. Cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease, and therefore statins don’t do people any good. This is a very very big deal. It’s not enough to ignore government-issued nutrition advice. I’d recommend doing the opposite.
- There are 18 volcanoes in the US considered “very high threats.” I have never lived close to any of them, and that was (mostly) deliberate. Arizona has two volcanoes with a threat rating (one “moderate” and one “very low”) but neither of those is within a hundred miles of me. Click through to the PDF; it’s excellent, and will tell you what volcanoes in your state have threat ratings.
- Good article on life expectancy. (Thanks to Wes Plouff for the link.) As I read it, the US is doing pretty well compared to the rest of the world. I wish there were data on life expectancy plotted against habitual hours of sleep per night. My intuition is that people who short sleep die younger.
- 2018’s tornado count is the lowest in 65 years. STORMY, are you still at it?
- Merriam-Webster will show you what words were coined the year you were born, or any arbitrary year from 1500 to the present. On the list for 1952 are stoned, global warming, deep space, modem, nonjudgmental, softcover, field-effect transistor, plotline, sonic boom, and Veterans Day. So what are the cool words on your list?
- We don’t hear much about polar bears these days, in part because they’re thriving, in spite of any changes in the climate that may be happening. Three recent papers cited at the link.
- Our pool water is still at 84 degrees, almost certainly due to a warmish fall (it hit 90 in our neighborhood today) and especially our pool cover. We were in the pool today, and luvvin’ it.
- Best webcomic I’ve seen in some time. Carol and I just finished a whole box of pumpkin spice K-cups, and that may do us for another year. We think that coffee should be light, sweet, and spicy, like life. Goths we are not, evidently.
Odd Lots
- Grocery conglomerate Kroger is testing a driverless robot cart for grocery delivery here in Scottsdale. The service uses robots made by Nuro. (Watch their videos to get a sense for the carts’ size and speed.) The test only involves one Fry’s grocery store several miles south of me, but assuming no disasters, I expect to see it rolled out more broadly. (Thanks to Jon Gabriel for the link.)
- Almost no one answers their phone anymore, and close to a hundred years of “telephone culture” is rapidly going away. The torrent of illegal robocalls is the primary reason, though our multitude of other means of communicating does contribute. The Feds are doing almost nothing to enforce our junk call laws; if Trump could eliminate illegal robocalls, we’d not only re-elect him, we’d crown him emperor.
- The Web is now mostly scripts, and most of the scripts are for advertising and surveillance. Here’s a nice long-form intro to the problem, touching on Google’s AMP, and explaining where all our bandwidth is going.
- Earth has “mini-moons;” chunks of rock under 10′ in size that wander into Earth’s gravitational influence and then wander out again. We’ve only spotted one so far, but I’ll bet there are a lot more. What could SF do with an idea like that? I’ll be giving some thought to that question in coming days.
- Gosh! The NYT is willing to admit that sleep deprivation affects college grades. (This is one reason I lived at home; I was told what dorm life was like.)
- Related to the above: Since sleep loss makes us gain weight, could the fabled “freshman fifteen” be due to trying to live on four hours a night?
- Here’s a nice short (if technical and a little snarky) explanation of how El Nino conditions come about.
- Researchers have found a way to extract uranium from seawater. There is about 4 billion metric tons of uranium in the oceans; if this method scales, we can end global warming simply by going all-nuclear. Again: If you’re more afraid of nuclear power than global warming, I see no reason to be afraid of global warming at all.
- And of course, this is the realization of an Arthur C. Clarke White Hart story called “The Man Who Ploughed the Sea,” in my view the best of the Harry Purvis yarns. My copy of Tales from the White Hart is from 1969 and falling apart, but find a copy if you can. It’s not every day that we see science fiction become actual science.
- This seems pretty clear to me: “There is no convincing evidence that people with moderate or average sodium intake need to reduce their sodium intake for prevention of heart disease and stroke.” I did the experiment. Sodium affects some people. It does not affect all.
- An Amish gentleman in Michigan has started his own ride-sharing service for the Amish community. For $5, Timothy Hochstedler will take you wherever you need to go in Colon, Michigan in his horse and buggy, providing stories and good conversation along the way. He doesn’t have an app, but if you see him go by empty, flag him down.
- Insufficient sleep causes people to become lonely and withdrawn, which in turn raises mortality rates by as much as 45%. As you’ve heard me say many times: Sleep is not optional.
- Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International series rekindled my interest in cryptozoology, and there’s a whole museum devoted to that, operated by author Loren Coleman. I love their “Monsters in America” map, even if there’s nothing close to Phoenix.
- One creature on the map gets the award for Best Monster Name of the Year: The Pope Lick Monster, which somehow suggests a giant dog haunting Vatican City.
Odd Lots
- Lazarus 1.8.4 has been released. Bug-fix release but still worth having. Go get it!
- From the Questions-I-Never-Thought-to-Ask Department: How was sheet music written after quill pens but before computers? With a music typewriter, of course.
- How to become a morning person. Yes, there are benefits. The larger question of whether circadian orientation is born or made remains unanswered. Carol and I both lived at home during college. We’re both morning people. My sister and I had the same parents, grew up in the same house and obeyed the same rules (bedtimes were set from above and were not negotiable) and she went away to school. She is a night person. Proves nothing, but I find the correlation intriguing. (Thanks to Charlie Martin for the link.)
- Here’s a long-form, highly technical paper on why human exposure to low-level radiation is more complex than we thought (hey, what isn’t?) and that some data suggests a little radiation experienced over a long timeframe actually acts against mortality. I’d never heard of the Taiwan cobalt-60 incident, but yikes!
- Sleep, exercise, and a little wine may help the brain’s glymphatic system clean out unwanted amyloid waste products within the brain, preventing or staving off Alzheimer’s. This process may be the reason that anything with a brain sleeps, and why humans (who have more brain matter per pound than anything else I’m aware of) should get as much sleep as we can.
- An enormous study on the benefits of the Mediterranean diet was found to be profoundly flawed, and has been retracted. The data was supposedly re-analyzed and the original results obtained again, but if the researchers made the mistakes they did originally (assuming that they were in fact mistakes and not deliberate faking) I see no reason to trust any of their data, their people, or their methods ever again.
- How faddism, computerization, national bookstore ordering, a court case, and New York City cultural dominance destroyed (and continues to destroy) traditional publishing of genre fiction. The good news is that with indie publishing it matters far less than it otherwise would.
- If you’ve followed the nuclear energy industry for any significant amount of time, you know that fusion power is always 30 years in the future. Now, I’ve also been hearing about thorium reactors for almost 30 years, and I got to wondering why we don’t have them yet either. Here’s a good discussion on the problems with thorium power, which intersect heavily with the problems plaguing ordinary uranium reactors.
- Long-held myths die hard, especially when governments beat the drum for the myth. Eggs are good food. I eat at least two every day, sometimes more. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a study indicating that people on a lots-of-eggs diet lost weight and suffered no cardiac consequences of any kind. Good short summary here.
- I don’t see a lot of movies, but I’m in for this one, crazy though the concept is. After all, spectacle is what the big screen and CGI are for. Mad Max meets Cities in Flight? Sold.
- The contrarian in me has long wondered how much of what I put out on the street every week in the recycle can is actually recycled. The answer is very little, especially since single-stream recycling became fashionable. Almost all of it goes into landfills. The reasons are complex (there’s not a lot you can do with scrap plastic, for example) but apart from aluminum cans, the cost of sorting it far exceeds the value of the reclaimed materials.
- The antivax movement has always boggled me for its indomitably willful stupidity. Having stumbled upon a research paper on who the antivaxers are I boggle further: They are almost all members of the educated elite in our urban cores. This was always a suspicion of mine, and now we have proof.
- Here’s a fascinating piece on the effects of water vapor and continental drift on global temperatures. The topic is complex, and the piece is long and rich, with plenty of graphs. The comments are worth reading too. The primary truth I’ve learned in researching climate for the last ten or fifteen years is that it’s fiendishly complex.
- Brilliantly put: “But anger isn’t a strategy. Sometimes it’s a trap. When you find yourself spewing four-letter words, you’ve fallen into it. You’ve chosen cheap theatrics over the long game, catharsis over cunning.” –Frank Bruni, NYT.
- A few days back I got Leonard Bernstein’s quirky, half-classical, half-klezmer “Overture to Candide” stuck in my head all afternoon. One listen to this was all it took.
- I got there by recovering an old memory, of a chap who came to SF cons in the 70s with a strange keyboard instrument that he blew on through a hose, which as you might expect sounded like a piano accordion without a bellows. He was a filker and played interesting things, and I always assumed that he had somehow built the device himself. (It was much-used and taped up in several places.) But no, the chap is Irwin S. “Filthy Pierre” Strauss, and the instrument is a melodica.
- Finally, one of the creepiest articles I’ve seen in a couple of years. I considered and set aside a plotline in my upcoming nanotech novel The Molten Flesh that involved sexbots, real, fully mobile AI sexbots enlivened (if that’s the word) by the Protea device. Maybe I should bring it back. The original 1959 Twilight Zone episode “The Lonely” has always haunted me. Maybe sex is a sideshow. Maybe it’s about having something to care about that cares back, and therefore gives your life meaning. I could work with that.
Odd Lots
- Wanna know why I’m an optimist? This is why I’m an optimist. (Among other things.)
- NASA says that cosmic rays are bad and getting worse, which has consequences in several areas, from heart health to manned spaceflight to climate. Cosmic rays seed clouds, increasing the Earth’s albedo and cooling the planet. Weirdly, cosmic rays are linked with cardiac arrhythmias.
- Cosmic rays will only get worse as we plunge headlong into a new solar minimum. Already, 60% of 2018 has been sunspot-free, and the minimum won’t happen until late 2019 at the earliest, and possibly not until 2020.
- Here’s a site with a boggling number of scans of old radio, TV, amateur, and SWL publications, books and magazines both, all of them apparently legally downloadable for free. The PDFs are high quality and full color where color exists.
- Canadian researchers have discovered a new type of aurora, and named it…wait for it…Steve.
- Barnes & Noble is planning a number of weird new tactics, none of which make any real sense, and taken together spell an ever-faster circling of the drain. When they go away, Manhattan print publishing is in very serious trouble.
- Carol and I finally “cut the cord,” and ditched cable TV. The content was mostly crap, and 40% of the outrageous fees we pay for cable TV goes to sports channels that we don’t watch. We’ve done well with an over-the-air antenna plus Netflix, and for over-the-air, this site helps you figure out where the transmitters are in your area so you can aim the antenna correctly.
- When you’e good and damned tired of Internet cat pictures and would prefer a little mechanical mayhem instead, feast on this ten-minute video of trucks and RVs hitting the same low-clearance bridge. I saw a truck do this once, on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago, back when I was in college. The top of the truck peeled back, the truck buckled, and suddenly there was head lettuce rolling all over the place.
- Who’s responsible for the obesity plague? The Federal government and its politicized nutrition science. Here’s a good summary from Gary Taubes.
- The study didn’t show causality, but the correlation is intriguing: People with high cholesterol had better brain health after age 85. What this means is probably that cholesterol doesn’t matter. Put those statins down and work on other areas like cutting carbs and especially sugar.
- Weird Stuff Warehouse in Silicon Valley just closed down. Bummer. I never failed to drop in there when I was in the Valley. Stores like that are increasingly rare, and seeing this makes me want to head down to Apache Surplus in south Phoenix while they’re still open, whether I need more junk or not.
Odd Lots
- Twitter has gone absolutely off its rocker since Parkland, and now it’s just haters hating anyone who disagrees with them. (No, that’s not new; it’s just never been this bad.) I stumbled across a site called Kialo, which is a kind of digital debate club, in which issues are proposed and then discussed in a sane and (hurray!) non-emotional manner. I myself certainly don’t need another time-sink, but I wanted to bring it to the attention of anyone who enjoys (increasingly rare) reasoned debate.
- Another interesting approach to political social media is Ricochet, a center-right bloggish system with paid membership required to comment. (You can read it without joining.) No Russian bots, or in fact bots of any kind, and a startling courtesy prevails in the comments. Its Editor in Chief is Jon Gabriel, who used to work for us at Coriolis twenty years ago. Not expensive, and the quality of the posts is remarkable.
- FreePascal actually has an exponentiation operator: ** That was what FORTRAN (my first language) used, and I’ve never understood why Pascal didn’t have an operator for exponentiation. Better late than never.
- This article doesn’t quite gel in some respects, but it’s as good an attempt as I’ve seen to explain why Xerox never really made much money on the startling computer concepts it originated back in the crazy years of the ’70s. I worked there at the time, and top-down management was responsible for a lot of it, as well as top management that wasn’t computer literate and thought of everything simply as products to be sold.
- Japanese scientists found that treating the hair follicles of bald mice with dimethylpolysiloxane grew new hair. Dimethylpolysiloxane is used to keep McDonalds’ deep fryers from boiling over, and given that Mickey D’s fries are one of my favorite guilty pleasures, I suspect I’ve ingested a fair bit of the unprounceable stuff. No hair yet, though I keep looking in the mirror.
- German scientists, lacking a reliable supply of bald mice, have discovered a species of bacteria that not only enjoys living in solutions of heavy metal compounds, but actually poops gold nuggets. How about one that poops ytterbium? I still don’t have any ytterbium.
- Eat more protein and lift more weights if you’re a guy over 40. Carbs are no food for old men.
- Evidence continues to accumulate connecting sugar consumption to Alzheimer’s. Keep that blood sugar down, gang. I want to be able to BS with you all well into my 90s. Try cheese as snacks. It’s as addictive as crack(ers.)
- If in fact you like cheese on crack(ers), definitely look around for St. Agur double-cream blue cheese. 60% butterfat. Yum cubed. A little goes a long way, which is good, because it keeps you from eating too many crack(ers.)
- And don’t fret the fat. The Lancet has published a study following 135,000 people, and the findings indicate that there is no connection between dietary fat and heart disease. Ancel Keys was a fraud. Ancel Keys was the worst fraud in the history of medical science. How many times do we have to say it?
- 37,132 words down on Dreamhealer. It’s now my longest unfinished novel since college. (It just passed Old Catholics, which may or may not ever be finished.) Target for completion is 70,000 words by May 1. We’ll see.
- On March 17th, it will be 60 years since Vanguard 1 made Earth orbit as our 2nd artificial satellite. Probably because it’s so small (a 6″ sphere, not counting antennae) it is now the satellite that’s been in orbit the longest, including those the Russians launched. The early Sputniks & Explorers have all burned up in the atmosphere.
- I never knew that the parish church of my youth was Mid-Century Modern, but squinting a little I would say, Well, ok. Here’s a nice short visual tour of the church where I was an altar boy and confirmed and learned to sing “Holy God We Praise Thy Name.” It hasn’t aged as well as some churches (note the rusty sign) but some of the art remains startling. I met Carol in the basement of that church in 1969, and will always recall it fondly for that reason alone.
- Ever hear of Transnistria? Neither had I. It’s a strip of Moldova that would like to be its own country, (and has been trying since 1924) but just can’t get the rest of the world to agree. It has its own currency, standing army, and half a million citizens. (I’ll bet it has its own postage stamps, though why I didn’t notice them when I was 11 is unclear.)
- A guy spent most of a year gluing together a highly flammable model of a musk melon (or a green Death Star, if you will) from wooden matches, and then lit it off. He even drew a computer model, which needed more memory to render than his system had. Despite the bankrupt politics, we live in a wonderful era!
Odd Lots
- I regret to report that Robert Bruce Thompson has left us, at age 64, of heart problems. He’s best-known for his books PC Hardware in a Nutshell and Building the Perfect PC, but he’s also written several books on astronomy and telescopes that I much admire, as well as several books on home-lab chemistry. He was one of the best technical writers of his generation, and has been blogging as long as I have, which later this year will have been 20 years.
- Apple will be releasing the source code for the Lisa OS this year. The machine came out in 1983 and didn’t sell well due to its $10,000 price tag. (That would be almost $25,000 today.) I’m interested because Lisa OS was written in…Pascal! I’ve heard rumors from the FreePascal community that a port to the Raspberry Pi is likely and might not even be especially difficult. Imagine the OS from a $25,000 machine running on a computer costing $35. I’d do that just to say I did.
- I didn’t know anything about ArcaOS until a few days ago, but it’s basically a continuation of OS/2 Warp, based on Warp 4, MCP2. Legal, not free, but also not hideously expensive, and supported to boot. If you ever used OS/2 and liked it, take a look.
- Back before we truly understood the dangers of nuclear radiation, scientists experimented with nuclear fission by moving neutron reflectors around a softball-sized core of PU-239 by hand, and recording the nuclear reaction’s strength from Geiger counter readings. This was called “tickling the dragon’s tail,” and when done clumsily, led to the death of several researchers and shortened the lives of others. Here’s a good summary.
- The last house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright before his death in 1959 is in Phoenix, and it’s for sale. Got $3.25M in your wallet? You’re set! (Thanks to my own Carol for the link.)
- Here’s an excellent long-form piece on Amazon Go, the online retail behemoth’s experiment in checkout-free B&M retailing. Take if off the shelf, toss it in your bag, and when you’re done shopping, just leave. You need an Amazon account and ideally a smartphone, but with that you’re in business. No word on when the concept will move beyond Seattle.
- The Dark Crystal is coming back to movie theaters in February. That was a butt-kickin’ movie, and I will probably hand over the $14 ticket price without a great deal of grumbling. A really big screen is worth something!
- IO9 mentioned some teasers for Cloverfield III. III? Was there a Cloverfield II? You guys never tell me anything!
- A Canadian sniper team in the Middle East nailed an ISIS terrorist at 3,871 yards. This is about 1,000 yards farther than the previous record for a sniper kill. I have a lot of respect for marksmen (my father was one) and a sense of awe before the skill of snipers at this level.
- Every time I crank up Waterfox, it asks me if I’d like it to be my default browser. Every damned time. Something appears to be redefining my default browser without my permission. This support page hasn’t been especially helpful. Haven’t cracked this one yet, but I’ll report here when I do.
- Something the AGW crowd should keep in mind: If you say that any hot summer’s day means global warming, don’t be surprised if people unroll the syllogism and assume that any cold winter’s day means global cooling. Climate isn’t simple, and we know a lot less about it than we claim.
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.
Odd Lots
- 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.
