Odd Lots
- In my last very mobile couple of years, I’ve had some of my best ideas while driving across the featureless plains of Nebraska, including a way to solve a plot/tech issue that had prevented me from further progress on The Molten Flesh: How Protea sampled the powerful and very paranoid Sangruse Device. In looking back, this has been a pattern: In times of enforced boredom, ideas happen. Here’s some insight on that issue, which matters a lot to me, who loves ideas but loathes boredom.
- Here’s a very good tutorial on how to take photos of electronics projects, and by implication any small object shot for detail on a neutral background.
- The causes of “the French Paradox” (the French eat loads of fat and yet have little heart disease) have long been argued about, but it may simply be due to the fact that the French government makes sure that its pregnant women are well-fed, and has been doing so since the 1870s. (See next link.) Low fetal weight (often caused by poor maternal nutrition) correlates strongly to heart disease, diabetes, and much else later in life. Modern declines in heart disease may have nothing to do with red wine, dietary fat, or even smoking. Pregnant women may just be eating better.
- Sometimes a simple animation can explain a difficult mechanical mechanism. Hey, how many of you dudely dudes really understand how a sewing machine works?
- Grab a look at this bogglingly clear close-up of a sunspot, taken with an Earth-based telescope. The key is the deformable mirror and its overall mechanism of adaptive optics, which continuously corrects for atmospheric turbulence and other disturbing factors.
- Google’s spider evidently crawled Contra thirty seconds after I posted yesterday’s entry. Not complaining, but…how often does that damned thing come by?
- Here’s everything you’ll probably ever need to know about four-leaf clovers. It confirmed what I knew from experience probing our lawn in Chicago as a kid: five-leaf clovers also exist (I found more than one) even if they’re not as legendary.
- Double resistor color codes! So intense! What does it mean? (It means 230K.)
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: food · health · humor · photography · science
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On the Googlebot thing: Check your Remote Publishing settings in WordPress. You probably are set to notify Google blog search whenever you post a new blog. That will trigger Googlebot to crawl your site again.
(If you notify Ping-O-Matic, it automatically notifies Google blog search and several others.)
Sunuvugun–I saw the URL for Ping-O-Matic when I set up the blog last year, but didn’t really look into it and thus didn’t understand what all it did. But yup, that’ll do it. Thanks for letting me in on it. There’s just too many moving parts in a lot of this stuff.
“…I’ve had some of my best ideas while driving across the featureless plains of Nebraska,…”
Every now and then wetware super loop needs interrupts.
“Dr. Atanasoff’s Computer,” Scientific American, August 1988 [not online].
“The evening had not begun with particular promise. It had in fact, been so frustrating that he left laboratory, got into his car and began driving eastward from the college at Ames at high, concentrating on his driving to take his mind off troubles. After several hours he ended up some 200 miles away in the state of Illinois, where he stopped at brightly lit roadhouse for a drink.”
“Low fetal weight (often caused by poor maternal nutrition) correlates strongly to heart disease, diabetes, and much else later in life.”
There should be some evidence to correlate with this, mostly from the WW II era.
For instance, it’s been said that the British people were better nourished during the war than at any time before or since, due to the combination of rationing with the government’s requirement that the nutritional value of available food resources be maximized. (For instance, Woolton pie, a highly nutritious dish of which the British people were thoroughly tired of by V-E Day.)
So – have the birth cohorts of those years showed less heart diseases etc?
Contrariwise, the war years were a time of acute food shortages in the USSR. It was noted, a generation later, that there hadn’t been any new grandmaster-level chess players from the USSR for several years – when the war-year birth cohorts were coming of age.
The most acute example could be from the Netherlands, where the winter of 1944-45 was known as the “starvation winter”.
The Starvation Winter cohort has been studied, as reported by Matt Ridley in The Agile Gene, pp154-157–that’s where I first heard of the whole issue.