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.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: food · health · history · pascal · programming · science · space
"
> Craft beer sales are dropping
> in states where recreational
> marijuana is legal.
The obvious inference is that people drink craft beer to get drunk. That is contrary to my experience, though. Price is generally a factor; cheap beer lets you get drunk more.
I wonder what the sales of Bud, PBR, and the “malt liquors” look like…
> Fake news is news your tribe
> disagrees with.
My primary tribe is the Skeptics.
I’m still giving the hairy eyeball to various miracle batteries and fuel cells, cold fusion, Lockheed’s fusion reactor (which has come around twice, though most people don’t seem to remember the first time…), and… reactionless drives.
I’m fully prepared to admit I’m wrong and do the Happy Dance should they prove out… but “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I don’t require panels of academics and bureaucrats to deliver their opinions; simply shipping some product would persuade me.
Yukky month? It’s been a yukky year.
We lost Ron Glass. Shepherd Book has gone forth to preach among the stars.
And just before that, Florence Henderson departed to bake cookies for the angels.
Man, 2016 just sucks.
The Firefly cast has been doing pretty good. We’ve lost many of the Star Trek cast, but since the show was half a century ago, that’s not unexpected.
The Babylon 5 cast… the Reaper has shown that “60” is a bad number.
$39K a year for insurance before you get the first reimbursement at 80%?
Vince Lombari had it right.
https://youtu.be/4V0TYIO6yv4
I love to give advice so take this FWIW. I grew up in Tucson and when I left to go to school and ultimately live in the Silicon Valley I noticed my health got a lot better. One of the factors is I think that I went from ~2500 ft altitude to ~50 feet. The thicker air with higher oxygen content agrees with me. In Phoenix you are about 1000 ft so you are probably OK. But the other thing I noticed is the difference in relative humidity. Around here it is ~40-50% while in Tucson it was usually less than 20%. This is not only bad for your skin but I think it messes up your lungs. People in the polar north routinely have whole house humidifiers but houses in AZ seldom have one. You might look around for one for your house. When I go to visit AZ I borrow a room humidifier and turn it on in my bedroom while I sleep. I think it makes a big difference so you might start with one of these to see if it helps you.
Re health insurance, $25K is outrageous. You or your wife might consider getting a part-time government job. They usually come with great bennies like free or very low cost first dollar health insurance.
I bought a 6-month short-term health insurance policy to carry me from January 1 to June 1, which is when I start Medicare. Cost me a small fraction of what even six months’ worth of premiums would be for the single plan available in my county. Still not sure what Carol’s going to do, but we’re working on it.
My skin does better in AZ than in Colorado Springs, and I’ve often wondered if altitude has anything to do with it, since the humidity is generally lower in AZ than in CO.
“I eat two. Fried in butter.”
So do I. When I’m ambitious, I scramble them with onion, cheese, mushrooms, leaf spinach, and jalapeno pepper.
And when I’m lazy, I spray the pan with aerosol grease substitute.
Eggs are a perfect food…if you think about it, they have to be!
I usually sprinkle shredded cheese into the eggs to add a little zero-carb flavor, and if I’m ambitious have been known to dice ham into the pan as well. Good stuff.
I couldn’t believe that professor existed, but he is real. He seems to have real credentials in biology (lots of papers on dry grassland ecology) and to be exercised about habitat loss and extinctions. Also about “peak oil” and “social justice”.
I’ve said it it elsewhere. “Global warming” is an existential threat to civilization – because it threatens to corrupt and discredit science.
Agreed. I just lost another friend who simply could not abide me posting citations in the least critical of catastrophic AGW. I’ve known the guy for almost thirty years. And he not only called me a denier, he doubled down, and now I ignore him.
What few people seem to realize is that global warming is a shibboleth. You have to keep repeating it to be admitted to progressive circles. Furthermore, you have to attack people who refuse to repeat it, lest you get hurled into the (imaginary) Outer Darkness.
I continue to be astonished at how many people are willing to sell themselves into that sort of silly-ass tribal slavery.
It’s worse than that. It’s a gigantic monetary scam as well.
I don’t know what the total amount of $ being spent for “global warming” remedies is, but I’m sure it’s over $100B/year. Subsidies for wind power, solar power, electric cars, and biofuels, plus “carbon credits”.
A few years ago, the Sicilian Mafia was busted for running a wind power scam. The authorities recovered over 1B Euros. How much the scam had collected in total wasn’t reported, but probably 5x-10x as much.
And that was just one illegal operation. Far more goes to “legitimate” green enterprises. Europe is littered with derelict wind power turbines: they are abandoned as soon as the tax credits expire.
Tesla Motors got circa $100M in credits – much of it by a dubious claim that its vehicles were “quick-recharge”. (The claim was based on owners being able to swap out the battery pack at an automated station – of which there was exactly one in the world.)
More billions spent on forced take-up of efficient lightbulbs – first CFL, now LED. There are benefits, but the extra costs were substantial for many years – to the delight of GE and other manufacturers, who much preferred selling $3 CFLs instead of 35-cent incandescents.
And the cost of premature shutdown of hundreds of coal-fired power stations, though that doesn’t end up in anyone’s pockets.
I think I became sure it was a scam when Sports Illustrated ran this cover story: a photoshop of Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami, flooded so that Marlins pitcher Dontrelle Willis, standing in the mound, is up to his thighs in water. Which will never happen. Even the warmists admit that, when pinned down to specifics.
Howling alarmism is nearly always a cover for a bad case.