Odd Lots
- Sorry for being quiet for awhile. I’ve had some significant health problems that have slowed me down, and a few major non-writing projects to pursue, like finding a new car to replace our 25-year-old Toyota 4Runner, and replacing the dead air conditioner in our smaller garage, which is also my workshop and ham shack. Summer is acumin in, and the garage is a mess from my having to clear space around the dead unit so a handyman can remove it and install a new one. I would have called the handyman who installed it, but alas, he died a couple of years ago.
- Being a long-time cheese fan, I was pleased to see this piece of research, which associates higher dairy fat intake with lower incidence of Alzheimer’s. Read the whole thing: The article has a long list of limitations in the data upon which the study was based, meaning it may not be as predictive as originally stated.
- If you haven’t already bookmarked space.com’s Space Calendar, get on it. The site has listings for most launches, including China’s (maybe) but mostly launches from the US and other western nations. Carol and I have seen a fair number of SpaceX launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and this is where we find most of the up-and-launchers.
- The Chichon volcano in southern Mexico killed over 2,000 people back in 1982, and buried whole towns under pyroclastic flows. The top blew off a la Mt. St. Helens, leaving an immense crater with a small lake at the bottom, and seismologists assumed it would be quiet for awhile. Well, “awhile” may be over, as the lake is picking up more volcanic sulfides and chlorides, with CO2 bubbles coming up from the lake’s bottom.
- YouTube is now blocking background play on a lot of mostly mobile browsers. Background play still works on Brave under Windows. I don’t listen to music on my phone, so I’m not sure if blocking background play is also happening on desktop OSes.
- It occurred to me recently, in these years of wildly active solar phenomena, that snow is the price we pay for auroras. Sigh. But no, I’ll take a warm climate any day of the week. I’ll only want to see snow again as a tourist.
Posted in: None Of The Above.
Interesting article on cheese, dairy fat & dementia. I’m not a big dairy products consumer, but I do like strong tasting cheeses, which are typically high fat. I generally reject low-fat offerings of any type of food & drink. The research that I have read indicates that we need healthy fats.
My research matches yours, and I haven’t consumed fat-free dairy (skim milk, 0% yogurt, etc.) for quite a few years. Fat is not the villain that the health industry preached for many years. If there’s a villain, it’s sugar. We’re eating low-carb generally these days to keep our weight down. We eat real full-fat cheese (not that yellow stuff full of chemicals) across the cheese spectrum, from parmesan to bleu and gorgonzola, and everything in between. I’m currently on a gruyere kick, and when I get tired of that, I’ll probably move to gouda.
There’s a good book called The Great Cholesterol Con by Anthony Colpo that closed the cholesterol case for us, with plenty of others in that category adding evidence pointing in the same direction.
In everyday life Carol and I eat meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and salad. We bend the rules some for holidays and parties, but day to day that’s the menu. I weigh less now than I did at my peak in 1997. It may not work for everyone, but it works for us.