{"id":3816,"date":"2016-11-29T19:52:31","date_gmt":"2016-11-30T02:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3816"},"modified":"2016-11-29T19:52:27","modified_gmt":"2016-11-30T02:52:27","slug":"odd-lots-301","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3816","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;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&#8217;s been a yukky month, let&#8217;s say.<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;s two-word formula for success in SFF is &#8220;Be Prolific!&#8221; An ambitious novel set in the Gaean universe might take me 18 months. <em>Drumlin Circus<\/em> took me six weeks. I need to do that again. And again. And again after that.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/national\/health-science\/the-mysterious-syndrome-impairing-astronauts-eyesight\/2016\/07\/09\/f20fb9a6-41f1-11e6-88d0-6adee48be8bc_story.html\" target=\"_blank\">Spending time in zero-G is evidently bad for your eyeballs<\/a>. Not yet precisely sure why, but it may be another case of humans being evolved for a particular environment, like, well, gravity.<\/li>\n<li>So far as we can tell, the efficiency of the <a href= \"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster\" target= \"_blank\">Em Drive<\/a> is related to the Q of the resonant cavity. What, then, might happen <a href= \"http:\/\/www.emdrive.com\/IAC13poster17254.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">if we coated the interior of the truncated cone with a room-temperature superconductor?<\/a> No, I don&#8217;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&#8217;t actually a drive, it could be something else interesting and possibly useful. Research needs to continue.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/forum.lazarus.freepascal.org\/index.php\/topic,34807.0.html\" target=\"_blank\">Lazarus 1.6.2 has been released<\/a>. It&#8217;s all bug fixes, but still worth having.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/news\/2016-11-whole-fat-consumption-leaner-children.html\" target=\"_blank\">Giving children whole milk (rather than lowfat or skim) makes them leaner and generally healthier<\/a>. <a href= \"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3270\" target=\"_blank\">Lowfat and skim milk are a scam<\/a>. Producers tell you skim milk is healthy, sell you the skim milk, and then sell the cream to somebody else. Don&#8217;t fall for it. Skim milk is fed to pigs because <em>it keeps them eating<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>Eggs are good too: <a href= \"http:\/\/www.tandfonline.com\/doi\/full\/10.1080\/07315724.2016.1152928\" target=\"_blank\">Eating one egg a day reduces your risk of stroke by 12%<\/a>. I eat two. Fried in butter. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>In 1919, big chunks of Boston were leveled by a tsunami of&#8230;molasses. This is one of my favorite episodes from American history, and <a href= \"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/researchers-dig-into-bostons-mysterious-tsunami-of-mola-1789400151\" target=\"_blank\">here&#8217;s a good summary<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>As Glenn Reynolds said of this link, <em>Choose your poison<\/em>: <a href= \"http:\/\/www.brewbound.com\/news\/report-beer-volumes-declining-markets-recreational-cannabis-legal\" target=\"_blank\">Craft beer sales are dropping in states where recreational marijuana is legal<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Testable predictions are the key to solid science. <a href= \"http:\/\/www.newshub.co.nz\/world\/humans-dont-have-10-years-left-thanks-to-climate-change---scientist-2016112408\" target=\"_blank\">A University of Arizona scientist has told us that within ten years, climate change will wipe out all human life on Earth<\/a>. Let&#8217;s put it on our calendars and show him how much we f&amp;$@** love science, whaddaya say? We could make it the biggest story of 2026. The man deserves to be famous for such hard-hitting research.<\/li>\n<li>There should be plenty of takers: <a href= \"https:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2016\/11\/22\/the-un-poll-redux\/\" target= \"_blank\">A global UN poll asking what people around the world consider important shows that climate change comes in dead last<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>A separate poll shows that <a href= \"https:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2016\/10\/21\/vox-poll-people-are-more-afraid-of-clowns-than-climate-change\/\" target=\"_blank\">Americans are more afraid of clowns than climate change<\/a>. After thinking about it for a second&#8230;I am too.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/sploid.gizmodo.com\/an-amusement-park-thats-also-a-giant-spa-is-obviously-t-1789429176\" target=\"_blank\">Cross a hot tub with a roller coaster<\/a> and you get&#8230;what? I&#8217;m still not sure riding a roller coaster dressed in nothing but a towel couldn&#8217;t have, well, unintended consequences.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s this simple, really: Fake news is news your tribe disagrees with. Keep that in mind when the scrubbing starts.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;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 [&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":[37,39,44,90,32,54,55],"class_list":["post-3816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-food","tag-health","tag-history","tag-pascal","tag-programming","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3816"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3817,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions\/3817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}