{"id":3838,"date":"2017-01-03T14:15:51","date_gmt":"2017-01-03T21:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3838"},"modified":"2017-01-03T14:15:54","modified_gmt":"2017-01-03T21:15:54","slug":"odd-lots-303","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3838","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/health\/article-4052606\/Eating-red-meat-does-NOT-hurt-heart-New-study-insists-large-portions-beef-pork-wonders-blood-pressure.html\" target=\"_blank\">Eating red meat will not hurt your heart<\/a>. This is not news to people who&#8217;ve been paying attention. Alas, meat has been slandered as deadly for so many years that we&#8217;re going to be shooting this lie in the head for decades before it finally bleeds to death.<\/li>\n<li>There are <a href= \"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com.au\/ancient-auroch-close-to-being-revived-2016-12\" target=\"_blank\">at least two efforts underway to back-breed the aurochs<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/infogalactic.com\/info\/Aurochs\" target=\"_blank\">a very large and ill-tempered ruminant<\/a> that went extinct in 1627. I made use of aurochs in <em><a href= \"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Cunning-Blood-Jeff-Duntemann-ebook\/dp\/B0131OHVIA\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Cunning Blood<\/a><\/em>; the Moomoos (basically, cowboys on Hell) had difficulty herding them until they domesticated the mastodon and rode mastodons instead of horses.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/view\/articles\/2016-12-23\/fact-checking-s-infinite-regress-problem\" target=\"_blank\">Who will fact-check the fact-checkers<\/a>? In truth, there is no answer to this question, which heads toward an infinite regress at a dead run. Nobody trusts anybody else in journalism today. To me, this means that journalism as an industry might as well be dead.<\/li>\n<li>Even <a href= \"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/12\/19\/well\/beware-winter-is-coming.html\" target=\"_blank\">the <em>New York Times<\/em> is willing to admit that cold weather is 17 times deadlier than warm weather<\/a>. This is one reason we moved to Arizona: Winters have been nasty in Colorado for several years, and I have an intuition that flatlining solar activity may make things a <em>lot<\/em> colder before they get warmer.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.financialpost.com\/m\/wp\/fp-comment\/blog.html?b=business.financialpost.com\/fp-comment\/lawrence-solomon-proof-that-a-new-ice-age-has-already-started-is-stronger-than-ever-and-we-couldnt-be-less-prepared\" target=\"_blank\">Russian scientists evidently agree with me<\/a>. And y&#8217;know, the Russians <em>might<\/em> just know a few things about cold weather.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.scout.com\/military\/warrior\/story\/1675096-most-read-2016-howitzer-fires-rail-gun-round\" target=\"_blank\">The Army is accelerating development of a railgun compact enough to fire from something the size and shape of a howitzer<\/a>. 10 rounds per minute, too. With one of those you could poke a lot of very big holes in very big things in a very big hurry. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)<\/li>\n<li>Can&#8217;t afford a howitzer railgun? <a href= \"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=TZUgiCahy_4&amp;\" target= \"_blank\">How about a snowboard powered by ducted fans<\/a>? The idea is cool. Watching the guy put it together in fast-motion is cooler.<\/li>\n<li>SF writer Paul Mauser suggests that <a href= \"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/12\/19\/well\/beware-winter-is-coming.html\" target=\"_blank\">publishing&#8217;s gatekeeper function has been crowdsourced on the indie side<\/a>, and I agree. You can&#8217;t always tell if an indie book is good before you buy it. Guess what? You can&#8217;t always tell if a print book is good before you buy it. Manhattan&#8217;s imprints can barely pay the rent and <a href= \"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/media\/greenslade\/2013\/jul\/03\/magazines-job-hunting\" target=\"_blank\">want interns to work in editorial for free<\/a>. Warning: It&#8217;s handy to have gatekeepers who know how gates work, and why.<\/li>\n<li>Gatekeepers? Where were the gatekeepers <a href= \"http:\/\/www.thecrimson.com\/article\/2006\/4\/23\/students-novel-faces-plagiarism-controversy-beditors\/\" target=\"_blank\">when Kaavya Viswanathan allegedly cribbed a whole novel together from other authors&#8217; work<\/a> and then sold it to Little, Brown for half a million bucks?<\/li>\n<li>Pertinent to the above: <a href= \"https:\/\/www.plagiarismtoday.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">There&#8217;s a very nice site devoted to plagiarism<\/a>, which is evidently a far bigger problem than I would have guessed.<\/li>\n<li>An obscure author (of three memoirs) claimed that <a href= \"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/laurie-gough\/selfpublishing-an-insult-_b_13606682.html\" target=\"_blank\">indie publishing is &#8220;an insult to the written word.&#8221;<\/a> <a href= \"http:\/\/monsterhunternation.com\/2016\/12\/30\/fisking-the-huffpos-snooty-rant-about-self-publishing\/\" target=\"_blank\">Watch Larry Correia lay waste to her essay<\/a>. Don&#8217;t be drinking Diet Mountain Dew while you read it, now. Green stuff pouring out of your nose is generally embarrassing.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/entry\/people-are-cracking-up-over-this-gift-a-mom-got-for-her-daughter_us_586571dfe4b0eb586488b8c8\" target=\"_blank\">This item is probably not what you think it is<\/a>. The manufacturer could probably have used a little gatekeeping on the product design side.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Eating red meat will not hurt your heart. This is not news to people who&#8217;ve been paying attention. Alas, meat has been slandered as deadly for so many years that we&#8217;re going to be shooting this lie in the head for decades before it finally bleeds to death. There are at least two efforts underway [&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":[37,39,43,140,16,54,31,20],"class_list":["post-3838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-food","tag-health","tag-humor","tag-making","tag-publishing","tag-science","tag-weather","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3838","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=3838"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3839,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3838\/revisions\/3839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}