{"id":3859,"date":"2017-02-15T21:25:32","date_gmt":"2017-02-16T04:25:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3859"},"modified":"2017-02-15T21:25:35","modified_gmt":"2017-02-16T04:25:35","slug":"odd-lots-305","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=3859","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I had some fairly sophisticated oral microsurgery about ten days ago, and it kind of took the wind out of me. That&#8217;s why you&#8217;re getting two Odd Lots in a row. I have things to write about long-form but have only recently found the energy to write at all. Promise to get a couple of things out in the next week.<\/li>\n<li>Some researchers at UW Madison are suggesting that <a href= \"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/02\/02\/science\/sleep-memory-brain-forgetting.html\" target=\"_blank\">sleep may exist to help us forget<\/a>; that is, to trim unnecessary neural connections in order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the brain. Fair enough. What I really want to know (and am currently researching) is why the hell we <em>dream<\/em>. I doubt the answer to that is quite so simple.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/ultibo.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Ultibo<\/a> is a fork of FreePascal\/Lazarus that creates custom kernel.img files for the Raspberry Pi, allowing direct boot into an embedded application without requiring an underlying OS. I haven&#8217;t tried it yet (still waiting on delivery of a few parts for a new RPi 3 setup) but it sounds terrific. Bare metal Pascal? Whoda thunkit?<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.washingtontimes.com\/news\/2017\/feb\/14\/humana-latest-insurer-exit-obamacare-exchanges\/\" target=\"_blank\">Humana just announced that it is leaving the ACA exchanges after 2017<\/a>. As I understand it, that will leave a fair number of counties (<a href= \"http:\/\/www.tennessean.com\/story\/money\/industries\/health-care\/2017\/02\/15\/humana-2018-aca-exchanges\/97929184\/\" target=\"_blank\">and some major cities<\/a>) with no health insurance carriers at all. Zip. Zero. Obamacare, it seems, is in the process of repealing itself.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"https:\/\/pjmedia.com\/trending\/2017\/02\/14\/supposedly-nonpolitical-writers-group-goes-hard-left\/\" target=\"_blank\">NaNoWriMo has gone all political and shat itself bigtime<\/a>. You know my opinions of such things: <em>Politics is filth<\/em>. A number of us are talking about an alternate event held on a different month. November is a horrible month for writing 50,000 words, because Thanksgiving. I&#8217;m pushing March, which is good for almost nothing other than containing St. Patrick&#8217;s Day. (Thanks to Tom Knighton for the link.)<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-4228590\/Protesters-riot-close-Gare-du-Nord.html\" target=\"_blank\">Paris has been gripped by rioting since February 2<\/a>&#8230;and the US media simply refuses to cover it, most likely fearing that it will distract people from the Flynn resignation. Forget fake news. We have fake media.<\/li>\n<li>I heard from a DC resident that there was also a smallish riot in Washington DC today, and so far have seen no media coverage on it at all.<\/li>\n<li><a href= \"https:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2017\/02\/07\/the-new-maunder-minimum-vegetable-shortages-strike-london\/\" target=\"_blank\">Cold weather in Italy and Spain have caused vegetable shortages in the UK<\/a>. Millions of small children who would supposedly never know what snow looked like may now never know what kale looks like. Sounds like a good trade to me.<\/li>\n<li>Trader Joe&#8217;s now sells a $5 zinfandel in <a href= \"http:\/\/drinks.seriouseats.com\/2011\/11\/we-tried-every-trader-joes-wine-private-label-coastal-merlot-zinfandel-chardonnay.html\" target=\"_blank\">its house Coastal brand<\/a>, and it&#8217;s actually pretty decent. Good nose, strong fruit. Seems a touch thin somehow, but still well worth the price.<\/li>\n<li>I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve ever seen Gahan Wilson&#8217;s cartoons in <em>Playboy<\/em> and <em>National Lampoon<\/em>, but Pete Albrecht sent me a link to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tcj.com\/gahan-wilson\/\" target=\"_blank\">an interview with Wilson<\/a> that explains why he did certain things the way he did, like his brilliant series called &#8220;Nuts&#8221; about how the world looks and feels to small children.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had some fairly sophisticated oral microsurgery about ten days ago, and it kind of took the wind out of me. That&#8217;s why you&#8217;re getting two Odd Lots in a row. I have things to write about long-form but have only recently found the energy to write at all. Promise to get a couple of [&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":[52,39,43,82,90,35,32,128,54,20],"class_list":["post-3859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-culture","tag-health","tag-humor","tag-media","tag-pascal","tag-politics","tag-programming","tag-rpi","tag-science","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3859","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=3859"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3860,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3859\/revisions\/3860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}