{"id":4448,"date":"2020-12-30T10:53:15","date_gmt":"2020-12-30T17:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4448"},"modified":"2020-12-30T10:55:36","modified_gmt":"2020-12-30T17:55:36","slug":"odd-lots-326","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4448","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/dailycoffeenews.com\/2020\/12\/14\/coffee-is-being-widely-used-as-a-covid-19-diagnostic-tool\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Coffee is being used as a COVID-19 diagnostic tool<\/a>. Basically, when you wake up and smell the coffee, make damned sure that you can smell the coffee. Carol and I kid each other about being able to smell lots of things, including coffee but also bacon, garlic, ozone&#8230;and dog poop. If we ever catch Teh Viruss, we will know it.<\/li>\n<li>This has evidently been known for a long time, and I wonder why I never heard about it: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.upi.com\/Health_News\/2020\/12\/29\/Study-Blood-pressure-often-differs-widely-between-two-arms\/9291609174182\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Blood pressure readings can be different between your two arms.<\/a> I tried this, and mine match pretty well. Significant differences between readings taken from both arms can predict increased danger of heart attack and stroke.<\/li>\n<li>2020 was a popular year to make climate catastrophe predictions about. Well, in a lot of very significant cases, <a href=\"https:\/\/pjmedia.com\/news-and-politics\/tyler-o-neil\/2020\/12\/28\/egg-on-their-faces-10-climate-alarmist-predictions-for-2020-that-went-horribly-wrong-n1289371\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2020 bit the predictors in the ass, bigtime<\/a>. Like Yogi Berra said, &#8220;It&#8217;s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.&#8221; This goes double for predicting the future of tremendously complex systems that we understand poorly.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.discovermagazine.com\/the-sciences\/why-are-there-no-green-stars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">There are physical reasons why green stars don&#8217;t exist<\/a>. However, whereas blue dwarf stars are possible (and may be inevitable) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.guide-to-the-universe.com\/blue-dwarf-star.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">our universe has not been in existence long enough for them to evolve<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/scientists-have-grown-date-palms-from-2-000-year-old-seeds\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Israeli scientists have successfully grown date palm trees from seeds determined to be between 1,800 and 2,400 years old<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>However, even if we found a stash of seeds from the legendary ancient silphium plant, they might not grow in laboratories. A living silphium hasn&#8217;t been seen since Nero&#8217;s time. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/article\/20170907-the-mystery-of-the-lost-roman-herb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Romans much valued the plant as a medicinal herb, but try as they might, they could not cultivate Silphium from its heart-shaped seeds<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Buying books as &#8220;decor&#8221; is nothing new; people who stage houses for sale do it all the time. The books-by-the-foot vendors have seen a <em>huge<\/em> runup in sales, because people who want to look smart on Zoom calls <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/magazine\/2020\/12\/26\/books-by-the-foot-washington-dc-covid-books-440347\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fill a bookshelf opposite their desks with books that they have not read and will never read<\/a>. (Interestingly, the leader in that market segment is called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.booksbythefoot.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Books by the Foot<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/amerisleep.com\/blog\/what-are-the-most-common-nightmares\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Here are some interesting stats on the most common nightmares<\/a>. Peculiarly, they do not include the very common nightmare of searching your old school for some class and never finding it, prompting fears of failure to graduate, etc.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/woopow8\/status\/1343939147606605826\/photo\/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">This made me laugh too<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Coffee is being used as a COVID-19 diagnostic tool. Basically, when you wake up and smell the coffee, make damned sure that you can smell the coffee. Carol and I kid each other about being able to smell lots of things, including coffee but also bacon, garlic, ozone&#8230;and dog poop. If we ever catch Teh [&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":[41,218,33,169,39],"class_list":["post-4448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-biology","tag-books","tag-dreams","tag-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4448","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=4448"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4449,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4448\/revisions\/4449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}