{"id":4682,"date":"2022-04-04T15:10:47","date_gmt":"2022-04-04T22:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4682"},"modified":"2022-04-04T15:10:48","modified_gmt":"2022-04-04T22:10:48","slug":"odd-lots-333","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4682","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I got caught in <a href=\"https:\/\/carbuzz.com\/news\/canceled-tesla-cybertruck-is-dead\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">an April Fools hoax<\/a> that (as my mother would say) sounded too true to be funny: That Tesla canceled all plans to produce its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tesla.com\/cybertruck\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Cybertruck<\/a>. (Read the last sentence, as I failed to do.) I like Musk; he has guts and supports space tech. About his Cybertruck concept, um&#8230;no. It looks like an origami, or else something that escaped from a third-shelf video game. The world would go on without it, and he might use the money to do something even cooler, whatever that might be.<\/li>\n<li>Oh, and speaking of Elon Musk: <a href=\"https:\/\/pjmedia.com\/news-and-politics\/stacey-lennox\/2022\/04\/04\/great-news-elon-musk-becomes-twitters-largest-shareholder-after-conducting-a-poll-n1586696\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">He just bought almost 10% of Twitter<\/a>, to the tune of about $3B. He is now the biggest outside shareholder. This is not a hoax, and I wonder if it&#8217;s only the beginning. Twitter is famous for suspending people without explaining what they did wrong, sometimes for things that seem ridiculously innocuous. A major shareholder could put pressure on Twitter&#8217;s management from the inside to cut out that kind of crap. It&#8217;s been done elsewhere. And boy, if anybody can do it, he can.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.energy.gov\/ne\/articles\/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nuclear energy has the highest capacity factor of any form of energy<\/a>, meaning the highest percentage of time that energy producers spend actually producing energy. I knew that from my readings on the topic. What shocked me is that there is in fact an Office of Nuclear Energy under the DOE. I&#8217;m glad they exist, but boy, they hide well.<\/li>\n<li>The Register (&#8220;Biting the hand that feeds IT&#8221;) published <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2022\/03\/23\/c_not_a_language\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a fascinating article about how C has slowly evolved into an Interface Definition Language (IDL).<\/a> C was never intended to do that, and actually does a pretty shitty job of it. Ok, I&#8217;m not a software engineer, but the way to build a new operating system is to define the IDL <em>first<\/em>, and work backwards from there. C is now 50 years old, sheesh. It&#8217;s time to start again, and start fresh, using a language (like Rust) that actually supports some of the security features (like memory protection and safe concurrency) that C lacks. This is not Pascal sour grapes. I&#8217;m studying Rust, even though I may never develop anything using it. Somehow, it just smells like the future.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/wine-type-2-diabetes-food-2711772\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Drinking wine with food (as I almost always do) may reduce your chances of developing type 2 diabetes<\/a>. It&#8217;s not taken up in the article, but I have this weird hunch that sweet wines weren&#8217;t part of the study. Residual sugar is a real thing, and I&#8217;m drinking way less of it than I did 20 years ago.<\/li>\n<li>People have been getting in fistfights over this for most of a century, but <a href=\"https:\/\/herf.medium.com\/why-standard-time-is-better-e586b500923\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">establishing Standard Time year-round may be better than year-round Daylight Savings Time<\/a>. I&#8217;m mostly neutral on the issue. Arizona is on permanent DST and we like it fine. The problems really occur at high latitudes, where there isn&#8217;t much daylight in winter to begin with, so shifting it an hour in either direction doesn&#8217;t actually help much.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.foodbeast.com\/news\/van-leeuwen-kraft-mac-and-cheese-ice-cream\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">There is Macaroni and Cheese Ice Cream<\/a>. From Kraft. Really. I wouldn&#8217;t lie to you. In fact, I doubt I would even imagine it, and I can imagine a <em>lot<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>Optimists live longer than pessimists&#8211;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/science\/2022\/mar\/07\/reasons-to-be-cheerful-optimists-live-longer-says-study\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">especially older optimists<\/a>. Dodging enough slings and arrows of outrageous fortune somehow just makes the whole world look brighter, I guess.<\/li>\n<li>Finally, some stats suggesting that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.axios.com\/political-polarization-twitter-cable-news-ac9699c6-260d-4141-b511-5c7193566ea1.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">our hyperpartisan hatefest online has pushed a lot of people out of political parties into the independent zone<\/a>&#8211;where I&#8217;ve been most of my post-college life. 42% of Americans are political independents, compared to 29% who are Democrats and 27% who are Republicans. I&#8217;m on Twitter, but I don&#8217;t post meanness and (as much as possible) don&#8217;t read it. And if Mr. Musk has his way with them, I may be able to post links to ivermectin research without getting banned.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got caught in an April Fools hoax that (as my mother would say) sounded too true to be funny: That Tesla canceled all plans to produce its Cybertruck. (Read the last sentence, as I failed to do.) I like Musk; he has guts and supports space tech. About his Cybertruck concept, um&#8230;no. It looks [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[75,37,39,43,32,46,13],"class_list":["post-4682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove","tag-energy","tag-food","tag-health","tag-humor","tag-programming","tag-psychology","tag-wine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4682","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=4682"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4683,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4682\/revisions\/4683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}