{"id":4855,"date":"2023-02-25T14:08:18","date_gmt":"2023-02-25T21:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4855"},"modified":"2023-02-25T14:08:18","modified_gmt":"2023-02-25T21:08:18","slug":"odd-lots-339","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=4855","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.azfamily.com\/2023\/02\/24\/tesla-catches-fire-second-time-while-being-towed-after-crashing-into-scottsdale-building\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">A Tesla EV caught fire here in Scottsdale after it hit a building.<\/a> (No explanation yet why it crashed.) The cops closed off half a mile of Scottsdale Road (the big street down the middle of the long, narrow city) for most of yesterday, essentially cutting the city in half. Later the same day, while a towing firm was towing what was left of the car away, it caught fire yet again. This is not a good look, and won\u2019t help popularize EVs.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/clarkesworldmagazine.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Clarkesworld<\/a>, a respected SFF magazine, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2023\/02\/24\/1159286436\/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">closed for submissions after receiving a lot of crappy stories written by AIs like ChatGPT<\/a>. Having messed a little with ChatGPT, I don\u2019t blame them one iota. <\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/earthsky.org\/tonight\/bright-planets-west-after-sunset-venus-and-jupiter-conjunction-feb-mar-2023\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Venus and Jupiter will be only a full-Moon\u2019s width apart just after sunset the night of March 1<\/a>. Take it in if your skies are clear. This sort of thing doesn\u2019t happn very often.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/smart-news\/hip-hop-and-mozart-improve-flavor-swiss-cheese-180971721\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Swiss Scientists having been playing music in the rooms used for aging cheese, hoping to create interesting new flavors.<\/a> Hip-hop, Mozart, and Led Zeppelin each had a cheese wheel. After aging, flavors were tested and the Mozart had a milder flavor than Led Zeppelin and Hip-hop. Good; now let\u2019s see if this trick works for wine.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/climateskeptics\/comments\/10t8ljf\/no_global_warming_for_8_years_and_5_months_per\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">NASA satellite data says that there\u2019s been no global warming for eight years, five months.<\/a> It\u2019s been a chilly winter here, but back in the summer of 1990 we were in the pool in March, after a hot snap took the daytime temps up to 120F.<\/li>\n<li>This is disturbing: <a href=\"https:\/\/hotair.com\/david-strom\/2023\/02\/09\/fauci-now-he-tells-us-n529526\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dr. Fauci evidently knew all along that injected intramuscular vaccines would prevent neither infection nor transmission.<\/a> He was co-author of a peer-reviewed paper in <em>Cell<\/em>, a respected journal. The paper explains why: COVID and other respiratory viruses enter through the mucosa, and do not infect the body systemically. Vaccines injected into muscle don\u2019t get out to where the viruses replicate until the infection is well underway and contagious.<\/li>\n<li>This is the weirdest and (unintentionally) funniest article I\u2019ve ever read in the <em>Grauniad<\/em>, er, <em>Guardian<\/em>. According to the author, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2023\/jan\/23\/reading-is-precious-but-the-cult-of-book-ownership-can-be-smug-and-middle-class\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">owning quantities of books is a cultish thing, all very smug and (ewwww!) middle-class<\/a>. I\u2019m pretty sure a certain somebody is trying to write her way into the elites, and I\u2019m even surer that pieces like this will <em>not<\/em> do the trick.<\/li>\n<li>A large-scale study published in the highly respected peer-reviewed <em>Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews<\/em> found that masks provide little or no protection against aerosol viruses. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cochranelibrary.com\/cdsr\/doi\/10.1002\/14651858.CD006207.pub6\/full\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The study itself is here<\/a>. It\u2019s a serious slog to read, but several news sources are highlighting it, to the mask cult\u2019s incandescent fury. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearscience.com\/articles\/2023\/02\/11\/masking_likely_did_little_to_slow_the_spread_of_covid-19_cochrane_review_finds_881056.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Here\u2019s something from Real Clear Science<\/a>. Again, if high-quality masks are worn absolutely perfectly they may have\u2026some\u2026effect, but my own experiments with masks show that such perfection is impossible. Exhaling blew air jets around the edges of every mask I tried, not only releasing viruses, but sending them on a joyride that could have gone six or eight feet or more.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41598-018-38461-y\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Another new study published in <em>Nature<\/em> finds that cholesterol is <em>not<\/em> the killer we\u2019ve been warned against all our lives.<\/a> The results showed that cholesterol levels from 210-249 were not only harmless, but protective, in both men and women. The report is surprisingly readable as such things go, with good graphs.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Tesla EV caught fire here in Scottsdale after it hit a building. (No explanation yet why it crashed.) The cops closed off half a mile of Scottsdale Road (the big street down the middle of the long, narrow city) for most of yesterday, essentially cutting the city in half. Later the same day, while [&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":[41,227,224,253,39],"class_list":["post-4855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-astronomy","tag-climate","tag-covid","tag-evs","tag-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855","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=4855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4856,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4855\/revisions\/4856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}