{"id":5556,"date":"2026-02-05T14:26:32","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T21:26:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5556"},"modified":"2026-02-05T14:26:32","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T21:26:32","slug":"odd-lots-363","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=5556","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Sorry for being quiet for awhile. I\u2019ve had some significant health problems that have slowed me down, and a few major non-writing projects to pursue, like finding a new car to replace our 25-year-old Toyota 4Runner, and replacing the dead air conditioner in our smaller garage, which is also my workshop and ham shack. Summer is acumin in, and the garage is a mess from my having to clear space around the dead unit so a handyman can remove it and install a new one. I would have called the handyman who installed it, but alas, he died a couple of years ago.<\/li>\n<li>Being a long-time cheese fan, I was pleased to see <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedaily.com\/releases\/2026\/02\/260203030540.htm\" target=\"_blank\">this piece of research<\/a>, which associates higher dairy fat intake with lower incidence of Alzheimer\u2019s. Read the whole thing: The article has a long list of limitations in the data upon which the study was based, meaning it may not be as predictive as originally stated.<\/li>\n<li>If you haven\u2019t already bookmarked <a href=\"https:\/\/www.space.com\/32286-space-calendar.html\" target=\"_blank\">space.com\u2019s Space Calendar<\/a>, get on it. The site has listings for most launches, including China\u2019s (maybe) but mostly launches from the US and other western nations. Carol and I have seen a fair number of SpaceX launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and this is where we find most of the up-and-launchers.<\/li>\n<li>The Chichon volcano in southern Mexico killed over 2,000 people back in 1982, and buried whole towns under pyroclastic flows. The top blew off <em>a la<\/em> Mt. St. Helens, leaving an immense crater with a small lake at the bottom, and seismologists assumed it would be quiet for awhile. Well, <a href=\"https:\/\/indiandefencereview.com\/deadliest-volcano-waking-up-again-after-decades-of-silence\/\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cawhile\u201d may be over,<\/a> as the lake is picking up more volcanic sulfides and chlorides, with CO2 bubbles coming up from the lake\u2019s bottom.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidauthority.com\/youtube-background-play-broken-3636179\/\" target=\"_blank\">YouTube is now blocking background play<\/a> on a lot of mostly mobile browsers. Background play still works on Brave under Windows. I don\u2019t listen to music on my phone, so I\u2019m not sure if blocking background play is also happening on desktop OSes.<\/li>\n<li>It occurred to me recently, in these years of wildly active solar phenomena, that snow is the price we pay for auroras. Sigh. But no, I\u2019ll take a warm climate any day of the week. I\u2019ll only want to see snow again as a tourist.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sorry for being quiet for awhile. I\u2019ve had some significant health problems that have slowed me down, and a few major non-writing projects to pursue, like finding a new car to replace our 25-year-old Toyota 4Runner, and replacing the dead air conditioner in our smaller garage, which is also my workshop and ham shack. Summer [&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":[],"class_list":["post-5556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5556","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=5556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5557,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5556\/revisions\/5557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}