April 15th, 2016:
- A reminder: I try to credit anyone who sends me an interesting link when I post Odd Lots entries. If you don’t want to be credited by name for whatever reason, please tell me.
- Azounding is a brand-new announcement and promotion site for indie SFF. I’m participating, but with hauling stuff up and down stairs all the time, I really haven’t had the energy to get a promo together so far. But it’s definitely a site to check at least every few days lest you miss some countdown deals.
- More evidence that cholesterol has little if any link to heart disease, from a study that was done 40 years ago and never completely published. I smell Ancel Keys disease here, and I’m guessing tens of millions of people have died from it. (Thanks to Tom Roderick and several others for the link.)
- Neal Rest sends a link to another article on the same topic: Records found in dusty basement undermine decades of dietary advice.
- And still another, from reason.com. No, red meat and dairy is not a death sentence. It might in fact buy you additional years of life.
- Diseases out of Africa may have accelerated the Neanderthals’ demise. Or maybe they dawn-raided themselves into extinction. Or a billion other things. If God ever allows me to ask him ten questions, that’ll be #1.
- From Esther Schindler: NASA has released a new gravity map of Mars. How much ytterbium is in the Martian mascons? Restless minds want to know.
- Also from Esther: Women book air travel earlier than men, saving more money…and older people book the earliest of all. (Is that because time just goes faster for us?)
- Is it just me, or would calling #2531 a sunspot stretch the truth maybe a little? As I always ask in situations like this, What would Edmond Halley see?
- Gary Frerking sent me over to LumaStream LED lighting, which is developing a low-voltage lighting infrastructure that avoids the need to downconvert 120VAC to 12VDC in each bulb by doing the conversion up front. It looks like they’re targeting commercial lighting, but they’ve clearly proven out the idea that low-voltage DC systems can work.
- There’s a word for almost everything else in the English language; there should be a word for “the sadness that comes upon a tech writer when he must tip over a hundred pounds of his now-obsolete tech books (the ones he himself wrote) into the recycle bin.”
- A widely linked-to article speculates on how the ancient Egyptians could have made pyramid-building easier by turning their titanic rectangular blocks into dodecagons (12-sided polygons, done using rope and logs) and rolling them instead of dragging them. Problem is, a number of people misread the piece and said “dodecahedron” instead of “decagon” in their links. Geometry matters, people.
- Via Cory Doctorow: Original illustrations from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. 1864. Cool, but one wonders if they went a trifle cheap on the artist.
- My asshat alma mater is banning chalk, because somebody might get the vapors reading the word “Trump” in chalk. Sorry, fools. This is not what a real university does. I loathe Trump, but free speech trumps that, as it were. You get none of my money. And I will slander you mercilessly until the end of my days.
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