Odd Lots
- Older people apparently lose some of their ability to retain memories via poor sleep. So how much worse will it be someday for younger people who simply refuse to be in bed for more than six hours at a shot?
- Related, and also from UC Berkeley: Refusing to sleep makes you selfish and grouchy, and in some cases incapable of sustaining a relationship.
- Steve Jobs may have died from a high-fructose vegan diet. We were killer apes long before we were peaceful farmers, and we became peaceful farmers because it was that or go extinct. I’ve made peace with my inner killer ape; in fact, he’s got a chain around his neck and he does what I tell him–which is mostly shut up and eat your steak.
- Or krill. The total mass of all humans on Earth is far less than that of all krill. (287 megatons vs. 500 megatons.) So get out there and eat your krill!
- The World Trade Organization has given Antigua permission to ignore US copyright law and sell copyrighted works (movies and music, I’m guessing) without paying squat to copyright holders. The provision under which this was granted was approved by most nations, including the US.
- A standard deviation here, a standard deviation there, and sooner or later you’re talking new physics.
- The alphas doth protest too much, methinks. (See yesterday’s entry.)
- For more on tribal psychology and how alphas use it to dominate and exploit their people, see Colin Wilson’s book Rogue Messiahs. Also, virtually anything by the formidable Jared Diamond.
- If I didn’t love Newegg before (I did) I sure love them now.
- What? Pez still exists? I broke my last Pez dispenser by trying to fill it with candy corn in (I think) 1958. I might be a little more careful with one of these.
- Why do women hesitate to date short men? My theory: It’s a primal worry that short men may be Neanderthals. (I’m serious. Ok, half serious. 47% serious? What percentage of Neander/Sap pregnancies were sterile? That serious.)
- The Neanderthals were all over Siberia, and scientists have found that present-day Siberians have cold-climate adaptations that most of the world’s population do not have. Now, where d’ya think that might have come from? (Dating short men?)
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: health · humor · neanderthals · piracy · psychology · science
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More evidence against Steve Jobs’ diet: Ashton Kutcher, who’s playing Jobs in a biopic, tried to follow Jobs’ diet, and it put him in the hospital days before shooting was to start. Yow!
Good job by Newegg’s lawyers, but I still don’t like the company these days. I used to, they were my default source for just about anything they carried. Eventually I learned better. Their practice of shipping delicate devices such as hard drives without proper padding was widely known. I had one drive that the cable wouldn’t stay connected to because someone, somehow, had pulled it out without pressing the release and the plastic the connection hooked onto was chipped. Now how do you suppose that happened on a drive sold to me as new? They had long been rumored to ship returns back out without bothering to check if they worked, and I tend to think that’s what they sent me. I returned it of course, but I wonder what other sucker got stuck. So when I assembled my last computer rather than order parts from Newegg (as I had for the half-dozen or so before it) it was Amazon all the way.
I use Amazon these days as often as Newegg, but Newegg sometimes has things I can’t find on Amazon. (To be fair, the opposite is often true as well.) Perhaps I’ve just been lucky, in that goods from them have never arrived damaged for me. My luck has even extended to eBay, where I buy a lot of used Dell gear and odd parts, often NOS. (I haven’t had quite the same luck with kites on eBay as with computer junk.)
As well – about sleep – if you snore, get tested for sleep apnea – you can “sleep” for 8-10 hours, but if you have apnea you are NOT actually getting any real rest…
Next-up, Neanderthals & “shortness” – perhaps it is not being short that is ultimately the problem, but that short Neanderthals may resemble dinner….
Your URL there was munged–I fixed it.
I’ve heard that before, of course, and my guess is that Neander and Sap ate one another when the eatin’ was possible, but if it was a serious habit I think there’d be more evidence in the fossil record.
There is another hazard of Neader/Sap nookie: Neanderthal skulls were significantly larger than HSap skulls, and a different shape. At that time we were trying to evolve past the expansion of our own skulls, with mixed success to this day. In pre-industrial times, one in twenty pregnancies ended in the death of the mother, often because the infant couldn’t pass through the mother’s pelvic girdle. Now, add to that the possibility of a Neander/Sap cross with a big, odd-shaped head, and I think such pregnancies would be fatal much more frequently. Women paid attention to such things even then, and the smart ones probably avoided coupling with Neanderthals. Short stature was one reliable indicator of Neanderthal origins (there were others, of course) and after a hundred thousand years or so, such caution was primal and not purely rational. (We have an even older primal fear of snakes.) I wouldn’t be surprised if that caution existed to this day. It’s just another Jeff Duntemann Hypothesis, but it’s not beyond possibilty, and I may work it into my Neanderthals novel when I finally get to it.