Odd Lots
- Yes, I know: I haven’t posted an Odd Lots since late October. A few of the items here have been in the notefile for awhile and may be a little stale, but I’ve had other things on my mind than scanning the Web for links, heh.
- Forbes.com will not let you in if you’re using an ad blocker. G’bye, Forbes. You were barely worth reading even without the risk of your ads serving malware.
- Vegetable oils can kill you. If you must use them, use coconut oil, which is by far the best of the bunch. As for me and my house, well, we serve butter. (Thanks to Tom Roderick for the link.)
- Nice short historical piece on the Apollo Guidance Computer.
- Global warming may be caused, in part, by ozone depletion, in a subtle pas de deux with volcanoes. We’ve done a good job protecting the ozone layer in recent years, which may account (again, in part) for the Inconvenient Pause.
- Related: Excellent long-form article on climate and human civilization over the past 18,000 years. Make sure you get a good close look at that poster.
- Free Pascal 3.0 is out. Get it here. Lazarus 1.6 is being built with it, and should be out later this month.
- While you’re at it, see this interview with Florian Klaempfl, creator of Free Pascal.
- A satellite abandoned almost 48 years ago has begun transmitting again. Nobody knows why. (Thanks to Jonathan O’Neal for the link.)
- The common contention that 97% of the world’s scientists agree that global warming is an urgent problem is a lie. Repeating that lie doesn’t make it true…but it does make you a liar. (Thanks to Charlie Martin for the link.)
- When electronic surplus shops die, a little bit of geek culture dies with them. We have OEM Parts in the Springs, and Apache Surplus and Reclamation here in Phoenix, but I’ve seen any number of others go belly-up in the last twenty years.
- A gunmaker is going to carve up a chunk of meteoric iron and create a number of pistols. Not quite the “space gun” we imagine (and nowhere near as badass as Vera) but a space gun nonetheless.
- $40 of the $100 or so you pay for cable TV goes to sports content. This is one reason (and perhaps the main one) that Carol and I dropped TV when we ordered cable here in Phoenix. TV sports can’t die fast enough to suit me.
- Winemakers say that consumers want fuller-bodied and fruitier wines, but less alcohol. Those two factors are incompatible with the winemaking process, so wineries routinely under-report alcohol content in wine. Incredibly, the article’s author managed to blame part of this on global warming.
- 12 reasons you should not own a bichon. Hey, I own four. I’m a contrarian, after all.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: aerospace · dogs · electronics · pascal · programming · TV · wine
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> space gun
While most US space capsules came down in the sea, the USSR’s capsules came down on land. Often in quite remote areas.
After one capsule’s crew was trapped inside by wolves, the Soviets found room for an AK-47 in the payload. Later, they developed a special lightweight “space gun” to send up with the cosmonauts.
> electronic surplus shops
We never had any in my entire state, as far as I know. None of the local Radio Shack stores carried much, and that little was staggeringly priced. I desperately needed some components once, and wound up paying Mouser $15 shipping and fondling for less than a dollar’s worth of parts.
At least now with eBay and Amazon, I can buy some bench stock without being raped for shipping charges.
> FreePascal 3.0
Wow, it seems like just the other day when they went from 0.9 to 1.0…
I thought the gun they keep in the Soyuz capsules was a shotgun.
Speaking of bichons, how’s the Flying Squad dealing with the move?
They have a quarter-acre back yard to explore, and they frisk around like puppies. QBit has developed a taste for the olives that fall out of our olive tree, and Jack took huge exception to our fiberglass mermaid until we moved her to the top of the water feature. None of them seem especially interested in the quail. We did note that bunnies and lizards are suddenly absent from the yard. Pure coincidence…
So _that_’s why I can’t get into Forbes. Heh.
Coconut oil is loaded with saturated fat. No way i would touch that stuff. Strangely, the article does not mention any temperatures, or if it has do with the smoke point. That makes the article absolutely useless.
Great link, as usual. Thanx Jeff!
Can’t tell whether you are serious or joking when you say that you’d never touch coconut oil. If you are serious because you believe saturated fat is harmful, I’m afraid you are one of the many victims of the misinformation our government and its co-conspirators have been feeding us for the past four or five decades. I’m a fellow victim.
Coconut oil and most animal fats are about the most healthful fats. Do yourself a favor and check with some modern, non-biased sources to verify that.
When i removed saturated fats from my diet, my LDL plummeted from ~130 to just under 80. I also lost most of my desire for meat. So, i’m quite happy.
This is a good place to remember that almost all human traits are spectra, and that there are outliers. It’s impossible to declare that certain things are healthy or unhealthy without exception. All we can do is spot trends in the data.
My research suggests that genetics trumps everything. My LDL is already 80 or 90, and I eat saturated fats with almost every meal. It’s just how my genes are wired. Sodium has no effect on my blood pressure. What made a difference for me was cutting way back on carbs, especially sugar. There are people who metabolize carbs well, and you’re probably one of them. It would be interesting to know the evolutionary roots of differences like that, but I suspect we never will.
Yeah, it’s a person by person thing. I like to read about connections because what food or action causes what, then just try it out. Sodium doesn’t seem to bother me either. Like my mother, i have low blood pressure. Well, except mine’s on the line between normal and low. My body also does not seem to process folic acid. (Folate and Metafolate are fine though.)
Fats bother me, though i feel great after eating carbohydrates, and full too. (I read of an amino acid triggered by carbohydrates in the colon that causes that message.) So, all this research is really cool. The links really add to our knowledge. But, rules like do it this way or that? No thank you. I prefer to trust my own body (with a little testing to keep on track.)
an interesting thing to look at is the A to Z diet study, they tested several different diets and overall the range from the ‘best’ diet to the ‘worst’ was <10 pounds, but the range of weight loss/gain on each individual diet was about 40 pounds, showing that the individual reaction to the particular diet mattered far more than the diet itself.
Coconut oil is one of the healthiest of all vegetable oils, and is exponents better than any of the seed oils. The war on saturated fat was based on fraudulent science put forth by scamster Ancel Keys. Here’s a good high-level summary:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-science-of-saturated-fat-a-big-fat-surprise-about-nutrition-9692121.html
Trans fats are the ones you have to watch out for, as you do for aldehydes and other byproducts of raising oils to high temperatures while cooking. Carol and I use olive oil and coconut oil along with butter, and I’m constantly watching out for solid data on what oils work best at high temps.
Worry less.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/skeptic_Roy_Spencer.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_%28scientist%29
The guy quoted in the global warming article is well known – and not in a good way. Google is your friend.
Google is indeed my best friend, as it’s through Google that I’ve been able to find information on climate that isn’t smeared with the dogshit of politics. Roy Spencer is one voice in a growing shout against the politicization of climate science. I may not agree with all of his findings, but we certainly stand together on that point.
BTW, saying “Google is your friend” is impolite. It’s a sanitized way of saying, “Hey dumbass, here’s a link to something that supports my point, which you’d agree with if you weren’t such a dumbass.” I also take a dim
view of scare quotes. And if you call me or anyone else a denier, you’ll be banned without hesitation or regret.
I have to giggle every time I see a reference to Skeptical Science, which is one of the least skeptical sites out there. Note what Anthony Watts’ site says about it: “[Skeptical Science is unreliable] due to (1) deletion, extension and amending of user comments, and (2) undated post-publication revisions of article contents after significant user commenting.”
There’s some cranky “get off my lawn” in that reply there Jeff. Too bad, I advertised in your magazines back in the day, you seemed a little less fussy back then, although I remember a few swipes at Clinton from your editorial column – he only brought us eight years of relative peace and prosperity as well as the first federal budget surplus in two decades. Enjoy your new home, and watch out for those Arizona scorpions, which are painful but not lethal to you, but my vet assures me can be quite lethal to smallish dogs.
I’ll be moving along, no need to ban me. 73 (yes I’m a ham) and be well …
Exhaustion makes me cranky. Then again, I get some crazy hate mail from climate alarmists, and I’ve begun to get a little tired of it. I used to have a “climate” tag in my tag cloud, but I deleted it because it attracted crackpots. Lefties have called me a “moral coward” for refusing to condemn people they disapprove of, even if I don’t know them. I get called a racist for disliking Obamacare, which has so far shot two insurance plans out from under us. Hell, I get called a racist for calling it Obamacare.
Let’s just say that my patience with progressives is getting thin, particularly with respect to climate, for which the debate is spinning off into madness.
If you advertised in my magazines I owe you more courtesy than I showed you, and I’ll willingly apologize for that. Good luck and thanks for stopping by.
“A gunmaker is going to carve up a chunk of meteoric iron and create a number of pistols.”
Reminiscent of L. Sprague de Camp’s novel The Tritonian Ring, in which the decisive item is an anti-magical sword forged from meteoric iron. (Iron nullifies magical effects, a novelty in the Bronze Age milieu of the story.)