Odd Lots
- It appears that Learning Computer Architecture with the Raspberry Pi is a live project and will be published sometime late summer. (I don’t think the June date given on Amazon is realistic.) I’ll keep you posted.
- An art student built this bogglingly complex mechanical clock out of…wood. It doesn’t just tell the time–it writes out the time every minute. I think he’s in the wrong curriculum. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- From Charlie Martin: Are black holes really quantum computers? Depends on whether there really are gravitons.
- Also from Aeon, an article that agrees with what I’ve been saying for years: Even if LENR (i.e., cold fusion) isn’t actually fusion, it might be something interesting and useful, and research should continue.
- I’ve also been saying this for years: Fruit juice is no healthier than soda. Both are nearly all sugar, and both will eventually kill you. Fruit juice is basically fruit-flavored sugar; all the stuff that might conceivably be good for you (fiber, mostly) is thrown away.
- It gets worse: New research suggests that long-term vegetarian diets predispose people to heart disease and cancer. It’s complicated; read the whole thing, and then consider this item from phys.org, which may be the research that the other article is talking about. What Cornell was researching were evolutionary adaptations to different diets, and if you eat against your evolution, you may be causing yourself problems. That seems reasonable to me.
- Something about this purely textual clock appeals to me.
- Here we have Wayne’s Radios, which focuses on vintage radios, some deco, most midcentury modern, all of them interesting. Oh, and a few dinner plates for flavor. Or something.
- Nonetheless, if you’re going out to dinner, insist on plates. Because eating dinner out of vintage radios can be hazardous to your health.
- This is by far the worst wine I’ve ever tasted. The runner-up was evidently so bad they don’t make it anymore. No other wine I’ve ever tried was even in their ballpark.
- Is there now or has there ever been a wintergreen cream cordial? I’ve kept an eye open for years for something that tastes like Canada mints and is the color of Pepto Bismol. Why? Because contrarian.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: books · food · gadgets · health · science · wine · writing
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I was never happy eating meat, I would have stopped at 14 if I’d felt I’d had the power.
So health never came into the equation.
I’s been 37 years now since I last ate meat, next year it will be 2/3rds of my life.
But then, 1979 was also the year I got my first computer, a KIM-1.
Michael
Soda has sucrose or hfcs, fruits have fructose. If you’re just concerned about sugar, both are bad. If you’re going to drink a sugary drink though, the type of sugar makes a difference, at least in energy levels.
Just something to keep in mind.
Fructose doesn’t affect insulin directly but loads the liver, and over a period of time can cause fatty liver disease, which in extreme cases can be fatal. Fructose also appears to drive abdominal fat retention, which is the worst kind of fat to have, from a health perspective. So given a choice between diabetes and liver disease, I’ll choose…steak.
The wine, according to their ad, is not designed to please your palate, but your pallet. Evidently, it is meant to poured onto skids, leading to the concept of skid row.
This seems somewhat relevant: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-04/cc-eic033116.php
Thanks for posting that. Quick summary for onlookers: A new drug that reduces bad cholesterol and raises good cholesterol appears to have no effect on heart health. I’ve had my doubts about how relevant cholesterol levels are to general heart health for a long time. Inflammation appears to be the killer issue. We don’t hear nearly as much about that.
Back in the 1970s we were told that the arterial plaque that wound up blocking arteries was solidified cholesterol which precipitated out of the bloodstream.
Of course, Accepted Medical Science may have changed its mind several times since then…
I wonder how much of Learning Computer Architecture with the Raspberry Pi will still be applicable to the various models of Pi that have been introduced since then (Pi 2, Pi 3, Pi Zero)?
There may be some, but the way the deal worked out, I wrote the chapters on foundational issues, and someone else wrote the later chapters on Pi specifics. So if the problems exist, they exist after my last chapter.
I expect it all to be applicable, the differences between the different models do not prevent you from running the same software on them.
The differences are just how fast they are, and what interfaces are built-in. The Pi Zero may be a struggle to use, but as a more practical matter, once you get a USB hub so that you can connect multiple things to it and a USB network adapter, you are up into the price range of the Pi3, so you may as well get one of them.