Odd Lots
- Wanna know why I’m an optimist? This is why I’m an optimist. (Among other things.)
- NASA says that cosmic rays are bad and getting worse, which has consequences in several areas, from heart health to manned spaceflight to climate. Cosmic rays seed clouds, increasing the Earth’s albedo and cooling the planet. Weirdly, cosmic rays are linked with cardiac arrhythmias.
- Cosmic rays will only get worse as we plunge headlong into a new solar minimum. Already, 60% of 2018 has been sunspot-free, and the minimum won’t happen until late 2019 at the earliest, and possibly not until 2020.
- Here’s a site with a boggling number of scans of old radio, TV, amateur, and SWL publications, books and magazines both, all of them apparently legally downloadable for free. The PDFs are high quality and full color where color exists.
- Canadian researchers have discovered a new type of aurora, and named it…wait for it…Steve.
- Barnes & Noble is planning a number of weird new tactics, none of which make any real sense, and taken together spell an ever-faster circling of the drain. When they go away, Manhattan print publishing is in very serious trouble.
- Carol and I finally “cut the cord,” and ditched cable TV. The content was mostly crap, and 40% of the outrageous fees we pay for cable TV goes to sports channels that we don’t watch. We’ve done well with an over-the-air antenna plus Netflix, and for over-the-air, this site helps you figure out where the transmitters are in your area so you can aim the antenna correctly.
- When you’e good and damned tired of Internet cat pictures and would prefer a little mechanical mayhem instead, feast on this ten-minute video of trucks and RVs hitting the same low-clearance bridge. I saw a truck do this once, on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago, back when I was in college. The top of the truck peeled back, the truck buckled, and suddenly there was head lettuce rolling all over the place.
- Who’s responsible for the obesity plague? The Federal government and its politicized nutrition science. Here’s a good summary from Gary Taubes.
- The study didn’t show causality, but the correlation is intriguing: People with high cholesterol had better brain health after age 85. What this means is probably that cholesterol doesn’t matter. Put those statins down and work on other areas like cutting carbs and especially sugar.
- Weird Stuff Warehouse in Silicon Valley just closed down. Bummer. I never failed to drop in there when I was in the Valley. Stores like that are increasingly rare, and seeing this makes me want to head down to Apache Surplus in south Phoenix while they’re still open, whether I need more junk or not.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: ebooks · electronics · geophysics · health · science · TV
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I read an interview of Taube’s wife where she was asked if she and their children followed his diet. Answer: no way.
I’d be interested in reading that. Do you recall where it was published?
There’s a hint at the end of this article:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/thin-body-of-evidence-why-i-have-doubts-about-gary-taubess-why-we-get-fat/
But note that this is the “Scientific” American, as you can tell by the total absence of rigor, which has been replaced with feelsies.
Not much meat in that article. Yes, it’s about stats, and I think people who digest carbs well are the outliers. I know a lot of people who have gone low- or no-carb and lost a great deal of weight. I know maybe two people who can binge on carbs and not gain.
Not sure if you saw my series on diets some years ago, which basically says, Try things to see if they work for YOU. Taubes’ wife may not like Atkins, but Taubes presents an enormous amount of evidence in GCBC that the diet works for many or perhaps most people.
I’ve been able to maintain my weight by not ingesting sugar except on rare occasions. I still eat bread and certain other carb products–corn and potatoes, in moderation–and don’t gain. Sugar seems to be the key factor in a lot of people’s weight problems, and certainly is in mine. I always tell people to knock out the sugar first, and see what happens. Most of the time, they tell me they’ve lost weight.
I haven’t read SciAm for twenty-five years. How low fall the mighty.
I had a consult with the late, abused Dr. Atkins at his Manhattan office. Note that a major part of his method included supplements, such as trivalent Chromium. In this, he advanced beyond the “Scarsdale” diet. And, despite all of the abuse and lies, it turns out he was right. Not 100% correct for 100% of the population, but a lot better than conventional “wisdom”.
I agree about the sugar, but for me, even complex carbs are a problem. However, as opposed to the extreme paleo people, my experience is that a small of amount of carbs is necessary, especially if doing endurance exercises. This is where a familiarity with glycemic indices is useful.
> scans
Don’t forget archive.org. I’ve spent much of the last six months’ worth of evenings browsing the SF section of their pulp magazine archive. There are thousands of issues of, my best guess, a hundred and fifty different SF magazines, about a hundred and forty of which I’d never heard of before. I found dozens of short stories and a few novellas from the likes of Jack Vance and Keith Laumer that I’d never seen before, some new Zelaznys and Eric Frank Russell stories, and a couple of authors I’d never heard of who turned out to be pretty good, but were never reprinted or anthologized that I’m aware of.
Have you investigated the Pulpscans Group on Yahoo? Archive.org is only the tip of the iceberg.
I’d never heard of them! I suspect you’ve just diverted another large block of my time…
Yes, lots of old computer mags there also. – https://archive.org/details/magazine_rack
Regarding “This is why I’m an optimist”: We have more disposable income + We are smarter + We are freer + We are richer = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFZB8Bk0MPE
I feel guilty about Barnes and Noble. There was a time when I bought a lot of computer books there. Then I switched to Amazon to save 30%. Now I do most of my computer book reading on Safari Books Online. I have bought a lot of their reprints of classic literature–inexpensive paperbacks with footnotes and introductions by scholars but I doubt that is much help.
I’m not surprised at the number of RVs and rental trucks that hit the bridge. My dad rented one once to move some furniture and let’s just say many prayers were said.