Odd Lots
- It looks like we’re closing in on deciphering the Linear A script, which was the written form of the Minoan language, spoken between ~2000 BC and 1450 BC. We don’t know much about the Minoans, who were mostly displaced or absorbed by the Mycenaeans, mostly because we can’t read what survives of their writing.
- I’ve been using Windows since before there was Windows, and I never heard of this until last week: You can pause updates in Task Manager by pressing and holding the Ctrl key. It’s that simple: Just the Ctrl key. This is useful if your tracking memory or CPU usage of processes, because the display updates once per second and processes jump around as their resource usage changes. This applies to Windows XP, 7, 8, and 10—and possibly more, but those were the versions I had on hand.
- Now that they’re ducking and dodging lawsuits from doctors, the FDA finally admits that MDs may prescribe Ivermectin, whether on-label or off-label. Now it’s time to purge the FDA of those who tried to ruin the careers of MDs for legally prescribing Ivermectin.
- Dropping salt to lower blood pressure may not work without a balance between sodium and potassium. My godmother was healthy but had some hypertension. She stopped using salt cold-turkey. A year later she was dead.
- Researchers at City of Hope have discovered an anti-cancer chemo compound that targets solid tumors and only solid tumors. Oh, and not just tumors in one organ or location, but all of them. This could be a game changer if it can be tested and checked for side effects.
- What isn’t a game-changer is LK-99, the supposed room-temperature superconductor that’s gotten a lot of ink (pixels?) in the last couple of months. This doesn’t mean we should stop looking.
- Invisible supernovas that were once invisible stars made of invisible matter are called bosenovas. If you know your ‘60s pop music, the jokes write themselves.
- Here’s my own weird theory: Dark matter and boson stars are invisible because they are in fact 4-dimensional matter bending our 3-dimensional space without actually existing within our 3-dimensional space. My proof is this: Ya got any better ideas?
- Here’s what I consider the strangest list of books ever: The 20 Best-Selling Assembly Books of All Time. My own assembly book is #2. SolidWorks gets several places in the stack-rank. But #1, egad: It’s a popular fantasy novel about werewolves. Hey, with the title Assembly, how could it not be there?
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Looks like someone is using AI and it didn’t understand the definition of “Assembly” or the context thereof.
That, of course, was my first theory. It’s also a weird list because it goes on a lot longer than 20 books…95, in fact. An awful lot of those are CAD-focused. A dozen are so are assembly manuals for cars, guns, etc. There’s a second novel called Assembly but there’s no synopsis and in truth, I’m not that interested.
If it wasn’t AI, it was script work: A crawler pulled down every book listed on Amazon with “assembly” in the title or metadata, and then sorted them by…something. But if I had to guess (or bet) it would be AI.
I’m voting for “paid product placement by SolidWorks.”
Probably 90% of all cooking-related bloigs use the same template, and all shill for some specific food or kitchen product. They claim to be cooking blogs, but they’re really ads.
Amazon ratings themselves have the same issue, not human curated.
Your old book is #49 for example, but ahead of it are things like “The Catholic Wedding Planner” and other random stuff, and multiple versions (kindle/hb/pb) of similar books.
Are you sure you’re looking at the same list? #49 is one of several books about SolidWorks, and I see no instance of the word “Catholic” on the page. None of my older books are anywhere on the list.
Whoops. I misunderstood you. The stack rank you were talking about is Amazon’s Best-Sellers in Assembly Language Programming. And yes, there’s the Catholic wedding planner, alongside a book from the same publisher, the title of which contains an F-bomb. Sheesh,
I first ran across the issue a few months back, when “Best Sellers in SwiftUI” didn’t give me much in the way of results, and so I tried “Best Sellers in Apple Programming” – and the first book was a bodice ripper of some kind.
> Dropping salt to lower blood pressure may not work without a balance between sodium and potassium.
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I think the salt-and-blood-pressure thing came up here once before; I mentioned I had considerable datalogging showing no change whatsoever with or without salt, and you said you did.
Obviously, we are not all spherical patients of uniform density…
Following up, my blood pressure used to range 150-ish, +/- 10, until I went on a ketogenic, mostly-carnivore diet. In a few months it went down to an average of 105, sometimes dipping into the high 80s.
Carbohydrates are an efficient source of calories, but TANSTAAFL.
> Minoan language
Two written languages were in use, identified as Linear A and Linear B. Michael Ventris approached Linear B as a cryptographic problem, and using those tools, showed that it was a dialect of ancient Greek with a different alphabet.
Nobody knows why they used a different alphabet, but it could be something like why some former Soviet bloc countries moved from Latin to Cyrillic and back to Latin. (and in at least one case, it looks like one is moving back to Cyrillic again)
Likewise, Romanian moved from Latin to Cyrillic and back to Latin, the last move having been in the 19th century, I think.