geophysics
- 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.
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