making
- Eating red meat will not hurt your heart. This is not news to people who’ve been paying attention. Alas, meat has been slandered as deadly for so many years that we’re going to be shooting this lie in the head for decades before it finally bleeds to death.
- There are at least two efforts underway to back-breed the aurochs, a very large and ill-tempered ruminant that went extinct in 1627. I made use of aurochs in The Cunning Blood; the Moomoos (basically, cowboys on Hell) had difficulty herding them until they domesticated the mastodon and rode mastodons instead of horses.
- Who will fact-check the fact-checkers? In truth, there is no answer to this question, which heads toward an infinite regress at a dead run. Nobody trusts anybody else in journalism today. To me, this means that journalism as an industry might as well be dead.
- Even the New York Times is willing to admit that cold weather is 17 times deadlier than warm weather. This is one reason we moved to Arizona: Winters have been nasty in Colorado for several years, and I have an intuition that flatlining solar activity may make things a lot colder before they get warmer.
- Russian scientists evidently agree with me. And y’know, the Russians might just know a few things about cold weather.
- The Army is accelerating development of a railgun compact enough to fire from something the size and shape of a howitzer. 10 rounds per minute, too. With one of those you could poke a lot of very big holes in very big things in a very big hurry. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.)
- Can’t afford a howitzer railgun? How about a snowboard powered by ducted fans? The idea is cool. Watching the guy put it together in fast-motion is cooler.
- SF writer Paul Mauser suggests that publishing’s gatekeeper function has been crowdsourced on the indie side, and I agree. You can’t always tell if an indie book is good before you buy it. Guess what? You can’t always tell if a print book is good before you buy it. Manhattan’s imprints can barely pay the rent and want interns to work in editorial for free. Warning: It’s handy to have gatekeepers who know how gates work, and why.
- Gatekeepers? Where were the gatekeepers when Kaavya Viswanathan allegedly cribbed a whole novel together from other authors’ work and then sold it to Little, Brown for half a million bucks?
- Pertinent to the above: There’s a very nice site devoted to plagiarism, which is evidently a far bigger problem than I would have guessed.
- An obscure author (of three memoirs) claimed that indie publishing is “an insult to the written word.” Watch Larry Correia lay waste to her essay. Don’t be drinking Diet Mountain Dew while you read it, now. Green stuff pouring out of your nose is generally embarrassing.
- This item is probably not what you think it is. The manufacturer could probably have used a little gatekeeping on the product design side.
- 2014 was a lousy year for adult fiction and nonfiction sales both. SF was down 7%; fantasy down 13%; computer books down 12%. To sell anything at all, you need to be chasing all those bookish kids who are supposedly all off somewhere playing computer games. Or something.
- A “fix-up” in the SFF universe is a novel constructed out of shorter works, with some edge-smoothing to make the whole thing hang together. Having seen the big list of SFF fix-ups on Wikipedia, I realize that I’ve read a fair number of them without ever realizing that they were in fact fix-ups. So I guess the techniques work. Should I perhaps begin The Everything Machine with a slightly modified “Drumlin Boiler”? I’m now seriously considering it. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
- Too much salt may kill you. So may too little. And it may not kill you at all, in any quantity. So why all the kvetching about salt?
- We may live in a much bigger galaxy than we thought–and a corrugated one, at that,
- A new class of drugs called orexin antagonists have begun to be marketed as sleeping pills, but may also confer resistance to Alzheimer’s Disease. New and still tentative studies suggest that orexin antagonists may also be used to reduce appetite. (PDF; Read the whole paper, or at least find the section on orexin.)
- The first 3-D printer for metal is about ready to mass-produce. It’s an odd system in that it uses metal clay, which must then be…yes indeed…baked. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Tom Naughton of Fat Head fame reviews Malcolm Kendrick’s book Doctoring Data, and if you’ve ever had a suspicion that medical studies are a stretch (or in some cases completely bogus…remember Ancel Keyes, the consummate medical fraudster?) it sounds like a great read.
- A guy snuck into several Ivy League universities and acted like a student for four years without being noticed. It’s unclear how much he learned, but the article makes the (to me, obvious) case that today an American college education has far less to do with education and almost everything to do with credentialing, and sorting Americans into populations of winners and losers.
- And he didn’t invent the concept. There was a TV sitcom in 1965 called Hank, about a good-natured campus food-truck guy with a secret life sneaking into classes, so he could someday have a better job than driving a food truck. I followed the series, and remember it fondly. Alas, Dick Kallman, the lead, was murdered in 1980.
- Now that I know they’re out there, I’m going to start watching for abandoned microwave towers. So is this primarily a California thing? Ever seen any east of Nevada?
