Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Yes, I know: I haven't posted an Odd Lots since late October. A few of the items here have been in the notefile for awhile and may be a little stale, but I've had other things on my mind than scanning the Web for links, heh.
• Forbes.com will not let you in if you're using an ad blocker. G'bye, Forbes. You were barely worth reading even without the risk of your ads serving malware.
• Vegetable oils can kill you. If you must use them, use coconut oil, which is by far the best of the bunch. As for me and my house, well, we serve butter. (Thanks to Tom Roderick for the link.)
• Nice short historical piece on the Apollo Guidance Computer.
• Global warming may be caused, in part, by ozone depletion, in a subtle pas de deux with volcanoes. We've done a good job protecting the ozone layer in recent years, which may account (again, in part) for the Inconvenient Pause.
• Related: Excellent long-form article on climate and human civilization over the past 18,000 years. Make sure you get a good close look at that poster.
• Free Pascal 3.0 is out. Get it here. Lazarus 1.6 is being built with it, and should be out later this month.
• While you're at it, see this interview with Florian Klaempfl, creator of Free Pascal.
• A satellite abandoned almost 48 years ago has begun transmitting again. Nobody knows why. (Thanks to Jonathan O'Neal for the link.)
• The common contention that 97% of the world's scientists agree that global warming is an urgent problem is a lie. Repeating that lie doesn't make it true...but it does make you a liar. (Thanks to Charlie Martin for the link.)
• When electronic surplus shops die, a little bit of geek culture dies with them. We have OEM Parts in the Springs, and Apache Surplus and Reclamation here in Phoenix, but I've seen any number of others go belly-up in the last twenty years.
• A gunmaker is going to carve up a chunk of meteoric iron and create a number of pistols. Not quite the "space gun" we imagine (and nowhere near as badass as Vera) but a space gun nonetheless.
• $40 of the $100 or so you pay for cable TV goes to sports content. This is one reason (and perhaps the main one) that Carol and I dropped TV when we ordered cable here in Phoenix. TV sports can't die fast enough to suit me.
• Winemakers say that consumers want fuller-bodied and fruitier wines, but less alcohol. Those two factors are incompatible with the winemaking process, so wineries routinely under-report alcohol content in wine. Incredibly, the article's author managed to blame part of this on global warming.
• 12 reasons you should not own a bichon. Hey, I own four. I'm a contrarian, after all.