Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• I'm ok; stop fretting. I caught a very bad chestcold, which has had me spending a lot of time in bed for the past week or so, time I might otherwise have spent writing. Before that, I was trying to figure out how to obtain health insurance in a county where the cheapest plan costs $25,000 a year, with a $14,000 deductible. It's been a yukky month, let's say.
• Deciding what to write has been a challenge. People are complaining about the (lack of) size of my backlist, so what I really need to be doing is writing a few short novels, but writing them quickly. After all, Larry Correia's two-word formula for success in SFF is "Be Prolific!" An ambitious novel set in the Gaean universe might take me 18 months. Drumlin Circus took me six weeks. I need to do that again. And again. And again after that.
• Spending time in zero-G is evidently bad for your eyeballs. Not yet precisely sure why, but it may be another case of humans being evolved for a particular environment, like, well, gravity.
• So far as we can tell, the efficiency of the Em Drive is related to the Q of the resonant cavity. What, then, might happen if we coated the interior of the truncated cone with a room-temperature superconductor? No, I don't necessarily believe that it works. But damn, I sure hope it does. And as I said about cold fusion, even if the Em Drive isn't actually a drive, it could be something else interesting and possibly useful. Research needs to continue.
• Lazarus 1.6.2 has been released. It's all bug fixes, but still worth having.
• Giving children whole milk (rather than lowfat or skim) makes them leaner and generally healthier. Lowfat and skim milk are a scam. Producers tell you skim milk is healthy, sell you the skim milk, and then sell the cream to somebody else. Don't fall for it. Skim milk is fed to pigs because it keeps them eating.
• Eggs are good too: Eating one egg a day reduces your risk of stroke by 12%. I eat two. Fried in butter. (Thanks to Esther Schindler for the link.)
• In 1919, big chunks of Boston were leveled by a tsunami of...molasses. This is one of my favorite episodes from American history, and here's a good summary.
• As Glenn Reynolds said of this link, Choose your poison: Craft beer sales are dropping in states where recreational marijuana is legal.
• Testable predictions are the key to solid science. A University of Arizona scientist has told us that within ten years, climate change will wipe out all human life on Earth. Let's put it on our calendars and show him how much we f&$@** love science, whaddaya say? We could make it the biggest story of 2026. The man deserves to be famous for such hard-hitting research.
• There should be plenty of takers: A global UN poll asking what people around the world consider important shows that climate change comes in dead last.
• A separate poll shows that Americans are more afraid of clowns than climate change. After thinking about it for a second...I am too.
• Cross a hot tub with a roller coaster and you get...what? I'm still not sure riding a roller coaster dressed in nothing but a towel couldn't have, well, unintended consequences.
• It's this simple, really: Fake news is news your tribe disagrees with. Keep that in mind when the scrubbing starts.