Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• Lazarus 1.8.4 has been released. Bug-fix release but still worth having. Go get it!
• From the Questions-I-Never-Thought-to-Ask Department: How was sheet music written after quill pens but before computers? With a music typewriter, of course.
• How to become a morning person. Yes, there are benefits. The larger question of whether circadian orientation is born or made remains unanswered. Carol and I both lived at home during college. We're both morning people. My sister and I had the same parents, grew up in the same house and obeyed the same rules (bedtimes were set from above and were not negotiable) and she went away to school. She is a night person. Proves nothing, but I find the correlation intriguing. (Thanks to Charlie Martin for the link.)
• Here's a long-form, highly technical paper on why human exposure to low-level radiation is more complex than we thought (hey, what isn't?) and that some data suggests a little radiation experienced over a long timeframe actually acts against mortality. I'd never heard of the Taiwan cobalt-60 incident, but yikes!
• Sleep, exercise, and a little wine may help the brain's glymphatic system clean out unwanted amyloid waste products within the brain, preventing or staving off Alzheimer's. This process may be the reason that anything with a brain sleeps, and why humans (who have more brain matter per pound than anything else I'm aware of) should get as much sleep as we can.
• An enormous study on the benefits of the Mediterranean diet was found to be profoundly flawed, and has been retracted. The data was supposedly re-analyzed and the original results obtained again, but if the researchers made the mistakes they did originally (assuming that they were in fact mistakes and not deliberate faking) I see no reason to trust any of their data, their people, or their methods ever again.
• How faddism, computerization, national bookstore ordering, a court case, and New York City cultural dominance destroyed (and continues to destroy) traditional publishing of genre fiction. The good news is that with indie publishing it matters far less than it otherwise would.
• If you've followed the nuclear energy industry for any significant amount of time, you know that fusion power is always 30 years in the future. Now, I've also been hearing about thorium reactors for almost 30 years, and I got to wondering why we don't have them yet either. Here's a good discussion on the problems with thorium power, which intersect heavily with the problems plaguing ordinary uranium reactors.
• Long-held myths die hard, especially when governments beat the drum for the myth. Eggs are good food. I eat at least two every day, sometimes more. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a study indicating that people on a lots-of-eggs diet lost weight and suffered no cardiac consequences of any kind. Good short summary here.
• I don't see a lot of movies, but I'm in for this one, crazy though the concept is. After all, spectacle is what the big screen and CGI are for. Mad Max meets Cities in Flight? Sold.
• The contrarian in me has long wondered how much of what I put out on the street every week in the recycle can is actually recycled. The answer is very little, especially since single-stream recycling became fashionable. Almost all of it goes into landfills. The reasons are complex (there's not a lot you can do with scrap plastic, for example) but apart from aluminum cans, the cost of sorting it far exceeds the value of the reclaimed materials.
• The antivax movement has always boggled me for its indomitably willful stupidity. Having stumbled upon a research paper on who the antivaxers are I boggle further: They are almost all members of the educated elite in our urban cores. This was always a suspicion of mine, and now we have proof.
• Here's a fascinating piece on the effects of water vapor and continental drift on global temperatures. The topic is complex, and the piece is long and rich, with plenty of graphs. The comments are worth reading too. The primary truth I've learned in researching climate for the last ten or fifteen years is that it's fiendishly complex.
• Brilliantly put: "But anger isn't a strategy. Sometimes it's a trap. When you find yourself spewing four-letter words, you've fallen into it. You've chosen cheap theatrics over the long game, catharsis over cunning." --Frank Bruni, NYT.
• A few days back I got Leonard Bernstein's quirky, half-classical, half-klezmer "Overture to Candide" stuck in my head all afternoon. One listen to this was all it took.
• I got there by recovering an old memory, of a chap who came to SF cons in the 70s with a strange keyboard instrument that he blew on through a hose, which as you might expect sounded like a piano accordion without a bellows. He was a filker and played interesting things, and I always assumed that he had somehow built the device himself. (It was much-used and taped up in several places.) But no, the chap is Irwin S. "Filthy Pierre" Strauss, and the instrument is a melodica.
• Finally, one of the creepiest articles I've seen in a couple of years. I considered and set aside a plotline in my upcoming nanotech novel The Molten Flesh that involved sexbots, real, fully mobile AI sexbots enlivened (if that's the word) by the Protea device. Maybe I should bring it back. The original 1959 Twilight Zone episode "The Lonely" has always haunted me. Maybe sex is a sideshow. Maybe it's about having something to care about that cares back, and therefore gives your life meaning. I could work with that.