Mostly on the lite and positive side today (mostly) …
- New Mexico sues Google and Twitter for exploiting children.
- Interesting notion: The whole NFL/Nike/Kaepernick flap is a bit of theater to boost NFL ratings in “blue” markets.
- Have you paid a traffic ticket, fine, or government fee online in the last few years? Chances are your data got hacked.
- Fed up with high drug prices and shortages another hospital decides to make its own generic drugs.
- Gimmick or good idea? Amazon creates a “shopping center” strictly for small and medium businesses.
- The accusations against Kavanaugh just get fuzzier and fuzzier. (I don’t much care for Kavanaugh, a government-loving authoritarian who’s terrible on the Fourth Amendment; but what kind of society destroys a respectable person for something he may or may not have done in high school?)
- They really shouldn’t have built the Death Star as a sphere.
- That wolf pup may have been dead for 50,000 years. But it’s still adorably cute.
- Free markets help us be more humane to animals.
- They thought they’d left their pets on high ground. Thank heaven for rescuers.
- Boy, I knew you could get a lot of things at the public library. But guns? J.D. Tuccille; love his Attitude.
- Okay, okay. It’s just another food-and-health study, so take it FWIW. But this one says we can eat lots of cheese and butter. And butter and cheese!
- Alan Abel, hoaxer extraordinaire, has died. (But can we be sure?)
- Yet another trip down the rabbit hole of peculiar religious practices.
- Drawing: It helps us think and solve problems.
I’m not wild about Kavanaugh, either. He looks far too much like another Souter or Roberts. But this last-second Hail-Molech witch hunt looks far too familiar. Perhaps if he actually raped a few, he’d be fit for the Klintonian inner circle, or at least a gig in Hollywood.
As for ‘cheese and butter, and butter and cheese!’ – I can’t help but think that those Ancient Shepherds have scored another versus bought-and-paid-for pseudo-scientists, who often not only have a tendency to ignore plain-ole nutrition, but can’t understand “multi-factor interactions.”
Maybe a “land flowing with milk and honey” isn’t such a bad thing after all…
PS> And didja see the link to “Harvard prof” who hates one of the best oils on the planet?
“the installation of truth serum in congressional drinking fountains.”
OK, I could get behind that one.
Who knew Chocolate Labs came from gold mines!
Are you suggesting that Alex Abel may be the real Winagain Finegan?
“what kind of society destroys a respectable person for something he may or may not have done in high school?”
Certainly not this one, at least in Kavanaugh’s case. Even if he is not confirmed, not getting to be one of nine people effectively ruling the United States any time they decide to is hardly being “destroyed.” And if he is not confirmed, he’ll spend the rest of his life making a lot more money whining about it on the talk circuit than he would have ever made running around in a black dress.
Also for those so inclined Yom Kippur starts this evening and ends tomorrow evening
Also today is national cheeseburger day, of course if you’re celebrating Yom Kippur your faith forbids cheeseburgers.
NFL isn’t about sports, it’s about entertainment, I look at the owners of the teams as being like movie producers who make movies. And just like movie producers most of them seem to have an agenda they want to push. Their actions speak to that.
People are getting exactly what they pay for and only when they quit paying will it change.
I quit watching last year but Sunday I ate dinner in a new local sports bar that had a game on and as I watched what use to be my favorite team play I thought, between all of the advertisements (did they use to run that many?) what a joke it really has gotten to be. I’m beginning to think pro tennis may one day become more of a contact sport then football as is played by the NFL.
Concerning Death Star shapes: Ars Technica is pretty good on computers and related electronics. But this Ben Orlin with whom they are so impressed, well, maybe he’s got all kinds of “caustic wit” and “refreshingly breezy conversational tone,” but I question whether there’s anything behind all that (hot) breeze. Mr. Orlin:
“The air molecules are always hitting it at near-perfect right angles, so the vessel must bear the full brunt of the impact. So the Death Star cannot visit planets directly, meaning it could not enter an atmosphere and vaporize the occasional continent while blasting The Imperial March through loudspeakers. It has to remain in the vacuum of space, where there is no air resistance.”
Uhhh, yeah, there’s no spheres within the atmosphere. Except, maybe, soap bubbles? Quite spherical in shape, they are. They don’t go fast. Maybe going fast is a requirement for vaporizing the occasional continent? Breezy, man, breezy.
But it gets better:
“That brings up another issue. The Death Star was constructed in space, a realm where massive things (moons, planets) tend to take on a spherical shape due to gravity. But when Orlin did the calculations, he found that the size at which objects take on the shape of a sphere is about 400 kilometers in diameter, which is significantly larger than the ~160km Death Star.”
Anybody ever seen video of astronauts in orbit, goofing around with water, letting little blobs of it float around? Sure we have. And once they settle down a little, what shape do they assume? Spheres. Gee, I don’t see a 400 km water blob fitting inside a spacecraft, do you? Must be we don’t have the caustic wit required. I mean, it might be that surface tension causes things like those zero-G water blobs (or soap bubbles) to assume spherical shapes. You could think of surface tension as nature’s motivation for minimizing surface area. Spheres have an interesting property: of all three-dimensional objects, they have the largest ratio of volume to surface area. So if I were planning a structure in space in which to live, I’d be thinking that a spherical shape gives me the most space in which to live and store stuff, with the least surface area through which to lose heat to, well, space. Or any other cold environment, for that matter. Hmmmm, I wonder why igloos are hemispheres? And I wonder why the geodesic dome has been such a popular shape for “alternative,” off-the grid structures. A geodesic dome is simply an approximation to a sphere, using flat-and-straight building materials. The more facets to the dome, the closer the approximation.
C’mon, Ars, think a little before you publish. Geeez.
Regarding drug shortages, I don’t remember if the Safe Harbor statute has been mentioned here before. https://townhall.com/columnists/andrewmangione/2018/03/03/the-multibillion-dollar-solution–repeal-safe-harbor-n2456781
Pet dogs in ancient Rome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=457&v=Vxlci1d2rOg
Yeah, Amazon ain’t doing it out of the goodness in their hearts…they’ve either got a business angle or a political angle. Given the way pricing of services works, I wonder if Amazon’s margins are lower with the big guys than with the little guys, thus giving them a motive to promote the latter. Or they could just be virtual signalling.
Either way, it’s encouraging. I’ve been thinking of opening an on-line shop for my wife’s silks and my kayaks. Maybe now is the time.
The anti-fat fad began, according to at least one article I’ve read, with Eisenhower’s heart attack. His doctor declared that his diet was the culprit, and the rest of the nation followed suit. Naysayers at the time pointed out that the French ate lots of animal fats and had much lower rates of heart disease. They were dismissed as quacks then (and mostly still are by the mainstream medical world). Low fat became the new ‘healthy’, even though heart disease rates were not changing for the better. Then, about 10 years ago, I started reading lots of good science about why the culprit was excessive carbs, refined sugar in particular. The sugars cause inflammation, cholesterol sticks to the damaged arteries. Bingo. Eliminate the sugar and you eliminate the inflammation and the arteries stay clear. Makes sense to me.
Now if I could just get my doctor to agree.
Not germane to the accusations against Kavanaugh but related. It looks as if Cody Wilson is in trouble for actually doing (unless TPTB have already taken up falsifying digital recordings) something akin to what Kavanaugh is being accused of. Wonder how this will play out for Defense Distributed.
https://www.statesman.com/news/breaking-news/breaking-austin-man-center-printed-gun-debate-faces-sex-assault-charge/AnteUx5fI7LpNg6yg0Z1JN/
Jeez. It certainly sounds as if he’s guilty as charged — but also as if he was set up.
Yeah, he’s young. But didn’t he realize somebody would try something like that on him?
Agreed. After thinking about it for a bit, and watching the circus surrounding the Kavanaugh accusations (and thinking back to the Clarence Thomas circus and the recent Roy Moore flap), I rather suspect that it was an entrapment setup since they couldn’t get him on legitimate charges of any kind.
I dunno about cheese and butter, except that I’m happy to eat both. And I think that the chocolate, beer, and wine study is worth some personal investigation.
Speaking of butter: My cardiologist has forbidden me from eating a whole stick at a single sitting. Really, that was his only limitation on fats.