Yes, I think that, while some people have serious health issues, much of this is just fad.
[Update a while later]
I should note that I’m allergic to tree nuts, but it’s never been life threatening, as far as I know. It’s just that if I eat them, the linings of my mouth and throat itch.
One more point. I’m not normally into censorship, but I think that the “Food Babe” moron should be banned from the Internet.
Instead of curing it, it may be possible to prevent it.
Faster, please.
This whole debate assumes that the only purpose of space exploration is science. But if we want to settle space, we have to accept the fact that we are going to “contaminate” it with earthly life.
Apparently, sleeping all night isn’t a modern industrial invention:
The volunteers also slept continuously. They would toss and turn like everyone does, but they almost never woke up for a concerted window in the middle of the night. This contradicts a growing idea, popularized by historian Roger Ekirch, that sleeping in eight-hour chunks is a modern affectation.
Ekirch combed through centuries of Western literature and documents to show that Europeans used to sleep in two segments, separated by an hour or two of wakefulness. Siegel doesn’t dispute Ekirch’s analysis; he just thinks that the old two-block pattern was preceded by an even older single-block one. “The two-sleep pattern was probably due to humans migrating so far from the equator that they had long dark periods,” he says. “The long nights caused this pathological sleep pattern and the advent of electric lights and heating restored the primal one.”
Interesting. Also some good advice for better sleep.
Standing desks don’t extend lifespan?
I don’t know, it still seems like you’ll expend more energy by standing than sitting. But now I don’t feel as bad that I’ve never gotten around to getting/making one.
Apparently, David Appell is as hilariously illogical as ever. And yes, Big Climate does seem to be a tad misogynistic. But hey, they can be forgiven, they’re just tying to save the planet.
[Update a while later]
The problem with Senator Whitehouse’s RICO suit. He has no evidence.
Yes, it seems to be mostly a wild conspiracy theory. And projection.
Related: Katherine Hayhoe has gotten an infinite amount more money from Exxon than I have.
There’s a new, free downloadable anthology out. Looks potentially interesting.
Thoughts on his suggested reading list:
Ideological diversity in science fiction and fantasy was a given in the seventies. We are hopelessly homogenistic in comparison to them.
The program of political correctness of the past several decades has made even writers like Ray Bradbury and C. L. Moore all but unreadable to an entire generation. The conditioning is so strong, some people have almost physical reactions to the older stories now.
All part of the reason that I don’t read anywhere near as much SF as I did as a kid.
…and how they can stop.
…is too big to fail.
We need the rain, but I suspect we’ll get a lot of it in places that hurt rather than help. But the old saying is that droughts always end with floods. And it’s not clear that the drought will be over with a single wet winter. There’s a lot of snowpack to build and reservoirs to fill to get back to sufficient margin.