Science
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Midweekend
And now we are hear Our vacationing crew likes The Rippingtons, so I played some of their music through CarPlay on the rental car’s dashboard while sitting in the Lihue Costco parking lot. The above came up. How to enjoy bad but not worse weather Dig the webcam at Poipu beach, on the south side Continue reading
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This Tuesday
Verily What's happening today is today. All day. Also, it's absurd that Indiana is mostly in the Eastern time zone. This time of year, the sun rises at four hours before noon and sets eight hours after noon. And fast moving storms from southwest to northeast tend to produce tornadoes. There's a long arc of Continue reading
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Some Day
This is new I watched the whole 2026 NBA All-Star games, and they didn’t suck. In fact, they were surprisingly enjoyable. Players cared. (Well, not Jokić and Luka, who seems to be losing his skinny off-season look.) There was real defense. The best team didn’t matter, but it did win. Now, let’s try that with Continue reading
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Discoveries
Overheard "This TV isn't just HD. It's ADHD." "What does the AD stand for?" "Advanced Digital, I think." How about Water Stain? I still hate Liquid Glass. As a design language it mumbles. I'm especially turned off by semi-transparent type that makes stuff such as the time on my phone semi-readable. Let's give it a better Continue reading
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Department of Collections
Gruntles First, I hate liquid glass, with its water-stain lettering and deeply cropped and rounded window and icon corners (which give you fewer pixels to click on and harder corners to grab and pull.) I’ll say more about it after the holidays. Meanwhile, if you’re with me, this will help. Second, I continue to insist Continue reading
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The Science Kid
That’s me, with George F. R. Buletza, the principal of Maywood (NJ) Junior High. I was in the 8th grade, five-foot-three and eighty-three pounds, still with hair, no body fat, and obsessed by sciences in general and radio in particular. From my bedroom window I could see the lights atop the towers of New York’s Continue reading
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Weathering
And I appreciate them My tale of farting less as I got older has thirteen upvotes. One more way I missed out Daniel Barkhuff on delivering papers as a kid. That was a job I kinda wanted, back then. But at least I did get to serve on the Safety Patrol. And the Green Season Continue reading
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Look Up!
Surf’s up. North. Here is the auroral oval, right now: And here is the K Index, also via NOAA: Remember that the aurora’s curtains of light stand up to 800 miles above their base, about 100 miles up. So they are visible hundreds of miles away. Such as here, in Southern Indiana. So go find Continue reading
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It was real
I grew up under the red star, and right now I’m just to the right of it, on the third and top floor of the smallest residential building in northern Manhattan. When it hit, my wife and I both said, “That’s an earthquake.” We’ve experienced many in California, and know the feel. But none of Continue reading
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How about ASO, for Attention Surfeit Order?
Royal Society: Attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging. To which Thom Hartman adds, The Science Catches Up: New Research Confirms ADHD as an Evolutionary Advantage, Not a Disease. Which I’ve always believed. But that didn’t make me normal. Far from it. In my forties and at my wife’s urging (because my ability to listen well and Continue reading
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Good read
I just got turned on to Paul Ford's What is Code, from 2015, but still current today. Shoulda been a book, like Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line. You can still find the text online, such as here. Continue reading
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Thursday, 17 July 2025
An incomplete waste of time. New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes. No shit. Machine Bullshit: Characterizing the Emergent Disregard for Truth in Large Language Models is a scientific paper by four authors from Princeton and two from UC Berkeley. A pull-quote: "While previous work has explored large language model (LLM) hallucination and sycophancy, we Continue reading
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Wednesday, July 2, 2025
And if insurers aren't buying, hospitals close. Time has a good piece making clear that the socialized part of the U.S. health care system—Medicare and Medicaid—are socialist gravy on a vast B2B insurance business operating inside a captured regulatorium. Patient problems are products bought and sold. Also that it has more than four million views. Continue reading
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Friday, 20 June 2025
Convenient. The 50 Best Restaurants include: Six in Bangkok Five in Tokyo. Four in Paris. Four in Lima. Four in Copenhagen. Three in New York. Two in Munich. Two in London. Two in Mexico City . Two in Dubai. Two in Seoul. Two in Barcelona. One in Gardone Riviera. One in Alba. One in Singapore. Continue reading
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Monday, 16 June 2025
Trying on times. I like shoes I can slip on, because bending over to use my crooked arthritic fingers as shoe horns is painful. So is tying laces. (Oddly, typing on a keyboard isn’t painful, so that’s a counted blessing.) The shoes I’m wearing now are beat-up Sketchers that I bought at Nordstrom for about Continue reading
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Tuesday
We’re covered. Zoom in to satellitemap.space. The vast majority of low Earth orbit satellites (all the white dots above) are Starlink’s. Play around with the tabs. This, more than raw power, is what gives authoritarians their authority. Dana Blankenhorn has a good post on Authority. With respect to my own thoughts on the topic, there’s what’s said in Continue reading
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Tonight’s Lunar Eclipse
They call it a blood moon, because it looks like this: But that came later. Right now still in the evening of March 13th in the Eastern time zone, the Moon is as full as it can get without moving into the shadow of Earth . Which it will. Shortly. Here is where Earth’s shadow Continue reading
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On Intelligence
Now that AI is a huge thing, it’s worth visiting what intelligence is, and how we mismeasure it—for example, by trying to measure it at all. I’ve been on this case for a while now, mostly by answering questions ab0ut IQ on Quora. My answer with the most upvotes is this one, to the question Continue reading
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A very local storm
It was a derecho, or something like one. The gust front you see in the third image here — —looks a lot like the storm front in the top image above (via Weatherbug, storm tracker view). I’d experienced one twelve years ago, in Arlington, Mass. It felt like a two minute hurricane, and when it Continue reading