In honor of today being the 120th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight… (the flood, presumably caused by climate change, is in Kenya) Orville lived to 1948, long enough to see various iterations of rotary-wing flight (and a lot of patent litigation). | Continue reading
When NYC wants to build a tunnel, it costs $3.5 billion per mile in pre-Biden money. See “The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth” (NYT, 2017). Here’s a recent tweet from the IDF: At NYC prices, the 2.5-mile tunnel network would have cost nearly $9 billion to constru … | Continue reading
In a recent phone call regarding correct Christmas Card mailing addresses, a nurse friend in Boston told me that she’s moonlighting providing anesthesia at an abortion care clinic. Anesthesia is required starting at about 10 weeks of gestation and the clinic provides abortion car … | Continue reading
Today is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Some perspective from the Brits: The ‘Sons of Liberty’ were essentially the henchmen of the rich smuggler-barons who were faced with ruin At 6:30 p.m. on Thursday December 16, 1773, a group of between 100 and 150 American … | Continue reading
…. because he has experience with running a government at a structural deficit, something that states are theoretically not allowed to do. California has been in the news lately for its forecast $68 billion budget deficit, about 30 percent of total spending by the state governme … | Continue reading
“Former Facebook employee pleads guilty to stealing $4 million” (CNN): An Atlanta woman pleaded guilty to stealing more than $4 million from Facebook while she was an executive at the company. Barbara Furlow-Smiles who worked as a lead strategist, global head of employee resou … | Continue reading
Our beloved 2021 Honda Odyssey’s lease expires in January 2024. Due to the mostly peaceful inflation that the government says does not exist, leasing a replacement would cost nearly 2X what we’ve been paying on our lease whose built-in interest rate is close to 0%. I’m trying to … | Continue reading
I found Claudine Gay’s PhD thesis, which has been in the news recently, on ProQuest (locked down tightly so that peasants can’t get access, but free to academic elites… and me). Here’s part of the abstract: The last part is interesting, if true: “Where African-Americans enjoy … | Continue reading
Diversity is our strength until it arrives in the Northeast, say the elites. Eric Adams again? No. From the New York Times, November 28, 2023: The Connecticut River faces a crisis: An aggressive invasive plant that grows in thick underwater mats is spreading swiftly. It chokes … | Continue reading
Our MIT ground school class happens January 9-11, 2024. Why not come to Boston and spend three days learning everything that the FAA wants Private pilot certificate holders to know, plus some of the engineering behind the facts? For this year, although MIT is not Ivy League, I … | Continue reading
What are your best Christmas gift ideas? If your friend needs to be reminded that Snoopy was gay, how about this rainbow watch from Timex? Maybe your friend is a university president and wants to know what kinds of plagiarism policies to put in place and whether to organize d … | Continue reading
Loyal readers may recall A/B tests here in which the Dorco Pace 7 proved slightly superior to anything that Gillette offers. Other brands of razors were found to be grossly inferior. Background: Dorco Shaving Test: 7 blades good; 4 blades bad Gillette versus Dorco Shaving Test … | Continue reading
This is a report on a Thanksgiving Week trip to Montreal. I arrived on a nonstop flight on Lynx after Nine minutes of Formula 1 glory at the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Being a flight attendant on Lynx is a relaxing job because they don’t serve anything other than water. Seats don’t re … | Continue reading
To show the world’s Jew-haters just how wrong they are about rich Wall Street Jewish speculators controlling everything from behind the scenes, some rich Wall Street Jewish speculators have forced out the president of University of Pennsylvania. “UPenn President Liz Magill has re … | Continue reading
Florida Power & Light is our remarkably entrepreneurial local electric utility. They may have purchased a mailing list of “total douches very likely to own a Tesla” because they recently sent me an email trying to sell an unlimited charge-at-home plan for EVs: If they don’t ne … | Continue reading
From #Science itself: If we accept the CDC’s premise that humans are in charge of viruses, the map demonstrates that Science-deniers Ron DeSantis (Yale/Harvard grad) and Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo (Harvard MD/PhD in Science Denial) are doing a great job in Florida! … | Continue reading
After a business trip to Pasadena, I caught a flight to Las Vegas (for 9 minutes of Formula 1) out of Burbank. On the way, I stopped at the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation. This 1924 structure is a fitting final destination for those who have tackled the challenges … | Continue reading
Somewhat bizarrely, December 7, famous for Japanese naval aviation achievements in Hawaii, is also International Civil Aviation Day. How was this day observed in Maskachusetts? “Plane flying banner with the Palestinian flag and the words ‘Harvard Hates Jews’ circles the Cambridg … | Continue reading
Today is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an intelligence failure so spectacular that it has spawned what the righteous fondly refer to as “conspiracy theories,” e.g., that Roosevelt actually knew about the attack in advance. Certainly the U.S. did have eno … | Continue reading
It has been two months since the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and various Gazan civilians invaded Israel. Ever since that October 7 attack, the Israeli military (“IDF”) has been pursuing the freedom fighters around Gaza without any dramatic su … | Continue reading
Today is my last day of Apple News+, the cost of which was recently raised by 30 percent: I’m not sure what justifies this increase. The major news organizations have mostly been harvesting outrage from Twitter, reposting information straight from the Islamic Resistance Moveme … | Continue reading
A friend of a friend had some fun with ChatGPT: I hadn’t realized that ChatGPT had DALL-E capabilities built-in. Let’s see if we can get something to print to brighten Mindy the Crippler’s day: (“cheerful scene”? Does the rabbit agree?) What does ChatGPT think that … | Continue reading
Readers will be familiar with repeated questions of how our asylum-based immigration system is supposed to work. People are invited to become U.S. residents and then citizens based on a fear of violence in their country of birth. Thus, immigrants to the U.S. may have no affinity … | Continue reading
October 19: From the director of the WHO, December 2: The people who say that the IDF’s goal is to kill civilians tell the IDF exactly where “countless” civilians are gathered in an above-ground location and can be easily killed with one bomb. | Continue reading
The Cybertruck is officially launched. I wrote about this product in 2019: With today’s Teslas, one expects the driver to emerge and deliver a lecture on climate change, the merits of Elizabeth Warren, unions (except at Tesla itself), and a larger government, etc. What would th … | Continue reading
I was chatting with an executive from Grameen America, the U.S. division of Grameen Bank, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. I learned that, out of the rainbow of 74 gender IDs recognized by Science, Grameen American will lend to those who identify with just one gender: “women” (at … | Continue reading
A tweet from an Irish politician: We can zoom in on the scene of two Jews attacking a helpless Palestinian child with teddy bear via AH-64 Apache helicopter and Hellfire missile. (This fits with the media tendency to depict Palestinians as helpless victims, which is the opposi … | Continue reading
“Robert De Niro: Hillary Clinton Should Be the Next President” (Daily Beast 2016): “I think that she’s paid her dues. There are going to be no surprises, and she has earned the right to be president and the head of the country at this point. It’s that simple. And she’s a woman, … | Continue reading
Americans have so few shared values or interests (see my favorite Harvard analysis on why we can’t agree on whether open borders are good or bad; low-skill immigrants are great for the rich and terrible for the working class) that they can watch different political events even wh … | Continue reading
Governor French Laundry and Governor Science Denial are debating this evening. Let’s do a little pre-debate fact-checking. Americans have agreed that all of a society’s success can be measured by the society’s score in the COVID-19 Olympics. A society that achieved 0 COVID-tagged … | Continue reading
It is March 30, 2020. Our rotations are now “socially-distanced”: medical education (Zoom meetings with M1s and M2s), pathology (share a screen with a pathologist), and anatomy (handful of masked people in a large lab). The most popular choice is an additional two-week block of “ … | Continue reading
It’s the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, established by the United Nations. The most recent scientific poll of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza was conducted by Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD), a West Bank-based organization. The … | Continue reading
From Elon Musk, the book: Almost every year, Musk would make another prediction that Full Self-Driving was just a year or two away. “When will someone be able to buy one of your cars and literally just take the hands off the wheel and go to sleep and wake up and find that they’ … | Continue reading
…. as long as they can afford $15,000 for a lifetime of access to Nature. A tweet from the righteous: Science is a right, which means it is something that anyone, regardless of wealth level, should be able to claim and, if denied, be able to enforce the claim. Suppose that a … | Continue reading
For native-born U.S. citizens, it takes about three months, including mailing time, to get a passport if you pay extra for “expedited” service. From the State Department web page (retrieved end of October 2023): As of October, they were saying that it would take 2 weeks to mai … | Continue reading
Can a private citizen change the outcome of a foreign war? The answer is “Yes” for Citizen Musk. From Elon Musk, the book: An hour before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it used a massive malware attack to disable the routers of the American satell … | Continue reading
“These Teens Got Therapy. Then They Got Worse.” (Atlantic, by Olga Khazan; paywalled, but readable in the Google cache): Researchers in Australia assigned more than 1,000 young teenagers to one of two classes: either a typical middle-school health class or one that taught a ver … | Continue reading
When not working, does the world’s greatest innovator sit in a cardigan reading books, à la Jimmy Carter or Bill Gates? Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson: One key to understanding Musk—his intensity, focus, competitiveness, die-hard attitudes, and love of strategy—is through his pas … | Continue reading
There have been active battles since October 7, 2023 in and near Gaza (I wouldn’t call this a new “war” because these battles are still part of the war that Arabs declared on Israel in 1948). The Israeli counterattack seems to have started in earnest on October 28 (Wikipedia), th … | Continue reading
Six weeks until graduation. Before the last two-week elective, we have four weeks of Residency Prep (“RP”). It is March 16, 2020, and the deans are changing policies every few days, trying to stay ahead of COVID-19. M1 and M2 classes have been on Zoom for a week. Lanky Luke was f … | Continue reading
This year, I’m especially grateful that there is no war on U.S. soil. Regardless of which side in the Hamas-Israel fight one supports, nearly everyone will agree that war is hell and those who are insulated from war are fortunate. Since 1865, Americans have enjoyed better insulat … | Continue reading
The calm before the storm (March 9-13, 2020). All the talk in the hospital is about coronavirus. Small talk has become easier with physicians able to recycle the same opinions for multiple hall conversations. The first patient is getting a surgery for pes planus or “flat foot”. … | Continue reading
From Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson… “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” Musk tweeted. It was March 6, 2020, and COVID had just shut down his new factory in Shanghai and begun to spread in the U.S. That was decimating Tesla’s stock price, but it was not just the financial hit that u … | Continue reading
This is a report on the spectator experience at the Thursday evening Formula 1 practice session in Las Vegas 2023. My friends had $1,500 three-day tickets in the West Harmon bleachers (the cheapest seats; the average price paid was, supposedly, $7,000). One week prior, I bought … | Continue reading
We meet at 7:00 am in the “Anesthesia Ready Room”, a small office with only three computers shared by the 50-person anesthesia private practice. I was excited to be assigned to follow Dr. D, who is widely respected by surgeons. He’s a pale 38-year-old sporting wide circular glass … | Continue reading
I was shocked and horrified when Elon Musk called a young brave Thai cave rescuer “pedo guy” for no apparent reason. Why would someone who’d volunteered to fly from his comfortable and safe British home to risk his own life to save Thai teenagers be subject to any kind of critici … | Continue reading
I ask to focus on abdominal CT during this final week of radiology, which turns me into an expert on finding steatosis (fatty liver, caused by alcohol, viral hepatitis, or obesity). It’s easy to identify because it’s on every abdominal and pelvic CT! Prasanna’s partner explains h … | Continue reading
My mother is an American Jewish liberal Democrat (some redundancy in there?) and bought us a gift subscription to Moment, the magazine for American Jewish liberal Democrats. The latest issue arrived in the mail a few days ago. One of the cover stories is “Israel in Crisis”. Does … | Continue reading