The United Nations assures us that “We need more women leaders to sustain peace and development”: The evidence is clear: wherever women take part in a peace process, peace lasts longer. In fact, a peace agreement, which includes women, is 35 per cent more likely to last at least … | Continue reading
Elon Musk frets about our planet being underpopulated, a point of view likely to be confusing to anyone who has visited Sintra, Portugal. A garden built for quiet reflection, such as Quinta da Regaleira, will be packed with more than 1,000 tourists at a time in the shoulder seaso … | Continue reading
An immigrant physician friend, simply based on videos that she watched in 2020, diagnosed Joe Biden with dementia four years ago and referred to him as “the senile puppet” long before the New York Times editorial board noticed that anything was wrong. Democrats now believe that J … | Continue reading
Here’s something that I wouldn’t have expected to work: cork seats on subway trains. The Lisbon Metro, June 2024: Apparently, the seats used to be covered in cloth and they started a mass conversion about four years ago (“Lisbon Metro already running 100% coated with cork” (2022) … | Continue reading
From the big animal hospital in Boston: Let’s have a closer look at the 2SLGBTQQIA+ pit bull, which we’d be unlikely to see in Palm Beach County partly due to the cruel repression of Dictator Ron DeSantis and partly due to the fact that pit bulls are banned by most apartment comp … | Continue reading
Today was the day that New York City was supposed to be decongested. From New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s web site: As Governor, Kathy is committed to ensuring that New York leads the transition to a clean energy future and advances climate justice. Since taking office, she has … | Continue reading
International Jewry is responsible for Dr. Jamaal Bowman, Ed. D.’s recent defeat in New York. The Hill: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) slammed American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for pouring tens of millions into fellow Democratic New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman’ … | Continue reading
Pride is almost over and there won’t be any 2SLGBTQQIA+ holidays for an entire week (Nonbinary Awareness Week begins on July 8; International Nonbinary People’s Day is July 14; International Drag Day is July 16 (GLAAD)). Perhaps is it time for us to purchase our Queers for Palest … | Continue reading
We’re supposed to follow the guidance of the New York Times because the people on their editorial board have better access to information than we do. We wear cloth face coverings as PPE against aerosol viruses if they tell us to because they have direct access to the Science. We … | Continue reading
What if the electric company ran an art museum? In Lisbon, they do! The result seems to be a celebration of electrical and mechanical engineering in an old riverside powerplant. The process of charging a Tesla is explained to the lay visitor: A detail of the boiler: Babcock and W … | Continue reading
I am still in Portugal so I slept during the grand event. Did CNN manage to make Joe Biden look and sound mentally fit? Also, will there be additional debates during which our beloved leader must be propped up? Separately, this photo from Porto yesterday may contain the explanati … | Continue reading
I’m wondering if it wouldn’t have been smart to stay in Belém, a neighborhood of Lisbon that is rich in tourist attractions. I would recommend that everyone visiting Lisbon start at the commercial immersive Earthquake Museum, a 1.5-hour experience that helps you understand how th … | Continue reading
It seems that Julian Assange, who was never a political prisoner (only Russia and China hold political prisoners), is finally free after 14 years of prosecution by various nations (Wikipedia). During these 14 years, I’ve lost the thread. What did he do that was bad/illegal? I fou … | Continue reading
I’ve always liked Miele vacuum cleaners, but after a trip to Portugal I’m wondering if they’re massively ripping off American consumers. Here’s a Complete C3 at El Corte Inglés, a full price (to say the least!) department store in Lisbon: It’s 359 euros, but that includes 23 perc … | Continue reading
Palm Beach International has an in-terminal art museum. Here’s a work regarding homophobia that is so pervasive and severe that the artwork was selected for display to several million travelers: Our 8-year-old was seated next to a New Yorker on the flight to EWR: Incompetence by … | Continue reading
Photographed in Lisbon, the 8 hp Moroccan-built Citroën Ami: “Biden pulls back on tightened car and truck fuel standards” (Politico): The Biden administration on Friday backed off its proposal for a dramatic rise in fuel economy requirements for SUVs and pickup trucks, in yet ano … | Continue reading
As part of this year’s trip to Portugal we bought a family membership at the Oceanário de Lisboa, which I think has a legitimate claim to being the world’s best public aquarium. The typical public aquarium is “one damn tank after another”. This was tweaked to “one damn tank after … | Continue reading
NVIDIA is the world’s most valuable company (P/E ratio of 75; compare to less than 40 for Microsoft), which also means that nearly every NVIDIA employee is rich. A lot of people slack off when they become rich. Google ended up with quite a few “vesting in peace” workers who didn’ … | Continue reading
“Does Divorce Make You Hotter?” (Kat Rosenfield, The Free Press): Five years ago, all my girlfriends suddenly decided to abandon their husbands en masse. That is how it seemed at the time, at least. It all started when one woman blew up her marriage with one of those affairs so i … | Continue reading
Opening the mailbox in our inflation-free economy, I found the following had been forwarded from my mother’s old address in Maryland: This is a $1 million Maryland-based umbrella policy for mom, whose underlying auto policy was canceled some years ago (my father died in 2021, sho … | Continue reading
We recently had some windows added to our house. If you live in a northern lockdown state, this might not sound like a big deal: cut out some wood with a reciprocating saw, get a glass module (double pane to save the planet), frame around the glass module, touch up the paint. In … | Continue reading
Portugal so far has been short on what Americans would consider Social Justice. We witnessed one pro-Hamas march on a Lisbon synagogue and the number of participants (about 50) was a tiny percentage of the Lisbon metro area population (nearly 3 million). The pro-Hamas encampment … | Continue reading
“Why N.Y.C. Hotel Rooms Are So Expensive Right Now” (NYT, May 25): The average hotel room rate in the city is $301 a night, a record. A major reason: One of every five hotels is now a shelter, contributing to a shortage of tourist lodging. In late 2022, as thousands of migrants b … | Continue reading
We are informed by the New York Times and CNN that Governor Ron DeSantis has banned books that promote the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle. Here’s a photo taken this Pride at the local branch of the Palm Beach County Library system: A couple of close-ups: A potentially disturbing twist on … | Continue reading
“Europe Has Fallen Behind the U.S. and China. Can It Catch Up?” (New York Times, June 5): Europe’s share of the global economy is shrinking, and fears are deepening that the continent can no longer keep up with the United States and China. … Beijing and Washington are funneling h … | Continue reading
Happy Father’s Day to those who celebrate. Sunday is generally a sacred day of rest/family here in Portugal, but two dads teamed up to get our failed rental 2024 Mercedes E 300de back on the road. I hope that no fathers were implicated in the engineering of this useless machine. … | Continue reading
A Massachusetts Democrat’s Facebook post earlier this month (the woman who’d repeatedly expressed alarm regarding climate change was about to board a transoceanic flight, apparently; she’d also previously posted in favor of masks and was about to share a confined space with more … | Continue reading
The plan for this year is to fly commercial into ORD (nonstop from PBI), rent a car, and do some stuff before or after EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”). We have some constraints… one family member is 8 years old and, therefore, lacks an adult level of patience one family member lacks a … | Continue reading
Happy Pride! I wonder if this is based on my search history… I searched for the “Altis Prime Hotel” in Google Maps and I was shown a map with both the searched-for hotel and, presumably, what Google thought our family would prefer: | Continue reading
Democrats love contemplating the destruction of Florida almost as much as they love reflecting on Donald Trump’s crimes and convictions. The Democrat dream begins with a rejection of Science, i.e., saying that climate change has already resulted in more frequent and more intense … | Continue reading
Bom dia from the mostly-gun-free capital of Portugal! Checking in on U.S. news, I noticed the following… “Hunter Biden guilty of felony gun charges, faces 25 years in prison” (New York Post, so we know that it is true): a federal jury found him guilty of three counts related to l … | Continue reading
After nearly 20 years, my Gmail inbox is cluttered with over 90 GB of crud, including more than 48,000 unread messages. The majority of my non-spam email messages are irrelevant after a certain number of days, e.g., calendar notifications from Google Calendar, USPS “what’s going … | Continue reading
Parked in front of the Embassy Suites RDU for the entire evening of May 29: It occurred to me that this demonstration of solidarity with Hamas (see Talking with a pro-Hamas college student for how the folks who say that they’re only “pro-Palestinian” actually do expect and seek l … | Continue reading
CNN shows some video of Israelis who’d been unwilling guests of the Palestinians getting into a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. Sikorsky first flew this machine in 1964. This is exactly what Igor Sikorsky talked about: “If a man is in need of rescue, an airplane can come in and th … | Continue reading
How is everyone’s Pride Month going? I visited Target near the Raleigh-Durham (North Carolina) airport last month. What are they offering this Pride? My favorite item was this doormat, eminently suitable for a hangar door or for an FBO to place at the bottom of airstairs: Who cou … | Continue reading
Which young Americans care enough about their fellow humans (or at least those oppressed by Jews) to camp out in support of Hamas? The rich. From “Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?” (Washington Monthly): Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and … | Continue reading
I was chatting with a senior engineer at a Detroit automaker. “We design the car to last 10 years or 150,000 miles,” he said. He explained that component manufacturers try to torture-test the components so as to meet the same standard and then the entire car is given an accelerat … | Continue reading
As part of quest for Portuguese (EU) citizenship and because public school ended last week here in Florida, we’re all headed to Lisbon tomorrow and should be there through June 13 (after that we head to the north for a couple of weeks of exploration). Would anyone like to meet? I … | Continue reading
Today was another tech triumph for Elon Musk, but I have a question: if there aren’t a lot of fat humans who want to go to the Moon or Mars, what will we be lifting into space via the (apparently almost ready for real use) Starship? Aren’t most of the things that we want to send … | Continue reading
From the Party of Science… “His Pregnancy Came as a Shock. Florida’s Abortion Law Made It Harder” (TIME): Jasper never considered he might be pregnant. Despite the nausea, the stomach pain, the fatigue, the possibility never crossed his mind. He was about six months into testos … | Continue reading
From the member of the U.S. Congress who called for “river to the sea” liberation of Palestine after the October 7 Hamas/UNRWA/Palestinian Islamic Jihad victory: The GOP wants to cut funding to SNAP, one of the most critical food assistance programs to combat hunger in our coun … | Continue reading
We took our family to elite entertainment last month (movie theater) and then a Michelin-starred restaurant (Cheesecake Factory). Total cost after the inflation that the government says doesn’t exist: $300, which includes AAA-estimated mileage rate for the 12-minute drive in an e … | Continue reading
I listened to a COVID-safe Zoom talk from an MIT math professor. He talked primarily about a geometric optimization problem. My question: Maybe this will be covered during the talk, but being an engineer I would like to hear what the practical applications could be if Larry solve … | Continue reading
I hope that everyone has taken down his/her/zir/their International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia (May 17) decorations because today is the official start of Pride Month. Here’s what Pride Month looks like in our neighborhood… If he wants to fit in at Penn, El … | Continue reading
A college degree is purportedly important preparation for multiple aspects of life. Universities, therefore, require students to take classes that are far beyond their major. Extracurricular activities are encouraged, such as sports, pro-Hamas demonstrations, drinking alcohol (ho … | Continue reading
In George Washington, Mules, and Donald Trump (2015), I quoted from a book about the Oregon Trail: George Washington was America’s original maharaja of mules. Historians have long been squeamish about acknowledging that General Washington, like many of the American founders, was … | Continue reading
ChatGPT (launched November 2022) and similar LLMs were supposed to make customer service agents more efficient. Has this happened? From what I can tell, the opposite has occurred. If I call a company that is supposed to be providing service the inevitable greeting is “we are expe … | Continue reading
From a friend in the Boston suburbs: [Asian-American son] applied to be a student advisor and was turned down. He was perplexed as he has the highest GPA in the [expensive private] school of 500 students and gets along with everyone. He is a volunteer for the Special Olympics and … | Continue reading