Donald Trump has demonstrated his criminal mastermind capabilities by beating the impeachment rap. In the entirely non-partisan process, out of 535 members of Congress there were 4 people whose vot… | Continue reading
Who watched the State of the Union? What were the highlights? From one of the private jet terminals (FBO) at our local airport… $80,000 Audi A7 with a “Dump Trump” bumper sticker.… | Continue reading
A bill arrived for a (routine and negative) medical test today. Due to the artificially restricted supply, the provider attempted to fix the price at $150 (ask a physician who #resists Trump and we… | Continue reading
From Techcrunch: A smartphone app tasked with reporting the results of the Iowa caucus has crashed, delaying the result of the first major count in nominating a Democratic candidate to run for the … | Continue reading
So many questions after watching part of the Super Bowl with an Irish friend. “Are any of the Kansas City Chiefs from the same tribe as Elizabeth Warren?” Turns out that this was alread… | Continue reading
How is my favorite Democratic Presidential candidate, Pete Buttigieg, doing? (previous post) Will he win the Iowa caucuses tonight or will it be one of the (barely) living fossils who get more pres… | Continue reading
My iPhone went for a brief inadvertent swim in the Bahamas. Afterwards, it refused to charge due to the detection of water inside the Lightning connector. My companion is a collector of classic Eng… | Continue reading
Yesterday’s post was about Nikola Tesla as he saw himself. I also read Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, by Bernard Carlson, a professor with a “Ph.D. in the history and sociology … | Continue reading
One doesn’t learn much history in Electrical Engineering skool. I had a dim perception of Nikola Tesla as someone who turn Katherine Clerk Maxwell’s equations into practical AC generato… | Continue reading
From a Mexican’s point of view, American counter-service restaurants and ice cream stands do something completely unsanitary: the person handling the cash is also the person handling food. At… | Continue reading
and also to hang a rainbow flag. (But first, our faith called us to move to a suburb with almost no black or LGBTQIA+ residents.) Photos from the rich suburb of Lexington, Massachusetts: | Continue reading
African Americans work hard to help others while white people use their privilege to sip cocktails and stretch out in the expensive seats. Walking down the jet bridge at Logan Airport to catch the … | Continue reading
Just a few months ago, Americans couldn’t live without news about Turkey, Syria, and the Kurds, e.g., “Kurds say Turkey is violating hours-old ‘ceasefire’ in northern Syria&… | Continue reading
Friends have been asking me about the Sikorsky S-76 helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant yesterday. weather.com says that the crash occurred on January 25 close to 10:00 am and that conditions … | Continue reading
“A Surprising Finding on Paid Leave: ‘This Is Not the Way We Teach This’” (nytimes): One of the biggest arguments for paid leave for new parents has been an economic one: Research has r… | Continue reading
Good news and bad news for a friend’s 12-year-old… Bad: he was sentenced to read a book by his teachers in the Brookline (Massachusetts) Public Schools. Good: One of the choices was on … | Continue reading
My Facebook feed recently lit up with righteous Americans celebrating the a new female-led government in Finland. “Change in Finland: A government led by five women and the world’s youngest p… | Continue reading
My first exposure to the impeachment show is this evening in a hotel lobby here in Charleston, South Carolina: Note the time: 10:48 pm. Why are they working beyond normal business hours? Trial cour… | Continue reading
In working on the slides for a flight planning section of our FAA Private Pilot Ground School at MIT (videos and slides available free online), it occurred to me that none of the fancy computer too… | Continue reading
“The conundrum affordable housing poses for the nation” (Washington Post, January 2, 2020): A severe shortage of homes for working-class and low-income families is pushing up house pric… | Continue reading
We went down to Washington, D.C. for Women’s March Weekend. On Sunday, a park ranger showing us the World War II Memorial explained that the Mall was originally intended to be dedicated to pe… | Continue reading
Emailed to me by the MIT Powers that Be… “Women in mathematics aim for an equal sign” (MIT School of Science news): “It is crucial to recruit and attract more women at all levels … | Continue reading
Common sense and economic data have tended to diverge when looking at the value of a college degree. In unionized government jobs, such as teaching, the degree credential has obvious value. But wha… | Continue reading
In a “fun lunch” presentation of photos from Oshkosh in our FAA Private Pilot ground school at MIT (videos linked from the course home page), the next slide contained the following imag… | Continue reading
I posted the following image on Facebook with the preface “Certificated helicopter pilot and former divorce plaintiff flee Buckingham Palace via bus. #LEGOdrama #LowCarbonFootprint”: (C… | Continue reading
In “Americans don’t read the world’s best literature?” I wondered about why so few Amazon shoppers were reviewing Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke, Nobel Literature recipients for 2018 a… | Continue reading
One point from a geology class (previous post) was that the Black Death resulting in global cooling due to agricultural land (roughly 37 percent of Earth’s non-glacier-covered land) being ret… | Continue reading
Welcome to the middle of the coldest month of the year! Here’s an interesting video about corrections to instrument procedures when it is extremely cold. | Continue reading
If you’re looking to escape the Boston winter, our Museum of Fine Arts is showing “Women Take the Floor” currently. The entrance sign explains that “[the underrepresentation… | Continue reading
A recent selection from the Harvard Book Store… For the kids… Lying to children: (I don’t know how many people over age 50 would agree with “It feels good to be yourselfR… | Continue reading
Whenever someone tries to get me to share his/her/zir/their enthusiasm for helping migrants, I offer to pay all of the expenses to bring a migrant to the say-gooder’s house. So far, this hasn… | Continue reading
Turning Google Contacts into address labels for Christmas/New Year’s cards is a task that I expected to be simple. The plan was export to “Google CSV” formatupload to avery.com to… | Continue reading
Since the California elites who control our film industry won’t pay attention to the American heterosexual cisgender working class, it has fallen to the English (Ridley Scott and his son Jake… | Continue reading
We replaced a noisy 2010-vintage dishwasher with a brand-new $1,300 Bosch that got top ratings in Consumer Reports. The first installer showed up, pulled the old one out, and declared that the Bosc… | Continue reading
The automobile market requires high capital investment, yet we don’t see just a handful of almost-identical models taking the entire market. Starting from Android, building a smartphone shoul… | Continue reading
My Facebook friends were outraged that Ivanka Trump had been asked to speak at the Consumer Electronics Show. How was her talk? A senior citizen white male programmer linked to “Ivanka Trump … | Continue reading
Annals of free markets #7231… “Tesla Model 3 floodgates open in China next week” (CNET): Now, with local production in Shanghai, Tesla can skirt the ongoing US-China trade war. Th… | Continue reading
A Facebook friend posted the following: What’s the best money you’ve ever spent? (Money you think was particularly well spent, that is.) This generated over 200 responses. Sample of those related t… | Continue reading
I recently picked up a cartoon (“graphic novel”) version of the Iliad to read with the kids. It struck me that Homer was using 10 years as the time at which a war could reasonably be co… | Continue reading
Annals of defriending, installment #4681… A friend posted a picture of the impeccably dressed family standing in front of a burning fireplace: “Not to distract from the impeachment bona… | Continue reading
For folks who are already certificated, there are a few guest lectures in our ground school class at MIT next week that might be interesting. Monday (Jan 6), 12:30: Oshkosh slide show (me, being Ti… | Continue reading
Folks near Boston: an exhibit on migration at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum is closing on January 5. Don’t touch the cardboard beer boxes: Sign admonishes visitors not to touch the used tam… | Continue reading
Keren Schlomy, an environmental law expert here in Cambridge, wrote on Facebook… I was asked how I like my Tesla 3. This is how I replied: Imagine meeting a prospective partner on a dating si… | Continue reading
Destination Earth: A New Philosophy of Travel by a World-Traveler, by Nicos Hadjicostis, describes what the author learned during a 6.5-year trip around the world. As you might expect from selectio… | Continue reading
One of the (many) interesting angles in Brian Keating’s Losing the Nobel Prize (see previous post 1; also previous post 2) was that the Nobel in Physics was previously awarded for recently-de… | Continue reading
We’re still shopping for a new car to supplement the (awesome) 2018 Honda Odyssey. As we mull the options (waiting to test-drive the Mazda CX-30, for example), one thing that jumps out at me … | Continue reading
Annals of our future self-driving overlords… I was at the Burlington Mall with the kids. Apple iMessage exchange: where are you?”in Arhaus” autocorrected to “in Arafat’s” The Burl… | Continue reading
A friend posted “Men are showing up to the Wing and women are pissed” (New York Post) to Facebook. Highlights: The Wing was supposed to be the ultimate sanctuary for women … “Ther… | Continue reading