…. but it was in 2012, during the Obama administration: “Why China’s Political Model Is Superior” Some excepts: Many have characterized the competition between these two giants as… | Continue reading
At 7:15 pm on Sunday, October 20 I checked the JetBlue web site for fares to Las Vegas. They were showing a flight leaving in approximately two hours at a fairly high price (roughly double what Spi… | Continue reading
…. because TGQN is in. I visited a group house in which the students attending this Ivy League university vow “We reject systems that create and reinforce inequality” as a “… | Continue reading
On a typical cruise, passengers hand over their passports at the beginning of the trip and the ship’s staff handles any and all immigration bureaucracy. The countries being visited rely on th… | Continue reading
Wikipedia says “Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to examine and explain social behavior in terms of evolution.” One of the things that we learned about on our Northwest Pass… | Continue reading
I’m planning a trip to Shanghai, November 13-24. From the Okura Garden web site: In accordance with the Shanghai municipal environment regulations, unless requested by staying hotel guest, th… | Continue reading
Welcome to cold and flu season, especially for those of you with kids in school. The prevailing wisdom about colds is that the virus is passed from person to person, right? “Why can’t we cure… | Continue reading
I wanted to save a PowerPoint presentation about a recent Northwest Passage cruise to a series of HD-resolution (1920×1080) JPEGs for direct display from a USB stick to a TV. PowerPoint will l… | Continue reading
“1, 2, 3, 4, Trump Can’t Rule Us Anymore: With impeachment looming, it’s time to take to the streets again.” (NYT, October 21, 2019): All over the world right now, outraged citizens are… | Continue reading
From NBAA… “Gulfstream Ups the Ante with New G700 Flagship”: Gulfstream Aerospace unveiled the G700 as its newest flagship this evening at its NBAA-BACE static display at Las Vega… | Continue reading
“Sibling surprise” (Technology Review, the MIT alumni magazine) is fun for people who believe in the religion of genetics. Siblings reared apart were brought together as adults by DNA t… | Continue reading
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (founded with private money to help Jews settle in the U.S.; currently running with tax dollars to bring in non-Jews) helped set up a protest at National Airport in… | Continue reading
NBAA officially starts tomorrow, but most of the important announcements are today. “Pilatus Unveils NGX, Its Third-Generation PC-12” is interesting: In what Pilatus is calling a first … | Continue reading
The Jewish holiday of Sukkot ended yesterday. If the California power blackouts also end, that will add evidence to my theory that someone at PG&E wanted to help Californians celebrate Sukkot, … | Continue reading
I finally managed to carve out 20 minutes to go over to the Verizon store and swap my iPhone X for an iPhone 11 Pro Max (20 minutes turned into more than one hour thanks to Verizon’s 9 Mbit i… | Continue reading
An MIT economist, Esther Duflo, was a co-winner of this year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. How has her scientific thinking evolved? From a 2016 New… | Continue reading
Nobody can accuse Californians of being slackers when it comes to tackling the climate change emergency: “California bans hotels from using tiny plastic bottles” (USA Today). When does … | Continue reading
A friend’s daughter recently started her non-Asian odyssey through Harvard College ($70,000/year). While identifying as a cisgender heterosexual female, she elected “gender-inclusive… | Continue reading
We recently made it through the Northwest Passage on the MS Roald Amundsen, a diesel-hybrid cruise ship. What could be dumber than putting a huge bank of batteries into a machine that needs to be g… | Continue reading
We have a new full-time instructor at East Coast Aero Club and the snow hasn’t arrived yet, so I thought I’d remind Boston-area readers that we are happy to bring a helicopter to any lo… | Continue reading
Facebook is alive with outrage regarding Donald Trump’s scaling back of our military involvement what will soon be the 9th year of the Syrian Civil War. The same people who demanded the aboli… | Continue reading
“How to Tax Our Way Back to Justice: It is absurd that the working class is now paying higher tax rates than the richest people in America.” (NYT) is kind of fascinating for what it say… | Continue reading
A reporter sent me the NTSB preliminary report on the recent B-17 tragedy at Bradley in Connecticut. Here’s what I wrote back… This more or less eliminates a popular speculation that th… | Continue reading
Democrats advocate more low-skill immigration. This makes sense politically since roughly 80 percent of Americans on welfare will vote for Democrats (stats at end of this article; 88 percent of fol… | Continue reading
Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day, marking the anniversary of the beginning of European immigration to the U.S. (Who will be brave enough to suggest a further renaming of Columbus Day to ̶… | Continue reading
My Facebook feed is now 99 percent hysteria regarding the U.S. policy shift in Syria. Trump has decided to scale back involvement in the Syrian civil war, now in its 8th year. My friends who identi… | Continue reading
If you weren’t persuaded by the existing 100+ dialects of Lisp that have been created over the years, Bel from Paul Graham should change your mind and lure you aware from the dark and tedious… | Continue reading
Email from a 5th grade teacher to parents at our local public school (soon to occupy the most expensive, per-student, building ever constructed in the United States): Just wanted to reach out to te… | Continue reading
From “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past” (NYT): “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me,” Mr. Gates emai… | Continue reading
Two authors won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year: Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk. I hadn’t heard of either of these writers so I figured I would head over to Amazon and pick the ones … | Continue reading
At a recent aviation gathering, the topic of the Boeing 737 MAX came up. I gave my usual spiel about how TI was able to make the Speak & Spell in 1978. Why couldn’t a B737 have had a $1 v… | Continue reading
Back of a city bus in Harvard Square: I posted this to Facebook with “Helpful phone number in case identifying as polyamorous leads to a domestic dispute”. From the sponsor organization… | Continue reading
From the Udvar-Hazy Center, taxpayer-funded aviation in the 1950s: $2,500 Piper Super Cubs. I texted these to a friend. His reply: “Today that would be 50 Blackhawks with $20 million sensor p… | Continue reading
New Hampshire license plate (“Live free or die”) parked outside the FBO at our local airport: What kind of vehicle? | Continue reading
From September, some photos of an awesome exhibit of commercial exploitation of Native American culture at the National Museum of the American Indian. The building itself is as beautiful as ever. H… | Continue reading
“How Boeing Tried to Kill a Great Airplane—and Got Outplayed” (Daily Beast) has a lot of good background on the Bombardier CSeries (Airbus A220), an evolution of the Canadair Regional J… | Continue reading
From a late September visit to the Hirshhorn Museum… Walk past the Smithsonian Castle: In front is a crushed car sculpture by Jimmie Durham, who identifies as a Native American (see “Wh… | Continue reading
From a CNN article on the latest Nobel Prize in Physics: Peebles, who is Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University, had a message for budding scientists.”My advice to young… | Continue reading
From my latest FAA medical application: And from the National Museum of the American Indian, a 2008 ceramic from the Ayacucho Region of Peru in which only two gender IDs per species board Noah̵… | Continue reading
From a group instant messaging chat among some guys who have employed au pairs: Father 1: I think one of our former Au Pair is infatuated with me. She has been tagging me on Facebook and sending me… | Continue reading
Back in August, I asked “Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?” Here’s some evidence for the theory, from downtown Washington,… | Continue reading
“Harvey Weinstein Told Me He Liked Chinese Girls” (New York Times): The second power imbalance was around race — the fact that Harvey was white and I was a person of color With approxim… | Continue reading
From a recent visit to the National Air and Space Museum: Behind and above, a Piper Cub (derivative of the Taylor Cub being advertised). Adjusted for inflation, if we assume that the advertisement … | Continue reading
Here’s a Facebook posting from a righteous academic: I’ve been thinking about this image and caption ever since Amatullah posted it. I’ve been thinking about it in its own right—WHY DOESN’T F… | Continue reading
From Galaxy Starborn: | Continue reading
According to our Justice Department: “According to the allegations, while living in the United States, Saab served as an operative of Hizballah and conducted surveillance of possible target locatio… | Continue reading
Yesterday was a sad one for aviation enthusiasts due to the Boeing B-17 crash near Hartford, Connecticut. Friends and reporters have been asking me about this, but it is tough to say much. A plane … | Continue reading
From a recent trip to Washington, D.C.: A large swath of recently public space (used by both tourists and protesters) has been blocked off and is now patrolled by assault rifle-toting guards. Part … | Continue reading