Usual selection of stuff that is either illegal or unavailable in the US. Next stop: Greenland. | Continue reading
A human parent’s biggest fear is having a child with a genetic disorder (though the most commonly expressed fear on Facebook is of Donald Trump winning a second term!). Technology is bringing… | Continue reading
Waiting for the elevator in Copenhagen: (More seriously, the bear expert on our cruise says that pollution flowing up to the Arctic is a bigger threat to polar bears than is climate change. Every k… | Continue reading
In case of crazy weather on our Greenland-to-Alaska cruise (through what used to be called the “Northwest Passage” and is now the “Trump Global Warming (TM) Passage”), I dec… | Continue reading
From a recent trip to Roskilde: | Continue reading
She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer says that almost everything is heritable and that genetics is the mechanism for heritability. How… | Continue reading
From the museum in Sisimiut: | Continue reading
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, by Richard Thaler, has some potentially practical advice for improving our schools: A good example of a domain where field experiments run by econom… | Continue reading
This Northwest Passage cruise contains a lot of retired European multinational executives. They talked about being forced by China to set up factories in China in order to have access to the Chines… | Continue reading
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, by Richard Thaler, is an interesting history of this new-ish subfield from the inside. It also contains some potentially useful guidance for investo… | Continue reading
Billion Dollar Whale is a fascinating story by two Wall Street Journal reporters. The “whale” is a pudgy Malaysian-Chinese guy named Jho Low. Aside from making friends with Arabs and st… | Continue reading
I’m praying for global warming to end… on September 11, on which date I hope to be stepping off the ship that I boarded this morning in Greenland (soon to be our 51st state? Atlantic sa… | Continue reading
Anatole France famously noted “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” I’m recently ba… | Continue reading
A Facebook friend’s post: The upcoming US election is unlike any other. … This is not a normal election. This is a national emergency. It cancels the usual rules. … [some ideas fo… | Continue reading
Apollo 11 is an interesting way to relive the first moon landing through documentary footage (restored and organized into a 1.5-hour experience). The Last Breath (streaming on Netflix) is the flip … | Continue reading
Seemingly at least half of the retail stores in Seattle have an overt expression of support for the LGBTQIA community, e.g., a rainbow flag. Americans identifying as LGBTQIA are not half of the pop… | Continue reading
Destination Moon at the Museum of Flight in Seattle is on through September 2, 2019. The exhibit is a great experience, made better by the retired engineers who serve as docents. Feel better about … | Continue reading
The Customs and Border Protection Pipes and Drums playing (mostly bagpipes) at Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture 2019, seaplane base): on YouTube. My initial thought, actually, was “They aren’t t… | Continue reading
I’m heading out on a trip that will involve limited Internet connectivity. My notebook computer hadn’t been turned on for 1.5 weeks. Updating that to the latest version of Windows 10 to… | Continue reading
A virtuous Facebook friend posted “Have We No Decency? A Response to President Trump” from three reverends (Right, Very, and Plain) at the National Cathedral. The content is conventiona… | Continue reading
Kids plus Aircraft plus Non-profit typically equals “ride factory.” The most familiar example of this is EAA Young Eagles. Kids line up and are packed into aircraft as efficiently as po… | Continue reading
Customs and Border Patrol brought one of their Airbus H125 (formerly known as a “Eurocopter” and/or “AStar”) to Oshkosh this year. The $2,000+/hour machine holds up to 7 peo… | Continue reading
It has long amazed me that the typical non-emergency medical intervention for an American does not start with a plane flight to a country in which medicine can be done efficiently. “A Mexican… | Continue reading
The latest Samsung Galaxy Note is now the top-scoring smartphone at DxOMark. It has a 7-point lead over the Apple XS Max, for example, but what’s more interesting is that the phone offers a 1… | Continue reading
One interesting panel at Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture) this year was regarding civilian supersonic aircraft (see the Supersonic Renaissance clip on YouTube). As with most innovations in aviation, the bi… | Continue reading
One of the great things about the Internet is that we can answer the question How many people would spend 19 hours listening to the Mueller Report? The Audible version of the Mueller Report has 480… | Continue reading
At Oshkosh I attended a dinner for members of a “type club,” i.e., people who enjoy flying the same type of airplane. I had hoped for a talk about aviation. Maybe just someone in the cl… | Continue reading
When trying to charge a phone from public charging stations and power outlets on airliners, one thing that I’ve noticed is that the USB-A (traditional rectangular) ports tend to be “loo… | Continue reading
An aviation medical examiner recently contacted me regarding a college student interested in learning to fly, but who lacked the use of his legs. I responded with what I thought was the standard ad… | Continue reading
Dan had worked 80 hours per week in the family business since finishing high school. Due to the long hours, at age 45 he was still single and still living at home with his father. His father’s heal… | Continue reading
While flying Neoscape in an East Coast Aero Club helicopter on a photography mission, we were waiting for the shadow of a cloud to move away from the commercial real estate site subject. Matt Richa… | Continue reading
As with previous generations of politicians, Donald Trump is critical of pop culture, specifically violent video games, which he says are partly to blame for recent mass shootings (e.g., in Dayton)… | Continue reading
From seattle.gov: The Seattle Office of Labor Standards (OLS) announces that the 2019 minimum wage for all large employers (employing more than 500 workers worldwide) will be $16.00 per hour. In pa… | Continue reading
I recently spent two weeks on site at a big law firm as part of my software expert witness slavery. There are TVs in the reception and common areas of the firm, all of them locked to CNN so as to p… | Continue reading
A comment in response to my July 4 question “What’s great about the United States?”: The right to keep and bear arms, of course! Do I need to elaborate? I should think that the readers … | Continue reading
From Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture 2019): For years, especially during night flights, I have been wondering “Why can’t a Robinson R44 have a ballistic parachute like in the Cirrus, stuck on t… | Continue reading
From a July trip to Washington, D.C.: This particular outlet of Nando’s Peri-Peri is in Chinatown. Note that while Christianity and Judaism are respected to a lesser degree (smaller font) tha… | Continue reading
Seattle readers: in case you’re not following the comments on a previous thread, we will meet at Din Tai Fung, 600 Pine St (Pacific Place), at the unfashionable hour of 5:15 pm (latest reserv… | Continue reading
… at least when it came to the value of the Apollo project. Here’s a June 18, 1965 letter in the EAA Aviation Museum, from former President Eisenhower to astronaut Frank Borman: He desc… | Continue reading
Taken during a recent trip to Washington, D.C.: If the health care that they’re offering is free, why do they need to advertise to give it away? [Related: a DC pharmacy advertises three possi… | Continue reading
“America’s Housing Affordability Crisis Spreads to the Heartland” (Bloomberg) says that Americans with ordinary jobs can’t afford to buy houses or apartments all across the U.S. &… | Continue reading
Sadly paywalled, but one of my favorite recent news articles: “The College Financial-Aid Guardianship Loophole and the Woman Who Thought It Up” (WSJ). A smart immigrant from Bulgaria re… | Continue reading
There are approximately 58 gender IDs (NBC News story on Facebook). Yet government officials apparently feel comfortable saying that 1 out of these 58 is more important than the other 57. Convicted… | Continue reading
“That’s how you show that you’re a douchebag if you can’t afford a Tesla,” said a friend regarding Apple’s AirPods. At Oshkosh, Bose was demonstrating its old av… | Continue reading
What price virtue? An Obama t-shirt available at the Smithsonian American Art Museum for $45: Across the street in a gift shop run by a Chinese woman with an accent… a $7 Trump T-shirt. Made … | Continue reading
I’m coming into Seattle for work on Monday, but starting Tuesday, August 6 I will be free. My only firm plan right now is a late morning Tuesday seaplane refresher flight at Kenmore Air. I de… | Continue reading
I am an advocate for progressive causes on Facebook, e.g.., posting “Every month is Pride Month for Nantucket canines” over these photos from a dog boutique: Perhaps for this reason, I … | Continue reading
Donald J. Trump, racist, is back in the news for some unkind comments about Baltimore (a city roughly as dangerous as the countries from which caravan members are coming and receiving asylum due to… | Continue reading