On a recent trip through Logan Airport, I found a celebration of recycling: artwork made from 1500 lbs of collected plastic. This was right in front of de-icing fluid being sprayed on aircraft that… | Continue reading
“‘The Monsters Are the Men’: Inside a Thriving Sex Trafficking Trade in Florida” (NYT, yesterday): First, a health inspector spotted several suitcases. Then she noticed an unusual stash… | Continue reading
Friends in Manhattan had two(!) copies of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo, in their apartment and gave me one. Kondo herself says that one of the best things to do with a gift… | Continue reading
Here’s a story for New Englanders… “Patriots Owner Robert Kraft Charged in Florida Prostitution Sting” (nytimes): Robert K. Kraft, the billionaire owner of the Super Bowl ch… | Continue reading
The U.S.-Mexico border is 1,954 miles long, of which 580 miles was fenced (not “walled”!) prior to Donald Trump taking office (Wikipedia). That leaves 1,374 miles of proposed new barrie… | Continue reading
Our Verizon FiOS service was beginning to flake out, though could usually be restored by power-cycling the router. I decided that it was time to upgrade to Gbit service so I called up the friendly … | Continue reading
The Line Becomes a River is by a guy who worked as a Border Patrol agent between 2008 and 2012. He is outraged by U.S. policies that result in families of migrants being separated: No father should… | Continue reading
I was fortunate to be among the first 600 people to enjoy a fully staged opera on the Outer Banks of North Carolina: La Traviata. Three charitable foundations got together to make a professional pr… | Continue reading
The U.S. government-produced video running behind the replica Wright Flyer at the Wright Brothers National Memorial shows the arc of aviation starting at Kill Devil Hills and ending with U.S. gover… | Continue reading
At lunch on Friday, a friend bragged a bit about his daughter, a whip-smart Computer Science graduate working for one of the most prestigious Wall Street banks: “She’s making a ton of m… | Continue reading
“Lesson From The A380 And California HSR: Smaller Is Better In Transportation” (Forbes), by Brad Templeton, contains a lot of interesting numbers: In the Department of Energy Transport … | Continue reading
“The Secret History of Women in Coding: Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong?” (NYT, February 13, 2019) describes a golden age of… | Continue reading
Ever since being assured by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that socialism is essential for well-being, I have planned to visit Texas, where state/local government consumes only 7.6 percent of income (Tax… | Continue reading
The Line Becomes a River is by a guy who worked as a Border Patrol agent between 2008 and 2012. It is a worthwhile book if you want to understand the texture of land-based illegal immigration … | Continue reading
First Amendment as interpreted by the local public school system… (cut and pasted from Facebook Messenger) [son] is telling us now how in English the teacher demanded they don’t assume … | Continue reading
“California Scraps Plan to Build High-Speed Railroad Between Los Angeles and San Francisco” (TIME): California Governor Gavin Newsom is abandoning plans to build a high-speed railroad b… | Continue reading
The proposed Wall/fence that dominates the news right now is at least partly about economics. People who make it across the border are then entitled to make an asylum claim and live in the U.S. for… | Continue reading
“Trump Declares National Emergency to Build Border Wall” (nytimes): President Trump declared a national emergency at the border on Friday to access billions of dollars to build a border… | Continue reading
A friend on Facebook cited “2nd Fairfax accuser says she was raped by former Duke basketball player Corey Maggette” (CNN): “I say again without reservation: I did not sexually ass… | Continue reading
In a room of about 70 people at MIT (mixture of undergrad, grad, and alum), I asked how many thought that Captain Sully had another pilot up front with him in the Airbus A320 that landed on the Hud… | Continue reading
Folks have pointed me to mocking memes regarding Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, e.g., “It’s so cold, I had my hands in my own pockets,” in connection with her “Green New Dea… | Continue reading
Recent conversation in the D.C. area: Where did you land?We were planning to go to Dulles, but our landing clearance was revoked.Why?The controller could see that we hadn’t installed a blackf… | Continue reading
Here’s a fun story on the health insurance system that America’s most brilliant technocrats have created… Woman falls on Christmas (Tuesday) morning and breaks her collarbone. Blu… | Continue reading
Here’s the public Instagram feed of the teacher at a suburban Boston-area school (one of her thankless tasks is molding the 12-year-old mind of a friend’s daughter who previously caused… | Continue reading
“Political operative who was dating alleged Russian spy Maria Butina indicted” (CNN): The money laundering portion of the indictment notes a $20,472.09 payment from one of [the old bald… | Continue reading
“At least a dozen elementary students exposed to marijuana gummies, police say; mom arrested” (CNN, 2019): More than a dozen students at an elementary school in Cleveland were admitted … | Continue reading
“‘This Is Our Land’: Mineral riches should make Congo prosperous. Instead, they fuel corruption, which has kept the people poor and compromised elections.” (New York Times, Jan 26, 2019… | Continue reading
Bad Blood, the authoritative book on the rise and fall of Theranos, describes American- and British-born engineers and scientists being fired for saying “the goal is too ambitious”… | Continue reading
Recent email from the MIT President: Last October, following the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, I asked Associate Provost Richard Lester, who oversees MIT’s international activities, … | Continue reading
Received from a teacher by a parent of a local 7th grader: We will be reading March together as a class for our next unit and additionally students will be working cooperatively in book clubs for b… | Continue reading
Conversation from the other day… Pilot 1: [makes a suggestion]Pilot 2: Whoa! You’re going off the reservation. And we don’t need Elizabeth Warren to tell us what a bad idea that i… | Continue reading
The children’s section of our local bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts features books on the political issue that will have the biggest impact on young folks’ lives: | Continue reading
My high-level impression… Suppose that a dystopian science fiction novel published in the 1950s had imagined a city in which fabulously rich people lived in new gleaming towers, getting marij… | Continue reading
I had to attend an aviation event this evening and then proceed to the gym for my annual workout. So I missed the Trumpenfuhrer’s speech at the Reichstag. How was it? Are people who didn̵… | Continue reading
We experimented this year with a winter escape to a part of Florida that is a little cooler than Miami, but a lot less packed with both locals and tourists. Here’s a report… Jacksonvill… | Continue reading
Mike Busch, author of “the big book on piston engines,” has a helpful article in the Jan/Feb 2019 issue of COPA Pilot, the Cirrus owners’ group’s magazine. Busch explains wh… | Continue reading
From Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer by Barbara Ehrenreich… Working out is another form of conspicuo… | Continue reading
The Virginia governor, Ralph Northam, is in the news for a 1980s photo featuring blackface and KKK costumes. My question today for readers: Have you ever personally attended an event in which peopl… | Continue reading
“As STEM majors soar at UW, interest in humanities shrinks — a potentially costly loss” (Seattle Times) is kind of interesting. The liberal-arts decline is making the university financi… | Continue reading
… or at least for the next couple of months. Here are some books that I’ve ordered and perhaps readers will want to check out some of these so that we can have a discussion here. The Li… | Continue reading
A friend in his 30s works out every morning at a Planet Fitness. Our conversation: Him: At least 25 percent of the customers at that time of day are attractive women from [adjacent university].Me: … | Continue reading
Before a recent night flight from Hanscom Field (KBED) to Land of Gulfstreams (Teterboro, NJ; KTEB), I decided to call the official government-sponsored weather briefer at Leidos. The KTEB folks we… | Continue reading
“I got an electric car. My electric bill went down” by Brad Templeton is worth reading. He summarized it on Facebook: Surprise: I got an electric car and my power bill went DOWN. Why? W… | Continue reading
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 is streaming on Amazon Prime right now. It’s worth watching, even if you don’t advocate for abandoning capitalism in favor of socialism, as Mr. Moo… | Continue reading
If you want to know what a test pilot actually does, explained in a way that is technical and precise yet comprehensible and clear to non-experts, let me recommend watching Day 3 – PM session… | Continue reading
“Saudi teen lands in Canada after fleeing family” (CNN): A Saudi teen who fled to Thailand to escape her allegedly abusive family has arrived in Canada after being offered asylum there.… | Continue reading
Continuing research … (see Test 1 and Test 2) Test 3: one day of growthshaving in the showerEdge shaving gelDorco Pace 7 on right side of facelatest and greatest Gillette Fusion 5 ProShield w… | Continue reading
In our FAA ground school I had to show students a slide reminding them that FAR 91.211 requires oxygen for a pilot exposed to cabin altitudes above 14,000′ (and when flying between 12,500R… | Continue reading