We had a 0-time Continental factory rebuilt engine dropped into a 2005 Cirrus SR20 back in 2019. The steel oil filler cap was new at the time. After 5.5 years of operation, in which combustion generated water vapor as a byproduct, the cap rusted out to the point that it is missin … | Continue reading
We’re informed by Science that immigrant humans make life better/easier for natives (the enrichers and the enriched). Science also tells us that immigrant plants and animals make life extremely difficult if not impossible for natives. Examples from the Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, F … | Continue reading
My Facebook post from five years ago (i.e., near the beginning of the Maskachusetts coronapanic lockdowns), featuring the snow globe collection at KPVC: | Continue reading
Back in 2019, I watched a documentary about a diving accident (see Movie: The Last Breath). This year, I watched the Hollywood version. It’s the same director, but upgraded to meet the diversity quotas imposed by Hollywood for Oscar eligibility: It’s difficult for three guys to h … | Continue reading
Eid al-Fitr is now a “US Holiday” according to Apple: (Separately, nobody can write precisely precisely?) How about some new phrases, e.g., “As American as Eid al-Fitr”? (Eid al-Fitr is not on the analogous Google Calendar “Holidays in the United States”) Related: Profiles in Cor … | Continue reading
Today is the big day for the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County: Here’s the organization’s “Inclusivity Statement”: Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County embraces a culture of diversity and inclusivity in accordance with our Jewish values. We celebrate the uniqueness of our … | Continue reading
Compared to Maskachusetts, Florida is the land of the divided thoroughfare, dedicated left turn lane, and legal U-turn. It’s a little tough for people making a right turn on the cross street, though, to determine if a driver is making a left turn (no conflict) or a U-turn (confli … | Continue reading
Five-year anniversary of “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.”: A reminder to trust the experts and try to silence non-approved voices that might utter misinformation. | Continue reading
Our neighbor has a Model Y that is one generation behind the recently introduced one. He reports having made a 4-hour trip from Gainesville (home of University of Florida, which needs to branch out!) without once touching the steering wheel. I wonder if this supports a “yes” answ … | Continue reading
How about this use of artificial intelligence/LLMs… a complete personality upgrade. Consider that in-person interaction is becoming increasingly rare. Most of what is known about someone’s personality is based on whatever he/she/ze/they has typed into a computer or a phone. There … | Continue reading
“American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage” (WSJ): The 29-year-old always thought she’d have found her life partner by now. Instead, she’s house hunting solo and considering having kids on her own. “I’m financially self-sufficient enough to do these things myself,” said Vorlicek, … | Continue reading
“BYD confirms new 1,000V ‘Super E-Platform’ capable of fast charging 400km in 5 minutes” (electrek): Chinese auto conglomerate BYD has introduced a new 1,000-volt EV platform that can enable charging rates as fast (or perhaps faster) than a trip to the gas station. We’re talking … | Continue reading
A friend whose child recently applied to NYU downloaded the hacker’s data dump (canonical link; it may be that this has been getting updated with additional redactions) and found his child’s names and other identifiable characteristics. Background… “Hacker claims responsibility f … | Continue reading
I recently caught up with a friend who bailed out of Brooklyn in August 2020. He retired in 2019 after a couple of moderately successful startups (by NY standards, not by NVIDIA/OpenAI standards). He, his wife, and two kids (now 6th and 8th grade) moved to a beautiful historical … | Continue reading
Pierre Poilievre, the potential replacement for Mx. Trudeau as Canada’s leader, recently highlighted this chart showing the stagnation of the Canadian economy from an individual’s perspective (the economy grew with the population, though, so politicians had more money to spend ev … | Continue reading
I was recently asked to provide advice for a teenager with a $600 budget for a camera to take pictures of horses at horse nerd events. This girl is not interested in photography as a gadget fondling activity, but she needs a lens with a reasonably long reach. It’s the same situat … | Continue reading
We sent out a Christmas card that was postmarked West Palm Beach, December 23, 2024. The destination was Brooklyn. It was returned as undeliverable (my friend moved) on March 18, 2024, nearly three months after being mailed. An opportunity for DOGE? If the USPS were eliminated co … | Continue reading
The Righteous accuse Florida of being deficient in drag shows, especially drag story time for toddlers at the public libraries. Ocala, Florida, however, is home to a permanent drag show: the pet-friendly Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing. Here’s Wile E. Coyote’s dragster, which u … | Continue reading
A follow-up to 12 Hours of Sebring, a perfect Florida fly-in destination… This year, we arrived early to the race, scheduled for International Day to Combat Islamophobia. We traveled by Cirrus, an example of the kind of technology that has enabled all of the world’s religions and … | Continue reading
Back in 2023, the New York Times did a story on how Black residents of NYC were gone and immigrants had moved in via a process of non-replacement (see Great Replacement Theory for Black Americans (from the NYT)). Here’s the latest evidence that Replacement Theory is false (“debun … | Continue reading
Robinson has figured out that the big money in helicopters is government and medevac (also government, since Medicare and Medicaid pay). Consequently, they’ve released the R88, a machine big enough to serve as an air ambulance (government pays) or firefighter (government pays) or … | Continue reading
As you work on your taxes (one month to go!) and contemplate your charitable contributions, check out this post from two years ago… Our first grader learns about the non-profit world (American Heart Association): The CEO earned $2.44 million in 2020, How’s this lady with a bachel … | Continue reading
“E.P.A. Plans to Close All Environmental Justice Offices” (NYT): An internal memo directs the closure of offices designed to ease the heavy pollution faced by poor and minority communities. Mr. Zeldin’s move effectively ends three decades of work at the E.P.A. to try to ease the … | Continue reading
There is one thing that students and faculty at Columbia say that they hate more than than the state of Israel: inequality. The flip side is that there is one thing that students and faculty at Columbia love more than the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, and Palestin … | Continue reading
A few screen shots from joesanberg.com before it gets taken down… His X profile consists of just a single quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and shows no white people other than himself: Here here says that he wants to give money extracted from native-born taxpayers to “low-w … | Continue reading
The Iditarod leaders should cross the finish line within the next 24 hours. The leader, from Alabama(!), has just 73 miles to go. As with aerobatics and endurance flying (see Department of Old Guys can Fly: nonstop cross-country at 1,100 lbs gross weight: “EAA keeps saying that t … | Continue reading
I don’t know if Joe Biden is dead or alive right now, but I have fond memories of his 2019 career advice to coal miners: Suppose that a high school student took Joe Biden’s advice in 2019 but skipped the coal mining phase. He/she/ze/they will graduate from college in 3 months wit … | Continue reading
According to “Statewide COVID‐19 Stay‐at‐Home Orders and Population Mobility in the United States” (2020), today is the five-year anniversary of the first American lockdown order: In the United States, the first coronavirus‐related activity restrictions were issued on March 12, 2 … | Continue reading
A Ukrainian immigrant friend has been (understandably) expressing rage at Donald Trump for wanting to shut down U.S. support of Ukraine’s military. He also recently texted us that he was enraged with Trump’s tariffs (that never actually happen? I can’t keep track) tanking the sto … | Continue reading
Five years ago, here: Coronavirus enables elite universities to pull off the ultimate scam? First the big research universities figured out that they could charge more than $50,000 per year in tuition for in-person classes taught by graduate students with a tenuous hold on the En … | Continue reading
Five years ago… Investing in the time of plague? Thought experiment: What stocks will go up in response to the coronavirus plague? One idea: Comcast and similar cable TV stocks. If people are stuck at home they won’t mind paying for premium channels and will be less likely to cut … | Continue reading
It’s the 80th anniversary of a bombing raid on Tokyo in which the American military killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night (Wokipedia). Did the Japanese attack on our military installations in Hawaii justify our attacks on their civilians? University of Alaska in Fairbank … | Continue reading
Happy International Women’s Day to those who celebrate. A January 7, 2025 post from the suburb of Boston where we used to live: History was made today in Lincoln. Town Clerk Valerie Fox swore in Sergeant Jennifer McNaught as the newest member of the department. Sgt. McNaught beco … | Continue reading
Incredibly, the U.S. military decided that it didn’t need to waste every possible dollar every day. The Army will now do some primary training of helicopter pilots in the Robinson R66 (rebranded the “TH-66 Sage”) at a civilian flight school in Marianna, Florida, a one-hour drive … | Continue reading
A friend who taught computer nerdism in Hong Kong before joining our lab at MIT used to try to intensify the pain and suffering of graduate students by remind us that the Chinese had an expression “Poor as a Professor, Dumb as a PhD”. In an age where an average OpenAI employee ea … | Continue reading
Last month, I spent 1.5 hours at Alaska ComiCon in Fairbanks, which isn’t quite the jam-packed experience of the San Diego Comic-Con, but included the world’s largest balloon costume (Godzilla, of course!): My friends picked me up for the short drive to the Fountainhead Antique A … | Continue reading
On this glorious day of Turing Award presentation to two reinforcement learning nerds, I went back to some of ChatGPT’s failures, feeding the same prompts to the 4.5 version of our future robot overlord. December 21, 2024: ChatGPT tries to figure out time zones; Today: correct an … | Continue reading
The mushers and their beasts (14-16 per sled at this point) have all made it to the mighty Yukon River at or past Tanana. This is an all-gender race, just as I think all sports should be, and a woman is in the lead: Maggie Hamilton. She’s got a “T” bib for “Teacher on the Trail” … | Continue reading
Per my usual, I didn’t watch Trump’s speech last night, but have peeked at the transcript. CNN establishes their neutrality in the first sentence: Americans are reeling from the early weeks of Trump 2.0 The Google, informed by Oxford, says the definition of reeling is “lose one’s … | Continue reading
A friend in the Netherlands is a little crazy and is now head of a household (the term is still vaguely sensible there) with four pre-K children. Here’s his report: Things are going surprisingly well. It’s actually possible to have a ton of kids running around just like our foreb … | Continue reading
We were told by the Biden-Harris administration and their media allies that reducing undocumented immigration would require PhDs in Migration Science, $118 billion in new laws and funding from Congress, and decades of hard work by properly credentialed people. We also needed a pa … | Continue reading
I stopped going to movies when Maskachusetts made it illegal and, apparently, I haven’t resumed the habit because, except for the Bob Dylan bio, none of the movies that won Oscars last night are ones that I had heard of, much less seen. I thus appeal to readers to say which of th … | Continue reading
The Iditarod starts at 3 pm Eastern today. As has happened 3 times before (2003, 2015, and 2017), the sled dog race begins in Fairbanks rather than near Anchorage. This is due to a lack of snow. As we all get set up to watch the puppies run, here are some tips on traveling to Fai … | Continue reading
I’m listening to The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen (“One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2023”). The author was born in 1963, just as I was. Unlike me, he did not drop out of high school but, by contrast, was … | Continue reading
Thanks to Alaska Airlines’s focus on DEI rather than on starting and/or completing flights, I had a multi-hour opportunity to inspect the gates and the art collection at FLL. As we look back with nostalgia on Black History Month, here’s a Southwest gate: Remember that 15 pieces o … | Continue reading
From state-sponsored NPR: An organization is calling for a national boycott in the form of an “economic blackout” on Friday, urging Americans not to shop for 24 hours. This movement, spearheaded by The People’s Union USA, a grassroots group, follows the rollback of diversity, equ … | Continue reading
Closing out February with a reminder that this month is host to Valentine’s Day…. From our local “5th Grade Gifted Science Teacher” (Florida state law requires that public school systems offer gifted education beginning in 2nd grade): I am writing to all parents to remind you tha … | Continue reading
Leftover Inflation? (November 2024): I wonder if there is a significant “leftover inflation” yet to come, though, from companies and people who neglected to raise prices or who were locked into long-term agreements during the core years of Bidenflation. Our electrician, a solo pr … | Continue reading