Short notes and essays about stuff that interests me (mostly technical stuff).
I'm an avid reader of Construction Physics , but was particularly taken by this recent essay about the history of Screwworm diseases in the United States: The Fall and Rise of Screwworm Well-researched and well-written are hallmarks of Construction Physics articles, but this one is fascinating for its deep historical background; the article notes that "the first documented screwworm infection in a…
This is my kind of web article to stumble across: The road signs that teach travellers about France . I'm glad there are people out there still appreciating little details like this. In an era where drivers rarely wore seatbelts and often smoked at the wheel, and there were very few radars to prevent speeding, they also encouraged motorists to slow down. Rather than being a distraction, the brown…
I got a kick out of XKCD 3193 , it definitely hits that sweet spot that happens when you walk a certain side alley of trivia just a few steps too far. In my all-too-brief, but enjoyable and lucky, sailing life, I definitely sailed both a Deckhand Obliterator as well as a Mastless Rig. And my son once sailed a Keel Rig, early in his youth sailing academy days. (They called it "turtling" back then.)…
It's that time of year, when pundits look back at the last 12 months and try to say something meaningful. It's striking how the vast majority of those pundits say something like "2025 was a great year in the stock market; the S&P 500 is up 17 % this year". Here's CNBC: S&P 500 slides, but gets set to close out 2025 with 17% gain ; here's the BBC: US stock market ends 2025 on a high note after…
I routinely go for bicycle rides that take me past the old Oakland Raiders headquarters, which is about 1.5 miles from my house. I had noticed, over the years, several other organizations which were using that facility for various purposes, including: a local youth soccer league, the Oakland Roots semi-pro soccer team, etc. TIL that there is another occasional tenant, the Lincoln University…
Of course, you already knew that BG3 is amazing. Everybody knew it. Even I knew it. But somehow I had waited 2 years to actually install it on my computer. Happily, I have now fixed that problem. And so all I need is some time...
... it is the most beautiful webcomic ever posted anywhere on the web by anyone.
My blogging software suggested that it would be glad to allow the AI to write my blog from now on.
18 months ago, in March 2024, the MV Dali crashed into the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore Harbor . The National Transportation Safety Board has released the summary section of its report on the incident . There are many findings in the report, and lots to think about, but a particularly interesting part is the loose wire that crippled the ship at a critical moment. The NTSB made a very good…
Ina Caro's The Road from the Past is hard to describe. It's not a travel guide, it's not a history, it's not an autobiography. And yet, in various ways, it is all three. Caro found herself traveling extensively in France, and decided to try her own approach: Most people return from Europe with a memory of the places they have visited that is very much like a salad after it has been put through a…
This morning, I was driving home (from a doctor's appointment, ugh), and while stopped at a traffic light I was distracted by the biggest blimp I'd ever seen. It turns out this was Pathfinder-1 , the LTA Research experimental vehicle . Technically, the airship carries helium in a rigid internal frame rather than relying on the soft envelope design of traditional blimps; the design aims to improve…
I visited Bordeaux, France, recently. This is a very old city and has a quite complex history. About all I can personally attest to from my experience is that, nowadays, Bordeaux seems to be a lovely place: There are many interesting places to see and visit There is quite good public transit to get around All the local people I met were extremely friendly The food is great (try the Caneles)…
I happened to see a notice that the USCG Eagle was visiting the bay: Media Advisory: U.S. Coast Guard Barque Eagle ride-in opportunity into San Francisco Bay, Friday, July 25 . Of course, with my puny blog, I'm not a qualified media representative. Still! It would have been so cool! Seeing that article instantly took me back to 2008, when the Festival of Sail occurred. That was a long time ago, I…
I was fascinated by this survey article from Apple describing their work on memory safety: Memory Integrity Enforcement: A complete vision for memory safety in Apple devices . I spent pretty much my entire 45-year software engineering career working in systems programming areas where memory safety is a constant challenge. We have many many tools (lint, valgrind, Rust, etc) for finding such…
Have a look at this recent chess game . Just play through the moves. It's from a recent chess tournament in Samarkand, Uzbekistan . This is one of the qualifying tournaments for next year's World Championship, and there are some very fine players competing. Chess is very popular around the world these days, and many new young stars from unfamiliar regions are making the modern game quite exciting…
I happened to stumble across some interesting work from some people who are trying to take some of the Rust ideas about tracking memory lifetimes down into C and C++: A Provenance-aware Memory Object Model for C In a committee discussion from 2004 concerning DR260, WG14 confirmed the concept of provenance of pointers, introduced as means to track and distinguish pointer values that represent…
Mid-morning yesterday (8/30/2025), my wife's phone just stopped connecting to the cellular network (Verizon, in our case). The phone said SOS at the top instead of its normal display of a signal strength bar graph. We tried powering the phone down and back up, several times. Didn't fix the problem. Everything else about the phone seemed to be fine. It was able to get on WiFi with no problems. Its…
Got your note! Been having a bit of trouble finding a good time for a phone call. LMK
I like solving puzzles. If a crossword puzzle or a Sudoku or a KenKen or a Wordle drifts by, I'll often freeze in my tracks and not leave until I've finished solving it. My wife and I play "collaborative hard Wordle": we solve the puzzle together, discussing our potential guesses and agreeing on the next one to try, and we play in "hard mode", meaning that each subsequent guess must also obey all…
In recent weeks, I happened to stumble across two totally unrelated, but interesting, articles about the University of Chicago. Here's a nice page with some historical information about the nuclear missile base that was once in place just across the street from my dormitory at the UofC. I lived in Shoreland Hall from 1980-1981, during my first undergraduate year. The missiles were gone by the time…
California has many, many Wilderness Areas . Some are named after famous people (John Muir, Ansel Adams, Herbert Hoover), some after not-so-famous people ( Dick Smith ). Some are named after people who lived here before there was a California (Mokelumne, Chumash), some are named for reasons that nobody can remember ( Siskiyou ). Often, California Wilderness Areas are named after major geographic…
Via the SF Chronicle: First salmon in nearly 100 years found in Northern California river . It came as a surprise when, earlier this month, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife confirmed reports of adult Chinook salmon in the river near Ash Camp. Officials saw one female exhibiting spawning behavior and “guarding her nest,” while multiple smaller males were observed nearby, competing to…
I've been following Kyla Scanlon a lot recently. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but Kyla Scanlon is amazing. She's an Internet-based author and commentator with an enormous reach. She's written a well-received book. She has an extremely good newsletter (that's how I generally get her writing). And she's only 28 years old!! Her latest issue of her newsletter talks about the…
One day, not too long ago, a bunch of Flock Automated License Plate Reader systems suddenly showed up all around my neighborhood. I asked around and none of my neighbors knew what they were or why they had been installed. So I did a little reading. Apparently this was decided about 3.5 years ago , in a quite tight and controversial vote during the pandemic. Use of ALPRs was approved by City…
My dad had a crazy-broad range of interests, not surprising for a man who had both a PhD and a JD. Some of his interests were recreational: he loved cryptic crosswords; he was fascinated by genealogy; he loved playing board games; he was surprisingly good at golf. He was also interested in many areas of basic science, particularly those that were involved with what he thought of as existential…