Technical & professional content plus reviews, how-tos, and more.
Visual intuition for statistical thermodynamics and information theory. I've read a few books about thermodynamics and information theory, such as Einstein's Fridge (see review here ) and recently The Information by James Gleick (I plan to include a review in one of my posts this year). But
Another year in the rearview mirror In my annual update a year ago , I opened it with the following summary: In 2024, I wrote 9 posts including this one. That's down slightly from last year, but on par with 2020; my annual average from 2020 - 2024
I mentioned in my previous post about getting the exterior of my house painted this summer. That prompted some assorted thoughts about the topic of maintenance in general. As mentioned, I had the exterior of my house painted this summer. It is an old house (built in the 1930s) with wooden siding, and a lot of the paint was peeling. The most obvious benefit of a fresh paint job is to the…
I didn't have any posts in August and September due to the volume of travel I had for work. Now I'm trying to ease back into writing here with a few shorter posts I have planned to round out the year, but I also have several
In an information environment that is somewhere between actively hostile to indifferent to providing you with knowledge that is true and useful, you have to take a defensive posture.
A round-up of my writing theme for 2024 (that spilled over into 2025), along with some highlights from what I learned or that stood out in some way Over the past year and a half, I've been working on a series/theme about industry (and closely-related
steel, silicon, jet engines, microchips, cars, phones, paper, and pipe organs
These are books that I read last year (plus one or two non-books) that didn't fit into my theme on Industry/Technology/Supply Chains — for which a similar collection of reviews is still pending. I've done similar posts in prior years. Eunoia Eunoia by
The category of things that must exist as a going concern or not at all
300 posts is a major milestone and a good time to look back on past writing and reflect on why I write a blog. The Ghost blogging platform that I use informs me that this is my 300th post since I started this blog around 11 years ago. My own
After several years without one, I got a new 3D printer in 2024. This post explores what I've been doing with it. At the start of last year, I got an Ender 3 V3 KE. However, it didn't work initially. I had an issue basically the
These books are for the 1.5-3.5 age range (in my experience so far, noting that each child is unique and will mature at different rates with respect to their understanding of stories and specific interests). They are ones that my eldest daughter has enjoyed (and hopefully her
This year's writing on The Drafting Table and general life updates. In 2024, I wrote 9 posts including this one. That's down slightly from last year , but on par with 2020 ; my annual average from 2020 - 2024 has been 9.6. Having two kids under the
Six years ago, I wrote a post about updating a netbook I was running Linux on, and what I installed on it. This year, my Windows desktop died, so I replaced it and thought a similar post about what I set up on it would be interesting: both as a
Vaclav Smil's book Growth is wide-ranging enough that this isn't a comprehensive review. Rather, I decided to mainly explore just a few topics from it. Introduction Growth was one of my five 500+ page books from last year ( Lord of the Rings and Journey to