Paul Ingraham’s odds n ends blog
Panasonic Lumix DC-FZ80D, ISO 80, 2400mm, ƒ5.9, 1/160s. That’s the first moon I’ve seen in Vancouver in a month — appropriately shown with clouds. It has been a particularly grey and rainy month here, even by Vancouver standards. ( Or has it? 1 ) Two days ago, somewhere behind the clouds, there was a full supermoon setting at exactly the same time that the sun was rising . On a nice morning, that…
On Feb 2, 2010, my wife was severely injured in a car accident while travelling alone, about 50 kilometres east of Vientiane, Laos. Three days later, she was found in the basement of a shabby hospital, strapped to a spine board, barely cared for. An Australian physician found her, and I got The Call from him as I was emerging from a pub in Vancouver, trying not to feel anxious that my wife was at…
The moon is still relatively close to us today: we’ve got three months of the full moon happened at the closest point in the orbit (“supermoon”). There have now been two chances to see it looking relatively big for several days before and after full, and there will be one more such opportunity next month. A recent Astronomy Photo of the Day shows how much bigger the moon it looks at its biggest.…
The sharpest, the most detail. I’m blown away by how steep the learning curve has been! My new camera can get surprisingly close to this quality handheld and on full auto, which is amazing , but it also still falls short of what I really want. So this is on a tripod, and full manual. In fact, last night was my first time controlling all the exposure variables myself! It was a thrill to see how…
A little adventure from my life back in 2021, finally polished up for the blog… Wife and I rescued a birb from a house that was being demolished. It was trapped inside and frantically tapping on the windows, flying back and forth, clearly freaked out. Oh noes! Birb? “For those not terminally online,” writes Asher Elbein for Audubon.org , “birb is affectionate internet-speak for birds. Damned…
Despite my lifelong love of astronomy, I’ve never really been much of a moon guy. But with my new hand-telescope? An excellent "bridge" camera that prioritizes zoom, and which can do this ? Without a tripod?! Now I’m interested in the moon. Especially right now, because we not only have a supermoon right now, but an unusual three months of moons that are super : for the entire fall, the moon will…
I made good on my promise to do a run with a 5kg (11lb) weight vest, just to see how it would feel to carry that mass again … after recently losing about that much in fat . Achievement unlocked. Yep, sure does feel heavy! And yet … not that big a deal. It felt like more of a slog, yes, sure, but nothing dramatic — and that was reflected in an active calorie burn that was almost the same as the…
Wife and I did a late summer trip, our first stay at Yellow Point Lodge , a fascinating and famous camp/resort on Vancouver Island, just south of Nanaimo. Slogan: “Eat. Read. Sleep.” (But we did the eat, read, exercise version: hiking, kayaking, swimming, tennis!) I recently blogged about their 6-kilometre scale model of the solar system . It’s hard to get YPL bookings, and we got quite lucky with…
Favourite thing about the e-bike? It’s not the help with the hills — it’s the headwinds . I mostly don’t mind an honest sweaty hill climb, but I loathe headwinds, and erasing that resistance feels like magic. I’m in a phase now where I use only the smallest amount of motor power. Just a bit. Still plenty of exercise, but the ride is 10% easier, nicer, less sweaty. And less painful. My workouts all…
I’ve lost 5 kilos in the last three months, and I am feeling blown away by how much easier it feels to run . I knew it would feel easier, of course — 5kg of bouncing fat is a real factor — but I underestimated it. The energy difference is smaller than I would have guessed before crunching the numbers: just ~25 calories less for a 5k run. But the qualitative difference? It seems massive! It feels…
Recently my AirPods Max lost all dynamic functionality. They still worked as dumb bluetooth headphones, but that was it: no noise cancellation, no auto stopping on removal, and the buttons were unresponsive. After several restarts and resets , I was on the verge of admitting defeat when I suddenly fixed the problem by … … wait for it … Turning around one of the ear cushions! 🤦🏻♂️🙄 Which takes…
Wife and I were looking at a quirky old resort on Vancouver Island, Yellow Point Lodge , which has been there since the 1930s. Tagline? “Eat. Read. Sleep.” One of the features of the resort? A solar system model … kilometers across. “Walk, run, bike or drive our accurately scaled, six-kilometer model of the Solar System. The Sun is located just behind the Boathouse cabin and planets are located at…
Caught this unusual cloud shadow near sunset, and just barely: although the shadow lasted for a few minutes, it was only highly distinct and photogenic for about a minute. I’ve never really seen anything quite like this before, despite the fact that I’m always looking up. I guess it’s quite rare to have a puffier, taller cloud under a nice flat cloud layer … yet still fully exposed to the light at…
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a huge new telescope in Chile, with near magical new capabilities. It has an 8.4-metre mirror (on of the largest mirrors ever made), and a 3.2-gigapixel camera (biggest so far), with specs that give it an extremely wide-angle view of the sky at 3.5 degrees. For contrast, Hubble is famously narrow: it has always shown us extremely tiny slices of sky, but with…
Imagine scientists meeting to discuss the work that they are not doing, and “ the things we’ll never know .” The meeting was held to highlight the damage done by the grants that were canceled by the Trump administration this spring. The cuts were indiscriminate and inscrutable, often without even a detectable MAGA-flavoured rationale. John Timmer for Ars Technica: “Many of the grants were focused…
I’ve been going to Gabriola Island every now and then for fifty years now. For almost all of those visits, I’ve stayed at Haven — an unusual place, a seaside counselling school/resort. It’s basically the Canadian version of California’s famed (or notorious) Esalen Institute, and they are both products of the Human Potential Movement . However, there’s also a lot less overt New Age nonsense in…
I just finished Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company , a new book by Canadian journalist Patrick McGee. It is stuffed with fascinating insights into the surreal scale and strangeness of the iPhone-building business, but it is also about how iPhone has changed the world in ways that transcend tech: The prevailing western narrative about Apple in China is remarkably narrow.…
I live on PubMed . PubMed is a free database of life sciences and biomedical information from scientific papers, books, and more. As a health science journalist, I use it dozens of times in most weeks, hundreds when I’m actively working on some kinds of projects. For instance, actually checking the citations in a paper (crazy!) requires a lot of PubMed searches! And PubMed is American, and it’s a…
2024 was my first year with an e-bike, and a great success by many measures, one of the most satisfying, useful things I’ve ever bought. E-biking is not a cure for whatever the 🤬 ails me, but it’s the next best thing: a powerful tool for coping with the pain and malaise. Read more . [Project Try Everything, 800 words] [View this post on PaulIngraham.com]
Happy personal news: my pathologically high cholesterol has now been dramatically reduced by a potent and extremely expensive drug — Repatha, an injectable alternative to statins. And so my risk of heart disease and stroke is now way, way lower. More about the adventures of Fatty Bloodman here . [Project Try Everything, 1000 words] Plus an explanation of “cholesterol denialism.” [View this post on…
Gor -what now? Plenty of you nerds have already found this, but I’ve only just read that extraordinary article [aresluna.org] about one of the simplest and most ubiquitous fonts, “Gorton” — certainly the oldest widely used one wherever letters needed to be carved into metal or plastic. Many words (6100) and photos (600). If you have any interest in type at all, read for at least 5 minutes to get a…
For Canada, Trump’s brain-dead trade war started months before he started slapping tariffs on countries all over the world. But it wasn’t just about trade. Between his election and inauguration, Trump also menaced us on a near daily basis with his “51st State” bullshit. It felt like being humped by large, growling dog — while the “moderate” Trump apologists told us, “Don’t worry, he’s friendly!”…
Jason Motlagh for Rolling Stone on “ What Happened When Portland Legalized Fentanyl ”: The timing could not have been worse. Months into decriminalization, Mexican drug cartels ratcheted up the flow of fentanyl across the border and up the Interstate 5 corridor, where it flooded onto city streets, plunging prices to less than a dollar a pill. As lockdown despair from the Covid-19 pandemic…
Other than the obvious one, I mean? 😜 This morning I was working on a post for PainScience.com about an evolutionary perspective on pain , and I decided to (finally) track down a good image to represent evolution and natural selection. Not easy! The best symbol is the least scientifically sound, and the rest are either less recognizable, out-of-date, or unavailable. The full, original version of…
It’s fantastic to have a croisssant that is, all at once, super crispy and soft and warm. 😮 Like these… Wife and have been baking croissants lately. No, not from scratch — using a prepared dough. What am I, made of time? But I have done a bunch of reading about leavening, yeast, and sourdough just for nerdy kicks. Fascinating topic. Modern yeast is the impressive result of a couple centuries of…
Ancient wisdom? “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator, and writer (106-43 B.C.) Except … not actually Cicero. Or an ancient Assyrian tablet. Or an Egyptian priest. The true origin is actually an unresolved mystery, according to QuoteInvestigator.com , but it seems likely that it was a bit of droll…
Three days ago, I ran five whole kilometres for the first time in several years. Somehow I finally did it, despite my strange health problems. Now to see if I can keep it up! 😬 New Project Try Everything post, 3-minute read: “ Sneaking past exercise exercise intolerance: a happy update .” [View this post on PaulIngraham.com]
Delusional men with guns are menacing … weather scientists? Because they believe weather radar stations are being used as weapons to “poison our skies” ( WaPo, no paywall ). Specifically, members of America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are being threatened by a militia known as the “Veterans on Patrol” (actual veterans not included). These are profoundly ignorant people…
After being mothballed for most of the last five years, I am actually going to bring this blog back to life. Which is a bit weird. It makes no rational sense, and never did, and I just cannot help myself. I never stopped writing , I just stopped publishing . I ran out of time and heart for that extra bit of oomph that’s required to actually put words out into the world. And I was partially…
My new neighbours seem nice enough, but they weren't really getting just how well I can hear their music. Thin walls! We had a couple chats about it, but they still were playing music a little too loud and waaay too much. So I played some music for them! A morning of electronic dance music for all! 😈 (Which, I confess, I actually really like .) It’s been much quieter here since then. A couple…
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