Curiosity, near and far...   A couple of photos from today's dump of raw photos taken by Curiosity.  At left, a view into the distance –...

Things I didn't know...   I use IntelliJ IDEA , from Jetbrains, as my Java and JavaScript development environment.  I've been using ...

Zipf's Law holds...   Zipf's Law is one of those observed mathematical relationships that is surprising because it's so simple ...

Collectivization...   Friend, former colleague, and fellow retiree Doug W. passed along this quote: Back in the 1930s we were told we must...

Fish and chips excellence...   We needed to go to Ogden yesterday.  If you're not familiar with Ogden, it's a fair-sized city about ...

Fun with numbers...   I just finished writing some software (for the blog server I'm creating) that figures out whether it makes more se...

Curiosity is looking at weird rocks ... on Mars, like the ones at right.  Look closely and you can see some bizarre thin layers, with edg...

What a world we live in (part 63,992)...  For the past few months, I've been playing Scrabble with a new partner, a friend of my sister ...

The “Jersey Way”...   Via my pistol-packing, proud New Jerseyan mom: The Jersey Way Three contractors are bidding to fix a broken fence ...

Paradise ponders...   Chicken and dumpling soup is a good thing :)  So is chocolate cake!  It's a tea-and-chocolate-cake kind of mornin...

Just yesterday ... we were delighted by a weather forecast for ten whole days of no precipitation and above-freezing temperatures.  This mo...

Eleven years old ... this blog is, today.  It's our “bloggiversary”!  Eleven years and 12,781 posts (including this one).  I didn...

I find it strangely satisfying ... to find that I still can do some challenging programming.  I've been working for about 50 days now...

Troubling ... this sort of thing is .  But what could be done about it?  Other than shining light on the issue (as Claire Berlinski does in...

When I think about ... how political outcomes might be manipulated, these days I consider this the most dangerous – far more so than votin...

Tim Cook is right on this one...   We really, really don't want the government to be able to get access to our devices.  Smartphone own...

Fire in Paradise...   In our furnace, that is.  Our newly repaired furnace! The experience reminds us once again of why we love living he...

Amazing ... plus, pretty girls, for the double win!

Interesting piece ... by a scientist (physicist) and writer named Tom Hartsfield.  He takes no sides in the AGW “wars”, but l ooks at clima...

I can identify with this!   I have always hated neckties.  Jeans and buttoned, loose-neck, short-sleeve cotton shirts, that's my “uni...