Curiosity ... is into some new and exciting things as it climbs Mt. Sharp on Mars!  These are from today's dump of raw images, and ther...

Morning chuckle...   Via my lovely bride, who found this in some dark corner of Facebook (which really is just a giant bucket of dark corn...

Chladni patterns...   This video is a great introduction to the magic of Chladni plates and the patterns one can make on them.  I first...

Norman doors...   The video at right, despite coming from Vox, is an excellent introduction to human-centered design (no technical content...

Coloring books and Trump...   Rob Long, writing on Ricochet , makes an excellent point ...

Paradise ice...   Our trees are covered with sparkly ice this morning, as is our driveway.  The sun is shining brightly, though, so we'r...

Pharmaceutical development ... is a very complicated thing.  Several things are simultaneously true, making it almost impossible for ordina...

This morning I did something I should have done a long time ago ...   I closed my LinkedIn account.  Everybody I care about knows how to co...

Snow in Paradise...   Our forecast for yesterday called for a half inch or so of rain.  Instead we got rain for a while, turning into slush,...

Wood duck babies ... 23 of them!

Paradise ponders...   Yesterday morning I had three of my neighbor's kids over for their first tutoring session with me, on programming ...

I love these videos...

I'm not sure ... that the majority of young people (say, under 30) in the U.S. will understand that this is parody.  If you do under...

Curiosity is climbing!   The first picture below is looking behind its track, and it's easy to see that Curiosity is gaining some altitu...

Comet 67P, blowing off some steam...   Beautiful photo captured a few days ago by the Rosetta robotic explorer.  It's still orbiting t...

Pluto and Charon...   This is a recently downlinked photo taken by the New Horizons robotic explorer last July.  Look how close to each ot...

Changes on the surface of Titan...   The amazing little robotic explorer Cassini has now been poking around Saturn and its moons long enou...

The world is a complicated place, part 4,992,527...   Mostly it looks hopeless, too.  The subject this time is Myanmar (Burma to those of u...

I think I'm actually immune now ... to the siren lure of the latest and greatest software architecture fad.  I've been increasingly...

If you're interested in politics ... and you don't regularly read the Ace of Spades blog, you're missing a real treat.  Not on...