No fun. That’s the problem.

Since I’m horribly allergic to dogs (they cause asthma attacks), I don’t think people realize how many places I now can’t go and jobs I never bothered to apply for because a dog-friendly place is dangerous for me (enough dog hair is sufficient to cause an asthma attack). To be fair to dog-owners, most of them do…

EV owner here. I keep thinking about all the dead gas stations with closed hotels I saw in California’s gold country last year. There’s this whole abandoned infrastructure around decaying small towns left over from (?) the 1950s, when there were more gas stations across the landscape. The problem with cross-country EV…

Jeez, post NSFW if you’re going to post pictures of naked (e.g. not covered by feathers) theropods on this site!

An overexposure of porgs.

Don’t get too caught up in the George Romero school of random mythmaking. Actual zombification (not the Romero silliness) was (is?) a Haitian way to punish people by poisoning them to mimic death (through tetrodotoxin, which if dosed properly causes something that looks a lot like suspended animation, except that the…

So basically, the last season of game of thrones will be Walking Dead: Westeros edition? Boring. I’d be more interested if Cersei tries to make a deal with the Night King or Bran found a way to bind him, so that he was “allied” with Dany to fight Cersei.

Here’s some speculation:

Oh hell, why don’t we film an alt Civil War film where Booth misses, Lincoln survives, and Johnson doesn’t screw up the Reconstruction? What would the US look like if at least some former slaves did get 40 acres and a mule?

Yay! Great news for climate change. Jellyfish and cephalopods are the species doing well in a warming, acidified ocean, but I didn’t know of any cephalopods that ate jellies. Now that it turns out there is at least one, it’s at least theoretically possible that future oceans will have more complex food webs.

One reason to expect multicellular, carbon-based life forms to run on oxygen is that this is the only way it works on Earth. There are a couple of dozen ways to make life run on redox reactions (metabolizing methane, hydrogen, gold, iron, etc.), and there are single-celled organisms that do them all. Fundamentally…

If you want to get REALLY annoyed, free seed packets sent out by Sierra Club last year had almost exactly the same mix of seeds as part of a fundraiser. I got two of them. A group I belong to (the San Diego chapter of the California Native Plant Society) complained to the national Sierra Club and got blown off by a…

To help put this in perspective, the new claimed fossils are some 430,000,000 years older than the last ones (3.7 billion vs. 3.3 billion). That’s a bit longer than we think vertebrates have been on land. The finds are also something like 670,000,000 years younger than the birth of the Earth. For scale, the Earth,…

Um, as someone who read “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang <i>before</i> I saw <i>Arrival</i>, let me put it bluntly: this isn’t about human language. It isn’t about human language. It’s about physics, the nature of time, and free will. The heptapod’s written language, not their spoken language, was the key to…

Since writing is the heart of the story (Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life,” which you can get in a collection from Amazon), I’m not going to spoil it. What I will say is that the Heptapod writing in Chiang’s story doesn’t look like what they did in the movie. I understand why they did what they did with the movie,…

It’s much more clear in the short story, but basically, you can know the future, so long as you live your life as a performance piece. Or you can have the illusion of free will through ignorance, and live exactly the same life. The breakthrough in the story was a video analysis of the heptapod’s act of writing,…

If you google the cryptid known as the flying rod, it looks a lot like this. There’s a reason for the similarity...

Perhaps the explanation is the class action trial against Trump and Trump University that’s set to go to trial right after the election. I’m not a lawyer, but it looks like it could put a huge dent in both his reputation and his bank balance. As President, he might be immune-ish until after his term...

This series is what taught me that there’s a numeracy is mathematical equivalent of literacy. I read quite a lot and Rowling is very high on my list of favorite authors, but the Harry Potter books aren’t numerate. So don’t worry about the numbers not adding up in so many, many ways, and just enjoy the story again.

Probably been said already, but homing pigeons and street pigeons are the same species: rock doves. And yes, many of them can fly this fast. One of the most spectacular bits of flying I’ve ever seen was a city pigeon flying into a strongly gusting 50 mph wind to get back to its nest on a building. I’ve also seen a…