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…

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.

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?

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…

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...

Amusing irrelevancy. I had a Swiss friend stay with me here in the states for a couple of weeks. He was vastly amused that the cheese we call swiss cheese has those holes in it. Apparently the cheeses they make in Switzerland do not. Not sure what that says about Clarissa’s story, but perhaps it says something about…

Well, I think this is good evidence that said mother really shouldn’t take the class.

I’m a little confused. I thought the desert sand verbena had purple flowers. The orange sphagetti lying across the bushes sounds a lot more like dodder.

Gee, hundreds of generations of Mongols and other nomads can't be all that wrong.

Let's see. Christmas this year: spiral-cut ham? Check. The bones went into a pot of collards later, so we got two meals out of one ham.

Hope your remark gets approved, Numitron. Unless the proposed Lockheed fusion reactor pans out, we're looking at ITER based designs taking off after 2040, which isn't good. We needed them 20 years ago. Even worse, the nuclear power industry is looking for power plant designs that are no more complicated than…

Like this is a new problem? Film noir was invented in LA back most of a century ago, and there are whole books written about how the place is in eternal pre-Armageddon, what with the sunny weather/smog hiding horrible corruption, the place sucking the Owens Valley Dry (remember Chinatown?) like some bloated water…

Nope, mortality stats for the developing world, as well as medieval and early modern times. This is where we can dive into the statistical swamp big time, if you want. We can argue about the relative influence of childhood mortality, coronary disease (a major killer not so long ago, much as it is now),…

Statins are safe in the sense that they won't kill you if you overdose (as with aspirin). A very common side effect is pervasive muscle pain, and safe doesn't always mean pleasant or without problems. There's always a risk/reward calculation that you need to go through with your doctor.

Powering all this crap will be the interesting part. So far, it looks like we won't have even the possibility of "break-even" fusion before 2030, or working reactors before 2050 (assuming that they actually get fusion to work, which is, as usual, highly doubtful). Meanwhile, peak oil is still trudging towards us…