A couple of years ago the city tore up my street and laid new sewers. I watched with interest because I was fascinated by the engineering. The machine that extruded curbs was amazing. The work was carefully and professionally done, with great care to allow homeowners access. When they had to cut off water, they ran…

Because regulators are lazy and cowardly, and go after soft targets.

Those people want to occupy a house, do squat work, and sell it for a profit. All the while whining about welfare freeloaders.

Rogue Nation was great, Jurassic World was good, Inside Out was great, Ant-Man was way better than the premise would lead you to believe. Just saw Walk in the Woods, which isn’t a monumental movie but pleasant. Redford is mostly a prop, but Nolte steals the movie.

The most baffling thing is that Westerners who consider themselves intellectuals defend ISIS. Marxism at least gave lip service to honoring intellectuals, but radical Islamists make absolutely no secret of their desire to destroy all intellectual life and all non-Islamic history. It started with the Buddhas of Bamyan,…

Fascinating how people are relativists when it suits their purposes. “Who determines what words are wrong?” Do you feel the same way about “We don’t rent to blacks,” “Latinos need not apply,” “Gays not served here?” I doubt it. There’s no absolute right and wrong except when YOU want there to be. THEN the moral issues…

A Mathematical Illiteracy ribbon for not knowing what “exponential” means.

If it doesn’t happen in real life, it won’t happen on line. If people don’t come up to you and offer you free money, real people won’t do it on line, either. If your neighborhood isn’t teeming with hot, sex-starved women, that dating site won’t be, either.

Most of these just make me angry but Delia’s tormentor probably had a personality disorder that her family was all too aware of. (The rest might, too. Is “@$$****” in DSM-V?) A salute to the husband for being gracious enough to give her a nice tip.

Geographic features are always named in Latin by convention. “Colles” means “hills.” Others include “fossa” (trench), and “macula” (dark spot - “im-macula-te” means “spotless”). The similarity of “coleta” and “colles” is a bit awkward, though.

Somebody calculated that one highway from Sochi to the games was so expensive it would have been cheaper to pave it in caviar. In that spirit, let me suggest that instead of snow, they just cover the mountain in ermine. It won’t melt.

Shatner does suck. But he doesn’t care, and that makes him fun to watch. He’ll parody himself gleefully, because he just loves hamming it up.

The outer equatorial band is the geosynchronous band, about 22,000 miles out.

Really? Have you forgotten the “Why are we spending money on space when we have poverty here on earth?” crowd that shut down the last three Apollo missions and pretty much stopped planetary exploration for most of the 70’s and 80’s? Anyone know what they did with the money? It’s only been 40 years. Someone must know.

Especially the “science” specifically funded by corporations to make embarrassing facts go away, like the effects of leaded gasoline, smoking, or carbon emissions.

One of the classic examples of p-hacking was the astrology book “The Mars Effect,” which purportedly showed that athletic ability correlated with Mars being in a certain aspect when the subject was born. Well of course it did. Take a lot of people, a huge list of personality traits, nine planets plus a bunch of…

I seriously doubt the support layer contributes much to environmental contamination. The gallium arsenide and other nasties are in the semiconductors.

Scores is bad but better than the hundreds that would be killed by carpet bombing or artillery bombardment. Is it at all possible that the people we’re trying to hit have any moral culpability?

Have you ever noticed that the more precise or non-lethal weapons get, the more some people oppose them? Bullets are replaced by rubber bullets or tasers, carpet bombing by drones, cluster bombs by these, artillery by precision guided munitions, and the more it becomes possible to reduce innocent casualties, the…

As long as we’re on the way things should be, potato chips are brown, not pale yellow. I buy generic chips because a lot of the slightly ‘overcooked” chips, that is, the only properly cooked chips on the market, end up there.