Whatever night it’s on, if it hadn’t been for the Doctor having been on BBC America right before Graham Norton, the spousal unit and I would have never discovered the best talk show in the universe. Our lives are richer for it. Watching celebrities getting hammered while engaging in small talk is like being at the…

I don’t know. I recall that the device can be set to display in those other units. But I consulted my notes to write that comment, and I only wrote down the CPM values.

When the spousal unit and I were first married - that would have been thirty-five years ago *yesterday* - we lived in the Dayton Ohio area, which at the time was a hot bed of test marketing. Domino’s Pizza test marketed breakfast pizza there. I dimly recall they had three of them: one with scrambled eggs but no meat,…

For those of you into these things, the max reading was “> 437500 CPM”, where 437,500 counts per minute was the limit of the Mazur Instruments PRM-9000.

Ann (not her real name), a former colleague and close friend of mine for a couple of decades now, was to undergo treatment for thyroid cancer. A typical approach to this is that surgeons remove as much of the thyroid as possible, then the patient is treated with radioactive iodine. Thyroid cells absorb iodine. So the…

In some contexts this is referred to as the “swiss cheese” mode of failure... sometimes the holes all line up and everything fails: the primary, all the redundancies, and secondary, the backup, etc.

Perhaps Foone mentions this, but I’m fairly certain that “Normalization of Deviance” originated with Diane Vaughn and her 1996 book THE CHALLENGER LAUNCH DECISION. I read this massive tome by Vaughn, a sociology professor at Columbia, cover to cover some years ago. (I dimly recall that the later edition I read had an…

I always pack my Fusion 5000 in my travel gear. But I do have two complaints about it.

I always pack my Fusion 5000 in my travel gear. But I do have two complaints about it.

I am inclined to agree with you. But a couple of summers ago my wife and I were on a road trip from our home near Denver Colorado, driving on a state route through Arkansas in my 2016 WRX with Subaru’s “Eyesight” package. This was a divided multilane highway but *not* controlled access; there were turnoffs, sometimes…

(Because I know people will wonder, I take three handguns to the range to practice with: an H&K VP9, an H&K VP9SK, and a Walther PPS. My choices have evolved over the years. They’ll probably evolve again. And yes, I do practice with my Remington 870.)

I own my share of handguns. I don’t need them. It’s just a hobby. I’m a little surprised from time to time to get asked gun advice by my more left leaning friends. And they are in turn surprised when I tell them that handguns are a poor choice for home protection. A better choice is a sturdy bedroom door with a good…

I’m a little surprised to find that is probably my favorite program. Certainly my favorite mainstream broadcast program. I love the batshit (!!!) crazy plots. The colorful villains. The labyrinth mythology. And perhaps most of all the over the top costuming, hairstyling, set design, etc. I’m glad they’re bringing it…

This. The weight machines are not furniture. And playing with your phone isn’t a workout. Get your set done and get off. If everyone did this, none of us would have to wait very long for a machine.

His CRYPTONOMICON might just be the best novel I’ve *ever* read. But that’s just me: I read his THE BAROQUE CYCLE - which is a three thousand (!!!) page historical novel published in three volumes in the U.S. and eight in the U.K. - over a four months period, and if you had told me there was a three thousand page…

I recall that William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Lauren Beukes all have new novels coming out in 2019. They’re each on my “must read” list.

For a guy whose favorite hobby is reading, I’ve been remarkably hard on my body. I’ve got sizable scars from burns and stitches. I’ve broken bones in five different accidents, one of them requiring two surgeries because I snapped the stainless steel rod in my arm in half. I had several concussions - that’s what led me…

In the spirit of full disclosure, my daily driver is a 2016 Subaru WRX, in the summer I can often be found on a Triumph Bonneville, and I own a *lot* of watches. Used, new, mechanical, quartz, automatic, windup, you name it, I probably have one. I am not wealthy by any means, but I own *three* Rolexes, and at the…

As part of attending the four-day “Time & Frequency Seminar” at NIST in Boulder this past summer, I got to see the ytterbium optical clocks in the labs. Bleeding edge science going on there. The clocks are so precise, the scientists had to have an official survey done of the lab to establish its altitude, in order to…

Loved the surrealness of this episode. But I wonder: how did the alien and the moths get into the antiplace and where did they come from?

Preaching to the choir. Car & Driver made the case for this decades ago - putting snow tires on a Porsche made it a passable winter driver. I’d been driving all season radials for decades, but when I bought my WRX, I splurged for a set of aftermarket wheels on which I but Blizzaks. Takes the tire shop maybe ten…