Several years ago, I was replacing the electrical control system for an old rail swing bridge on the Oregon Coast when this elderly German tourist couple comes along and starts taking photos and asking if the bridge was condemned and when it would collapse. It was humiliating to have to explain that this was a bridge…

I’ve seen one. 7 dogs vs. one largish raccoon, the dogs all constantly braying so the good-ol’-boys huffing and puffing about 300 meters behind them knew exactly where they are. Now, I don’t know whether Michael hunts and camps around brown or black bears, but his point was that it’s foolish to let your dogs run free…

A list of culinary regrets:

They might have been wound or pleated into someone’s hair, probably that of a high priest or priestess. If they were a kind of currency, you might expect that more examples of these gold ringlets would have been discovered at other sites. As for how they were made, here’s a stock photo of gold shavings from a CNC…

I try to use memorable, short quotes from movies or tv for my passwords. And no, I’m not using “hakuna matata” or “What does Marcellus Wallace look like?” it’s more like “I am the danger S4E6” (also not one I’m using...jeez you people). So, how stupid am I to do this? I thought I was being clever but I’d not seen that…

And squirrels. And fish. And at least one brass spittoon/lamp/urn/thing. You saw it too, right? Right? If Google is using a statistical sample of images from the web to train the algorithm, then there are a lot more pictures of animals out there than I had assumed. They probably had to narrow the sample anyway…

After watching the first attempted landing, I had a similar idea that would have had the barge deploy the world’s biggest stunt airbag. But I realized that it would almost certainly fail because the stupid square-cube law ruins everything. So, I’m not an engineer, but from what I’ve read, commercial rockets are…

What you described has already occurred several times, albeit without a reliance on facial recognition technology, so it’s not hard to imagine that this kind of surveillance would be a powerful tool to suppress dissent or otherwise control individuals’ behavior. For example, you’ve got environmental protesters in…

That third point should have been: 3) Regardless of age, the cohort with the highest rate of suicide is single men; whether it’s that they have never married, are widowed or are divorced. The rates are pretty similar between these three groups, so we can be reasonably sure that alimony payments aren’t a big motivating…

I’m no health psychologist but... Professor O’Connor’s thesis that social perfectionism is particularly acutely felt by men is just stunningly weak. I’ll grant that the data seem to support the idea that perfectionism drives suicidal behavior. The rest of his argument: complete BS. Probably. Most likely. Almost…

It's likely an in-house tribute to H.R. Giger, who did most of the art design for Alien. Giger gets a send up in Prometheus as well:

I've been hauling this question around in the back of my mind since the time I first tried freeze dried astronaut ice cream during a grade school field trip: Why don't astronauts on the ISS store their food in the vacuum of space? Shelf-life constraints require most of the food items aboard the ISS to be…