I've read dozens of short items online recently saying how ( Read more... )

• Sandia Labs has invented a way to extract metals from coal ash, including rare-earth metals used in batteries and electronics. Furthermore, they do this using food-grade citric acid, which is relatively benign from an environmental standpoint. The treatment makes the coal ash residue much less toxic, and thus easier to dispose of.
• It took a few ( Read more... )

• Amazon is selling hand-made (in Latvia) steampunk thumb drives incorporating copper pipe caps and a Soviet-made pentode vacuum tube. LEDs light up the glass from the bottom of the tube when there's power available at the USB connector. (Thanks to Bill Meyer for the pointer.)
• Tonight would be a good night to see Mercury. It's never easy ( Read more... )

• Our night-time low here dropped into the 50s last night for the first time since we got back here in late July. The pool water is now down to 81, sigh. Autumn is icumin in; cul sinks the pul.
• One reason I've never written a sequel (much less a series) is ( Read more... )

• At our most recent nerd gathering here, four of my friends and I managed to carry our 1997-vintage, 198-pound Sony CRT TV set up our precipitous stairway out to the 4Runner, and a few days later I paid Blue Star recycling $37 to see it to its final rest. Many thanks to the guys--we had been pondering how to get rid of it for the past several years ( Read more... )

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• Sorry to be gone so long here; I haven't felt well for some days and did not do my usual daily quota of follow-your-nose Web exploration. Part of it is the politics; I seem to be hitting the I-Can't-Stand-It-Anymore level about three weeks earlier than I did in 2004 ( Read more... )

• Sorry for the recent quietude here; the weekend was a whirlwind, and it took all of yesterday just to catch my breath.
• Scott Kurtz' PvP webcomic celebrated its first ten years by showing us that Brent Sienna actually has eyes. Wow.
• Allan Heim sent me a pointer ( Read more... )

20 years ago yesterday, the stock market had its worst day (from a percentage standpoint) in US history. The weirdest thing of all is that nobody really knows what caused it. Sure, everybody's got a theory (and everybody has something else, too) but I have yet to read a theory that rings true ( Read more... )

I've begun to see a great many head-scratching articles about the explosion of executive compensation in the last eight or ten years, especially at very large corporations, while general staff compensation has stagnated or dropped. The puzzle is why people are puzzled; it seems pretty damned ( Read more... )