Groundhog Day. Snowing like hell here, and not only didn't our groundhog see his shadow, he couldn't even get out of his burrow. Nor did we get out of ours: Carol and I slept in and spent part of the afternoon watching...Groundhog Day.

I was going to write a longish essay on what may be the ( Read more... )

There is a logic fallacy that I've seen a great deal in the last twenty years: "If X might be true, then X must be true." It sounds idiotic (it is; never allow yourself to stoop to it) but it's about the only draft animal that debunkers have in their mental stable. Most people have heard the ( Read more... )

Continuing the multipart discussion I left off on December 23, 2005: I came to ham radio through electronics, and in part through my father, who had been an Army Airways Communcations System (AACS) radio operator during WWII. He could copy Morse Code at 25 or 30 words per minute in his head, even twenty five years after ( Read more... )

As I've written before, I don't pester celebrities. There aren't enough days in a life for everyone to be a friend to everyone else, and as much as I'd like to hang out with people like Niklaus Wirth or Garry Wills, it isn't gonna happen. On the other hand, if I had my druthers (and perhaps, if all that my Catholic School education taught me turns ( Read more... )

There's a fascinating Web site maintained by the Edge Foundation, and every January 1 it asks a crew of scientists and other bright people a difficult question. (This has been happening annually since 1998.) This year, the Edge questuion ran as follows:

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or ( Read more... )

Two hours left in the year, and as I say each December 31 as the clock winds down, Rest in peace, but yeah, bring it on! We are creatures who live in time, so trying to hang onto a day, a year, or a decade is like trying not to eat—and there's no future in that.

Any year you learn something is a good year, and this has been a good year. Let me list ( Read more... )

Christmas is the day that calls on us to look beyond ourselves, to get past the selfishness that seems to be the trademark of humanity, and understand that it's not about me. It's about us, and not just the obvious us, within our family or within our tribe (whatever that tribe may be) but a much more radical us: Everybody who has ever lived, and ( ( Read more... )

First of all, I need to be clear what the problem is here: I'm spread too thin on too many spare-time passions, and I'm not getting much accomplished on any of them. Keep in mind that I have a day job, though I don't talk about it much (simply because that's what I do all day, and there's a sameness about it that doesn't make for dazzling copy) and ( Read more... )