On Monday, when the big storms came racing through the upper midwest, we had wires come down in our backyard. They set one of the trees back there on fire, and took out our electricity, as well. When I called the power company an hour or so later, to check on the outage, I was told there was no estimated time for restoration yet ( Read more... )

(I'm trying to work on my personal metaphysical outlook, or something like that. Please feel free to comment. Honest opinions don't exist in a vacuum ( Read more... )

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I do not believe it is ever possible to truly understand another person.

We are, each of us, an island, with a sea of common experiences between us. There are archipelagos where the similarities are obvious, but sometimes the currents run strangely, and far-flung beaches will be washed by the same events, strewn with the same flotsam and jetsam ( Read more... )

This is an article on synthetic biology in The New Yorker. I haven't read the whole thing yet, because it's long-ish (eight pages of a narrow column, which I hate reading on the screen - I don't mind narrow columns in actual newspapers or magazines, but on-line, it's freaking annoying ( Read more... )