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Copper is neat stuff. It’s malleable, ductile, resists corrosion, transfers heat readily, and can be easily soldered. In various forms it is incredibly useful. There are around 50 pounds of copper in an automobile, and 11,000 pounds in a diesel locomotive, for example. One of the less useful forms that copper takes is when it [...]

I have to admit, I’m a complete space geek. That’s one reason why I was thrilled to read this week about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s grand initiative to seek the fundamental science of interstellar travel, with the goal of developing the enabling technologies by 2111, one hundred years from now. This is good [...]

Here’s a question: what do you do after you’ve made it? I don’t mean had a couple of wins and put a few bucks in the bank. I mean absolutely, unequivocally, ball-out-of-the-park made it? Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, the former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, has definitely made it. He leveraged his massive intellect and first-class [...]

At D9 Microsoft showed the Windows 8 UI for the first time. All the attention was on the touch-oriented “Live Tiles” interface. Business Insider and some other pubs have taken to calling it “Windows 8 for Tablets.” I don’t know if that’s what it is. About all I can tell is that the Live Tiles [...]

My Dad and I got into an interesting debate while nursing cold beverages on the deck of his place in Canada,  during the annual “cram everyone into one house and see how long we last” multi-family retreat. We always have some good discussions during these gatherings. But my Dad and I aren’t that often on [...]

I’m a hole poker, and people don’t much care for hole pokers. I learned this lesson years ago, when I was the boatswain aboard a large sailing vessel. The boatswain is the highest-rated seaman aboard who isn’t an officer; his job is to keep everything on deck and above in working order, and supervise the other [...]

Somewhere along the line, between devouring everything Tolkien wrote nine times, and putting down the eighth volume of The Wheel of Time in disgust, I lost my appetite for fantasy. There was a time when I would have departed for Middle Earth in a heartbeat, if you had shown me the door. I used to [...]

My last word, that is. When I set this site up I vowed to myself to focus on the historical, the technical, occasionally the literary, and stay the hell away from the political. But alas it seems strange, here on the eve of perhaps the greatest change in our government since Johnson’s Great Society, to [...]

I suspect that children are losing track of where stuff is. Not things like socks and backpacks, which they have never been able to locate reliably, but counties, states, nations, rivers, mountains, hemispheres. I already knew that my own kids have no sense of where stuff is in our locality. How could they? They never [...]

“Have you seen that thing?” “What thing?” “That thing that does that thing it does.” “Oh, that thing. No, sorry.” ~ thing; noun; from Old English thing, assembly; akin to Old High German ding, thing, assembly; Gothic theihs, time. ~ I’m not known for brevity. Whether speaking or writing I tend to use a lot [...]