Cosmology, origin of life, and astronomy are topics about which I read quite a bit. Any NASA and JPL discovery makes me stop whatever to read more about it. This is not something new as one of my school science fair projects was on O-Rings and Challenger. Before that I even attended Space Camp. (This…
Evidence is often portrayed as the collection of facts who neatly prove a conclusion. Just follow the arrows. Several things of late hurt my brain as others second guess and respond to the sad truth evidence rarely is so neat. Kendrick Johnson was found dead in a school gym. The local sheriff processed the scene.…
By default Outlook adds “stop processing more rules” to message filters. Eventually I run into the error: The rule has a condition the server cannot process. The action ‘stop processing more rules’ will prevent all remaining server rules from being carried out. Are you sure this is what you want to do? Well… That is…
Chant of Ages; Cry of Cotton: The Biography of a South Georgia Jewish Community’s Beginnings 1865-1908 by Louis Schmier My rating: 4 of 5 stars NOTE: I have known the author since I was maybe 5 years old? His son and I were friends in elementary school. We worked in the same building for several…
What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell My rating: 4 of 5 stars Pro-tip: All the chapters are articles published for Gladwell by The New Yorker. Most are behind their paywall. However, his web site has an an archive where I found the ones mentioned below. The publication date is noted at…
An advertisement for a Porsche plug-in hybrid really fails. First, Porsche was old and lame by high school. Lotus, Lamborghini, Ferrari, and so many other car companies come ahead. Second, I do not have a job where an ostentatious car helps me. Third, I cannot keep my mobile phone properly charged. A plug-in hybrid is not the…
A pain in my side over the past year finally forced me into addressing it. Windows Module Installer runs as TrustedInstaller.exe and for most cases just does its job which is to keep in touch with the Windows Update service and apply the updates sent to it. Occasionally they develop a memory leak and consume…
Divergent by Veronica Roth My rating: 2 of 5 stars The dystopian environmental use of Factions reminded me of the Houses in Harry Potter. People have a label by which they belong to another group of people who behaviorally are supposed to be like themselves. They are natural allies and yet frictions exist within the…