Part 3 of my Electric Car series. I already established that I want an electric car, but not a Tesla. What’s left? The Chevy Bolt. Small, simple, with a small tendency to catch on fire (presumably new ones don’t?). Good price/performance. Excellent for a city car. I seriously considered it, although at my age/with my […]
This is part 2 of my “Electric Car” series. I knew I wanted an electric car this time. The obvious choice was a Tesla Model 3, almost universally praised for its driving dynamics, range, software, and purchase experience. But you know what? I don’t want a Tesla. And a car, for me, is more than […]
My children used to love listening to They Might Be Giants’ Here Comes Science in the car. This song stuck with me; it was clear, even in 2009, that electric cars were the future. The reason I’m writing this is, unsurprisingly, because tomorrow I’ll take delivery of my first electric car. It’s kind of a […]
GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE! Although the hospitalization rate in Houston is still high, it’s pretty clear now that we passed a peak and it’s going down. This means my predictions were, fortunately, wrong. The daily new positive cases are still pretty high. What’s going on here? I wish I could tell you that people are being […]
(source, as always: https://www.tmc.edu/coronavirus-updates/tmc-daily-new-covid-19-hospitalizations/) We seem to have reached a plateau in terms of hospitalizations. I hope this is true, but I suspect it may be a mirage. I expected more of a spike after Christmas. Its absence leads me to wonder if we’re yet to see the full downstream effects of all that travel […]
A long time ago, I abandoned AT&T for the crimson-tinted waters of Comcast. They offered faster service, and they didn’t directly try to hoist a fraudulent contract on me. However, AT&T came around about a year ago with an offer a nerd can’t resist. Symmetrical, uncapped, 1 Gbps residential fiber-to-the-home. No strings attached. No requirements […]
Happy new year! The new COVID “British” variant (UK B117 strain) isn’t, of course, British. It was merely detected there first. See this thread by Dr. Gurdasani on Twitter, and the linked report from the Imperial College London: https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1344774555718590464 The TL;DR version is that this virus is A. Apparently more transmissible in children, and B. […]
This is the first post in what I hope will be an ongoing series in scientometrics. Today’s topic is an excellent paper -and idea- by Hutchins, Yuan, Anderson, and Santangelo called the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR). The RCR is part of a new wave of citation metrics that aims (broadly speaking) to correct for the […]
I like 3D printing. It’s an interesting, if fiddly, hobby. Quite fun as long as you don’t actually need to print anything, because things go wrong All. The. Time. The filament snaps and your printhead goes on, obliviously, for hours. Data communications break down. The hot end that melts the plastic clogs, and no more feed. There’s […]
Yes, I got an Apple Watch. Sorry, Watch. And people want to know. What is it? How is it? Is it any good? Is it worth the money? All reasonable questions. I’ll answer them as best I can. Once again, there’s already way-too-much written about the Watch all over the internet. I’m not going to rehash […]