Part 5 of my ongoing Electric Car series. Fixing my mistake with the Mach E order would cost $5,000 extra, plus taxes (for the extended-range battery) and another trip to the awful dealership, including redoing the price negotiation. No way. Life’s too short for that stress. The Polestar 2 was my second choice for an […]
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I read more
Part four in my Electric Car series. Like many nerds who just made a big purchase, I sat down the next day to read even more about the Mach E. Despite the lousy dealership experience (in part my fault, I don’t know why I had any expectations), I was looking forward to getting the car […]
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Ford
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 […]
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Electric Car
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 […]
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COVID-19 Houston update
(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 […]
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The UK COVID variant
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. […]
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Relative Citation Metrics
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 […]