Merlie and I have just returned from three weeks in Japan. Very fortunate to catch the cherry blossoms. It is risky to offer impressions after such brief exposure, but I will try. Many things are exactly as you would expect. Things are orderly. There is no trash or graffiti. People are extremely polite. But guess […]

My wife and I came out of a party recently just in time to catch a rocket launch in the sky. I took some photos of the beautiful colors and patterns and posted them on Facebook. A Facebook childhood friend “Bill” replied, “The rockets that go nowhere under the firmament.” Was he pushing the bizarre […]

Jerry Lettvin was one of several treasured mentors in my life. He was an MD and an electrical engineer, holding positions in biology and electrical engineering at MIT. I was a student in a most unique program he ran at MIT called “Concourse.” We did the usual classes, but we were in a smaller group, […]

Do you ever check your email spam folder? This may not seem very cosmic, but it reveals some odd biases. If you send an email to someone and they don’t reply, do you feel frustration that they didn’t check their spam folder to find your message? That is fair. But only if you also regularly […]

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) gained attention recently, due to some of its employees participating in the atrocities of October 7, including kidnappings and murders. It was not the first time U.N. workers were accused of atrocities. U.N. workers caused a cholera outbreak in Haiti. They committed sexual abuses […]

I recently attended an international Skeptics Society conference. One of the highlights was an interactive demonstration and experience of “Street Epistemology” by philosophy professor Peter Boghossian. Our current times are famously tense, with people choosing sides on a wide range of issues and digging in to defend their side. In many cases, the actual issues […]

People are surprised that I don’t own any Apple products and don’t plan to. I developed an aversion to Apple as a grad student, designing scientific instruments based on the newly emerging personal computers. Apple kept their hardware “closed” to outside connections. The IBM PC had its own problems, using the horrible Intel processor of […]

My last article was about the need for direct government investment in solving the Climate Crisis. That getting rid of bad subsidies and incentives is helpful, but not enough. This point was made by Simon Sharpe, who worked on counterterrorism for the UK Foreign Office. But Sharpe made another vital point: A lot of climate […]

I have written before about bad subsidies and incentives that have gotten us into the Climate Crisis. But there is another way to view the problem. “Nobody thinks we made the transition from horses to cars by taxing horseshit. Nobody thinks that we created the internet by taxing letter writing. Why would it be any […]

In ancient Greek tragedy, exile was considered a worse punishment than death. In modern times, woke cancel culture applies exile with little regard to its devastating impact on the target and on society. “Woke” originally meant a person was awake to actual racial and social injustice. Leftist Susan Neiman wrote a book Left is Not […]