Adventures with Jay Lake

My old friend Jay Lake discusses a dream in a recent blog post and refers to a series of real-life incidents, specifically:
“...a baby puke yellow Ford LTD wagon was in my life for a while back in the 1990s — that’s the car I flooded with raw sewage while driving it, if you’ve ever heard me tell that story; also the car I took over the river in Mexico on a canoe ferry. Also the car I was driving

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Owlet no. 1 Hatched

Owlet no. 1 hatched sometime between midnight and 3:30 AM. So, the activity in the nest box is going to steadily increase from this point on. This is when the viewing really starts to become interesting.

The first look at the owlet came a bit before 6 AM. Those curious, and those who have QuickTime installed, can view two, short time-lapse movies of the owlet moving around; one seen from the

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What is the CDC?

From Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC, pg. 38, by J.B. McCormick, M.D., S. Fisher-Hoch, M.D., and L.A. Horvitz. Here McCormick relates a story from a trip to Sierra Leone in March, 1976, as part of an effort to deal with the Lassa Fever virus.


[....] When we were introduced to the secretary of health for Sierra Leone, his first question was: “What is the CDC? Does that stand for the Colonial

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The Authoritarians

Ever since I finished reading it a few weeks ago, I've been meaning to recommend the book The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba. So, consider it recommended. It’s available online for free at the page linked-to above. The book’s been out since 2006, so it’ll already be familiar to a lot of people, but it was news to me when I learned of it a few months back, and I know

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Beware Your Socialist Roads

In a time when intellectual standards have dropped so low that any involvement of government in the lives of its citizens can be labelled “socialism,” it seem only appropriate to warn the U.S. populace against using its socialist roadways.
Here’s how the Carfree Times (always worth a read) March, 2010, issue lays out the facts, as supplied by that well known band of socialist agitators that is

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Exploiting?

From an old favorite:
"Exploiting?" asked Dirk. "Well, I suppose it would be if anybody ever paid me, but I do assure you, my dear Richard, that there never seems to be the remotest danger of that. I live in what are known as hopes. I hope for fascinating remunerative cases, my secretary hopes that I will pay her, her landlord hopes that she will produce some rent, the Electricity Board hopes

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