Conceived in bigotry and dedicated to the proposition that my tribe is holier than thine

“Conceived in bigotry and dedicated to the proposition that my tribe is holier than thine”. With deep apologies to President Lincoln, I fear this describes the practice of Christianity among White americans in the twenty-first century. It’s really painful to admit this. What is going on? Recently I visited a man wearing a T-shirt that … Read more

Flood Maps Miss Risk Factors

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) national flood insurance program has a non-governmental competitor. Here’s a Times piece about a Brooklyn-based non-governmental outfit called First Street Foundation. They’ve put together an online address lookup scheme called Flood Factor that returns a risk of flood at a property. They claim that FEMA’s rating system, based … Read more

New Microsoft Edge rolls out to everybody this month

About time! the new Chromium-based Edge browser will show up on Windows 10 machines in this month’s update. For the cancelled Internet Explorer and Legacy Edge project people, I would have more sympathy if their work products hadn’t baffled software developers for a quarter-century. IE and old Edge were in the uncanny valley of compatibility. … Read more

Hoarding? What? Really?

I went to Market Basket this morning to buy groceries. Market Basket, with their crew, is a major civil institution stabilizing life these days. Love ’em. There’s TP (“bog roll” to English and Scottish friends) available again. I guess the people who’ve laid in several decades’ worth of supplies have figured out they don’t need … Read more

Cloud adventures in CPAP

My dentist, the competent and honorable Dr. J. P. St. Clair, has been pestering me for more than a year saying, “You snore. I can tell by looking down your mouth. Do something about it!”  So I finally did. I took a “home sleep test” and the sleep clinic people said, yes you should do … Read more

Is Pluto a planet? A wonderful controversy!

I was chatting with a co-worker today, and she said she’d heard “they” were thinking about calling Pluto a “planet” again after it was demoted in 2006. Is Pluto a planet, or a dwarf planet, or a planetoid comet, or a cometoid planet, or what? It’s a wonderful debate. It’s a debate about how to … Read more