I like this guy’s positivity, but I caution that Trump is coming out “armed for bear,” in terms of centralizing power within the U.S. presidency, and he’s making sure he runs into as little resistance as possible.

What he’s doing is precisely what our Founding Fathers worked so hard to protect us against.

Tagged with:

Most math teachers wish they had a dollar for every time some cheeky 14-year-old raised his hand in their class and asked, “Am I ever going to use this even once in my life?”

I’ll grant that, if you’re not going into the sciences, you can skip advanced math–but not algebra, which lives all around us.

• If you want to drive to a restaurant halfway across the state of California on back roads where you’ll average 50 mph, to meet your Uncle Bob and his family who are driving down from Seattle on the Interstate at 75 mph, and he’s leaving at 6 AM, when should you leave?

• If it takes two minutes to print out three color photos, how long will it take to print out 15?

Sure, there are people who are proud that they’ve never used algebra in their lives, but maybe it’s time for them to rethink that.

Tagged with:

The subject of energy storage is like anything else in technology: lots of entrants of completely different types that, over time are winnowed down, and ultimately, the “winners win and the losers lose.”  What happens next is that the losers are eventually forgotten.

IMO, that’s what’s happened to flywheels.  It’s been close to 15 years since I heard anyone use the word.

Of course, it’s possible to store energy in its kinetic form, but as battery technology has continued to improve in terms of both price and performance, things like flywheels have fallen away and died.

Here’s a webinar on the subject by a guy who doesn’t see this industry segment the same way I do.  I.e., he somehow believes that flywheels can and will serve in the charging of EVs.

Tagged with:

Here’s a woman with a tattoo that reminds us that about 45% of our countrymen have joined a cult of ignorance and hate, and another 5% are in another, closely related cult: one of selfishness and greed.

Both vote for the modern Republican party, and the more overtly sociopathic its leader, the better.

Tagged with:

From a reader, with my comments below:
So, I started this sentence with ‘so’! And I followed up by starting another with a conjunction. But do I care?
There are many people who object to these practices, condemning them as incorrect grammar. But does it really matter? Do these usages detract from the accuracy and meaning of the sentence?
And if I end a sentence with a preposition, it is something I am quite happy with. If I put the full stop (period) before or after quotation marks is there a change in meaning?
I try to adhere to the rules of grammar, regardless of whether or not an error would change a sentence’s meaning.  Periods, question marks, exclamation points, and commas go inside quotation marks; colons and semicolons go outside.  Though mistakes of this sort do not change the meaning, they would make readers wonder why I didn’t learn this stuff in grade school, along with everyone else.
I used to write proposals, asking prospective clients in Fortune 500 companies for tens of millions of dollars in exchange for marketing services, and, a month or so later, reports detailing what my company had done that was worth all that dough.  Poor grammar was definitely not part of the correct “look.”
I don’t use extraneous words like “so” (in the sense above) in speech, and especially not in writing.  Why?  From Strunk and White’s Elements of Style: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words …. for the same reason that …. a machine should have no unnecessary parts.”
I sometimes start sentences (even paragraphs) with conjunctions because I believe there are times at which this practice helps me convey meaning to the reader.
Re: ending sentences with prepositions, I was relieved to learn that there is no such rule.  There is a rule that addresses the following old joke, but it’s actually the one mentioned above re: unnecessary words:
Incoming freshman at Harvard:  Pardon me.  Can you tell me where the library is at? 
Upperclassman: This is Harvard.  We don’t end sentences with prepositions.
Freshman:  Sorry.  Can you tell me where the library is at, asshole? 

 

Tagged with:

I’m not a billionaire, let alone one with the net worth of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, so maybe I’m the wrong guy to ask, but I would say that the answer to the question that this young man raises at left lies in the fact that most of the world’s wealthiest people care very little about anyone but themselves, and perhaps their immediate families.

It’s possible that this is simply an element of human nature that applies to folks with a ferocious appetite for extreme levels of wealth.  How do you think they wound up with $200 billion in the first place?  Teaching high school English? Charitable giving?

There is a certain irony here, of course. These horrible people either need to a) live on this decaying planet, or b) export their horrible nature to  a neighboring rock orbiting the sun. In either case, their disease can’t be cured by moving to Mars, any more that Pennsylvanians with metastatic cancer can be cured by moving to New Jersey.

Coincidentally, I met a TV actress yesterday who owns a Tesla.  I asked if she was aware that some Tesla drivers have bumper stickers that read: I bought this car before I learned what a terrible person Elon Musk is.  She laughed, and exclaimed, “That’s exactly what my bumper sticker reads!”

Tagged with:

At left are the words of U.S. representative Adam Schiff.  Sure, conservatives view Schiff as some sort of blend of the anti-Christ and Karl Marx, but doesn’t he have a point here?

Didn’t the American people have a right to have a Justice Department, that was given the better part of four years to get the job done, to uncover the truth about the former president’s attempt to overthrow their country’s legitimate government and prosecute him accordingly?

The implosion of the multiple cases against Trump is simply proof that the rule of law means essentially nothing at this point in U.S. history.

Tagged with:

When people like Ramaswamy are taken to be serious candidates to become president of the United States, it can only be because the people they’re speaking to are morons.

It’s a grotesque truth–but one we’re forced to accept.

 

Tagged with:

The author of this meme asks a very good question–one I would love to have answered before I check out of here.

If you surveyed everyone who voted against Trump, I think you’ve find four prevalent responses:

• Trump has a very close connection with Putin and the Russian oligarchs from which he’s profiting handsomely.

• Trump may not be profiting from these relationships, but has a feeling of great reverence for the world’s dictators, i.e., those whose actions are completely unconstrained.

• Trump loves to create outrage.  He doesn’t particularly care what people are saying about him, as long as he’s in the news.  (I hadn’t realized this was a possibility until I saw his picks for key cabinet posts.)

• Trump’s nature as a sociopath commands him to make life miserable for everyone except his supporters, i.e., people who can do something for him.  Since Europeans don’t have any direct effect on U.S. politics, why should he care a damn what they think?

Tagged with:

Perhaps there were times in U.S. history when government failed the people in a way that was not too different from what we have today.  I heard recently that the robber-barons of the late 19th Century were so corrupt that they essentially owned the presidency and congress.

Having said that, no Americans alive today have ever experienced anything like having Donald Trump in the White House, with his cronies in cabinet positions, with four long years to take battering rams to women’s rights, our healthcare system, national defense, education, and environment. If anyone thought there was any fairness in the justice system as it applies to rich people, as Dante said, “abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

As I explained to my mom on the phone the other evening, roughly half of this country walks around in a state of deep disappointment in the abject failure on the part of 76 million of their countrymen to apply basic moral reasoning at the voting booth.

Tagged with: