Recent Comments

1. about 3 years ago on Doonesbury

   Just a note about that “six weeks”. Pregnancy is counted from the first day of the woman’s last period. E.g., about two weeks before she could have become pregnant. This silly method left over from the 1800’s means that “six weeks pregnant” is actually “carrying a 4 week old embryo”.

2. over 3 years ago on Non Sequitur

   You can see evolution in a lab. You have to work with something that reproduces very, very quickly, and you have to be patient. Here is the result of a twenty year experiment: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab/

3. over 3 years ago on Doonesbury

   Fake news is out there, all over the internet. Anyone can publish anything, tweet anything, pontificate on anything. That doesn’t mean you need to believe it all.

4. over 3 years ago on Doonesbury

   Clueless. Repeating “alt-right” fake news.

5. over 3 years ago on Doonesbury

   One school I went to has a faculty dining room. Princeton: https://www.princeton.edu/prospecthouse/faqs4.html The other school (MIT) does not, as far as I am aware. (Since MIT is in Cambridge right next to Boston, perhaps they feel the faculty have many other local options.)

6. over 3 years ago on Doonesbury

   But Alien is pretty good!

7. over 3 years ago on Doonesbury

   Wow, you are wearing blinders, or only listening to FOX.

8. over 3 years ago on Doonesbury

   The two rules for buying a computer:

   One: Get the best computer that you can afford, and keep it until it dies beyond reasonable repair (8 – 10 years). Getting the best now means that in 8-10 years it will still be so-so OK.

   Two: Never, never look at computer ads again until you are ready for your next one. You DO NOT WANT TO KNOW what you could get for that same money in 3 months, never mind in a year or two.

9. over 3 years ago on Doonesbury

   “Try to remember that Hitler went to jail, and used that to consolidate his own powerbase.”

   True, but Hitler was young (36 or so) at the time. Trump doesn’t have that much time. We can hope he ages out (as in never makes it out, either from a long term, or death).

10. almost 4 years ago on Doonesbury

    At work decades ago (for Bell Labs), one supervisor was annoyed that people were playing Adventure (the “twisty passages all alike” text game on UNIX) during breaks.I was annoyed that he regarded that as a problem. I used a hex editor to modify my copy of the Adventure .exe file to report its process name as “vi” (a UNIX text editor) instead of “adventure”. Problem solved.