JALEP is Just Another Lunar Eclipse Photo. WC stood in the slush at the Dog Musher’s Field for a couple of hours Monday night photographing the total lunar eclipse in the southeast sky. Unlike a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse is a leisurely, slow-developing event. It’s a consequence of the geometry, or the astrophysics, if…
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal… In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour…
First, you have to understand the Heartbleed programming error. As usual, Randall Munroe at XKCD has an elegant explanation: Heartbleed isn’t malware; it isn’t really a bug. It’s a programming error, likely a piece of programmer diagnostic that got left in when it shouldn’t have been. Almost certainly, the first person to discover the Heartbleed…
This is a seriously wonkish post, but it is important because it goes to the heart of what the SCOTUS is doing with campaign spending limits and informs every aspect of First Amendment-protected speech. In the last ice age, when WC was a law student at a Certain Midwestern University, one of his professors was…
Sometimes The Onion goes through satire and out the other side. Thursday’s piece on the Chicago Cubs. Child Shown Field Where Cubs Suck SPORTS NEWS IN BRIEF • Sports • Baseball • ISSUE 50•14 • Apr 10, 2014 CHICAGO—Visiting for the first time in his young life, 9-year-old Jacob Tendering was reportedly shown the field where his favorite team, the Chicago Cubs, suck every home…
There’s been too much heavy stuff. The last three posts have been about corrupt politicians, addiction and despair. Time for a bird break. It’s still a while to spring migration in Interior Alaska, but we’ll have a look at some of the birds that are arriving, as you read this, on the Bolivar Flats Shorebird…
It was bad enough when WC stumbled across the Dunning-Kruger Effect a few years go and recognized how it explained politicians like The Quitter. But recently WC has been reading about Identity-Protective Cognition theory. Thomas Jefferson himself would despair. Despite the occasional – well, perhaps more often than occasional – lapses into sarcasm, WC is essentially an…
A couple of weeks ago,the excellent Amanda Coyne reported that the Alaska Democratic Party would be using the slogan, “The GOP is addicted to Koch” as a tag line in the 2014 elections. It’s a cute zinger, but WC wonders if the problem isn’t far bigger than the aphorism suggests. Certainly, Alaska GOP politicians running…
The New York Times reports that Charles Keating is dead. WC is tempted to visit his grave, just to make sure. Few Americans in the second half of the 20th Century inflicted so much harm on so many of their fellow Americans. And, indirectly, he aggravated the financial disaster that Alaska suffered 1988-1990. But WC will get…
Here’s a metaphor that WC’s geology professor gave: imagine a giant bell, as big as the Liberty Bell. Imagine there are microphones scattered around the outer surface of the bell. Now imagine tapping the lip of the bell with a hammer. Then, using just the information from the microphones to figure out where and how…
The inaugural Dumb As a Fence Post Award involved a wholly unscientific process, to keep it consistent with the Republican Party’s rejection of logic and science. Readers were invited to submit nominations of egregiously stupid actions and individuals. WC sorted through the nominations to choose the Stupider. The Stupider were put in a poll and…
WC freely admits he had never heard of, let alone heard, an ngoni before. But in the hands of Kone Abdoulaye, a backing musician for International Blue Express, this ancestor of banjo, a four-stringed african lute is simply amazing. Imagine, if you can, a primitive wooden lute that sounds like a percussive child’s piano tuned in…
