This is a new, sometime feature, where WC will share with readers both an especially silly email and WC’s reaction to it. Here’s the email: I read in a Twitter thread that solar panels drain the sun’s energy. Is that true? Let’s think this through. The sun radiates energy in all directions, not just towards…
You’ve probably never heard of Changpeng Zhao, or CZ as he calls himself. He’s one of the richest persons in the world, with a net worth estimated by Reuters of $33 billion.1 He’s the co-founder and former CEO of Binance, the world’s largest bitcoin exchange. He’s also a scofflaw, and now a convicted felon. His…
The etymology of the place name “Owhyee” is improbable. As it turns out, about a third of Donald MacKenzie‘s Snake Country Expeditions of 1819–1820 were native Hawaiians. “Owyhee” was then the standard spelling of the islands’ name, a proper spelling of the Hawaiian language name for the islands, hawai’i. The modern spelling then was otherwise unused. Three…
There are a lot of valuable resources embedded in a computer hard disk drive: stainless steel, circuit board pieces and, or course, the powerful rare earth magnets in the drive’s read/write head. Currently, only about 20-25% of discarded hard drives get any kind of recycling, and those are usually simply ground to tiny pieces and…
After the Space Shuttle launch vehicle retired in 2011, The Delta IV Heavy was the biggest, baddest rocket ship in the world. It had a lift capacity of 29 metric tons. Unfortunately it cost tons of money – $400 million per – to launch so its principle customer was the Department of Defense, launching big…
When Astra’s Rocket 3.0 blew up on the Alaska Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island in March 2020, Astra CEO Chris Kemp told news media at the time that the rocket “suffered an anomaly following an otherwise successful day of testing in Kodiak in preparation for a launch this week.”1 Kemp said that the company would…
WC’s former profession was law. WC spent 45-plus years in the private practice of law. For at least the last 15 years of WC’s active practice, WC was constantly warned that computers, and specifically artificial intelligence, would be replacing lawyers any day now. Those voices have gotten louder as AI has expanded its reach to…
WC has already noted that Ingenuity, the solar system’s most famous helicopter, has reached the end of her life. On her 72nd and final flight, she suffered some kind of unknown failure and broke one of her helicopter blades on a Martian sand dune. Perseverance, the Mars rover that carried Ingenuity to Mars’ surface and…
Year Scientist Change 1543 Nicholas Copernicus Dē revolutionibus orbium coelestium places the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the solar system 1650 Galileo Galileii The Milky Way was composed of stars like the sun; our sun was not unique 1750 Thomas Wright Nebula first identified as clusters of stars like the Milky Way…
Warning: This blog post was composed under the influence of pain-killing drugs. Read at your own risk. Have you heard about the computer malware attack on internet-equipped electric toothbrushes? Three million electric toothbrushes subverted by computer malware that attacks targets and victims with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) exploits?1 Now before we examine the details of this…
WC does try to track international events to some extent, and particularly in Great Britain. But somehow WC was entirely unaware of a massive, nasty scandal that’s unfolding there. While WC’s readers are doubtlessly better informed than WC and already are aware of this story, on the off chance that some readers aren’t, or informed…
When you become what you mocked, you should expect to be mocked for what you have become. Alaska Airlines, in a 1980s advertising campaign, mocked the food served on other airlines. Recyclable plastic parsley. A sample: WC has no idea if the advertisements were effective, but they were worth a laugh. Of course, it’s been…
Ex-Representative George Santos infamously invented his resumé. Very little of it turned out to be true. But George Santos is at least a real person. He’s a genuine sociopathic liar, but there’s a (sur)real person there. It turns out that the bankrupt cryptocurrency hedge fund called HyperVerse took the next logical step: it’s Chief Executive…
The Federal Trade Commission – the FTC – has brought an enforcement action against a company you’ve never heard of, Kochava. It’s based in Sandpoint, Idaho, and might be one of the the largest data brokers on the planet. It boasts it has bucketloads of personal data on more than 300 million Americans. What data? …
It’s not news that Twitter was hacked in 2022 – pre-Musk – and some 4.4 million email addresses and telephone numbers were compromised. Now truly massive stolen data sets from the Twitter hack are appearing for sale on the Dark Web. The data sets themselves aren’t especially revealing in isolation and on an individual basis,…
It’s probably time for WC’s review of the Canon R5, WC’s first mirrorless single lens camera. On paper, it’s a dream: powerful autofocus, an amazing 45 megapixels of image and very good performance in low light, all at one-third the weight of WC’s former prime camera, the Canon 1D-X Mark III. WC captured some excellent…
Lucy is a NASA unmanned spacecraft en route to the trojan moons of Jupiter. Lucy’s orbital path was plotted to take it by two main asteroid belt asteroids along that very long, four year voyage. Lucy passed the first of those two asteroids on November 1, a small object, about half a mile across, called…
There’s no question in WC’s mind that the late John Warnock was a genius. He developed, or co-developed, computer software products like PostScript, Adobe Illustrator and the PDF format that absolutely revolutionized how graphics were created and produced. But he also had the seriously annoying habit of causing his company, Adobe Systems, to purchase excellent…
Up until this month, WC had owned exclusively single lens reflex cameras. All those times in high school WC borrowed his parents’ Argus C-3 don’t count. An SLR operates by using a mirror to reflect up to the viewfinder the image from the lens; when the shutter button is pressed, the mirror flips up out…
The Detroit police arrested an 8-month pregnant African American woman for car-jacking and robbery. The arrest was based on face recognition technology and a photo lineup showing heads only. Based on that “evidence,” six (!) Detroit police officers arrived at the home of 32-year old Porcha Woodruff and, in front of her crying children and…
One day the goddess Juno perceived that it suddenly grew dark, and immediately suspected that her husband, Jupiter, had raised a cloud to hide some of his doings that would not bear the light. She brushed away the cloud, and saw her husband, on the banks of a glassy river, with a beautiful heifer standing…
WC has written here before about his extreme skepticism of all things cryptocurrency. While there are folks who have made nominal millions from each other, buying and selling something that, by definition and intention, is so difficult to find and trace that it might as well not exist. It seems its most common use is…
A farmer in Saskatchewan named Chris Achter had a text message exchange with a grain buyer named Kent Mickleborough. In the course of that text message exchange, Mickleborough sent Achter a proposed contract to buy 86 metric tons of flax at a price of $17.00 per bushel. Achter responded with a thumbs up emoji, the 👍 emoji.…
A reader recently asked WC what WC thought of “Photoshopping”. By the question, WC assumes the reader means using Adobe Photoshop to create fake or misleading photos, to digitally alter them in dishonest ways. Photoshop is a tool. It’s a powerful suite of software algorithms to enhance digital images. It’s likely accurate to say that…
This blog post is being written while WC is sitting in his unmarked, unconnected, no-power cave wearing a tinfoil hat and writing this piece of True Non-Googled Account of History for future generations using his charcoal pencil by earwax candlelight, while occasionally talking to trees.1 Because you just can’t be too careful when writing about…
Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, has died. By all accounts, he was a very nice person and an astonishingly generous charitable donor, But Moore is probably best known for Moore’s Law, which isn’t a law at all but a prediction. Moore predicted, in the late 1950s, that the number of transistors on an integrated chip…
The title to this post is a line from one of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s best known poems, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The poem is best known in the United States from the early Walt Disney cartoon, Fantasia, when Mickey Mouse, as the sorcerer’s apprentice, has a magic spell get out of control. The title is…
Karlee Besse, an accountant in British Colombia, recently lost her wrongful termination claim against her former employer in Canada. Instead, the judge ordered her to pay back her former employer, Reach CPA, for “engaging in time theft.” The outcome wouldn’t have been possible but for software her former employer installed on her computer. It’s a kind of…
WC likes much of David Brin’s writing, both his science fiction and his non-fiction. But sometimes even the best author produces a clunker. This is a review WC wrote for Amazon back in 2012.1 WC offers this review because, as a reader who stumbled on it points out, it’s a decent example of WC’s approach…
This blog post is dedicated to CMK, WC’s legal secretary at the time. In the two years she worked for WC, she had to learn three different word processing systems, two different accounting systems and still answer the phone. WC’s belated thanks, CMK. Despite what revisionist computer historians may say, the Apple Macintosh wasn’t the…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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