Category: Random

Barring some remarkable change in the world, we are going run out of oil in my lifetime. I don’t mean that we will literally run out of oil; I mean that it will become too expensive to use for ordinary tasks such as selling it in the form of gasoline for cars. There seem to…

I recently heard, purely anecdotally, about a case where a neighbor called Child Protective Services when a ten-year old boy came home and his mother wasn’t there. His mother was out shopping or something, and had given him a key. I don’t know if this really happened or not, but it seems like an extraordinary…

I was very impressed by this walking robot (that link is to a video on YouTube). Watching it gave me a very strong feeling of “the future is now.” No doubt there are many hurdles to overcome, but it sure seems like we could all have a walking robot pack horse in ten years (well,…

Growing up outside of Boston, St. Patrick’s Day was a significant holiday. We even got it off school–though to avoid church and state conflicts it was known as Evacuation Day, supposedly in honor of the date that the British troops were forced out of Boston in 1776. I was quite surprised to discover that this…

I was talking to my daughter about how anybody could put anything on the Internet. She was surprised by that, and indeed it is kind of incredible. There was nothing like that when I was young: a way for any random person to speak to any other random person. Of course, as I’ve said before,…