For the past couple of years there has been a faction in the debate about reinventing policing that insists that the police should be preventing crime rather than reacting to it. Every time I read this argument, something pings in my brain - wasn't that a P.K. Dick story? Some movie with Tom Cruise? Oh, right, Minority Report. All about preventing ( Read more... )

I just discovered that somewhere between my old iPhone SE and my spiffy new iPhone 12 Mini, Apple decided to introduce a new image format that nobody ever asked for called High Efficiency Image Format (which of course is abbreviated HEIC in the new file extension because WTF?). I did not realize this until I attempted to copy some pictures I took ( Read more... )

I have been watching "Twelve Monkeys," an SF series based on the apocalyptic pandemic movie of the same name. It's a solidly well produced show which does its best to be scientifically plausible (insofar as a show about time travel can be). But it was made 6 or 7 years ago, and what seemed plausible then sounds really dated now.

We've just been ( Read more... )

Josh showed up at 8:20am with the replacement gas valve, which is actually a little larger and more complicated than I realized, but still doesn't look like something that should cost over $1000.

tldr; boiler seems to be working great now. Crisis averted. Details below are mostly for me. If you happen to have hot water heat in your house it might be ( Read more... )

Clinical evidence that the pandemic from 1889 to 1891 commonly called the Russian flu might have been an earlier coronavirus pandemic



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And Richard only had to reset the furnace twice. This morning when I got up the radiators were hot and the dining room temp at 71, so I didn't even bother limping down to the basement to check the status. It's better not to hover over the thing anyway. Catching it stuttering and retryng in mid-cycle is distressing, but it's not helpful to interrupt ( Read more... )

It's -18 degrees Fahrenheit and your furnace/boiler stops running. Yup, that happened on Thursday night. There was an error code (63) blinking on the front of the boiler and we didn't see a reset switch (because we're stupid. We were looking inside the front panel and failed to notice the prominent switch on the side of the boiler). So we just had ( Read more... )

 ... is right twice a day. And today that stopped clock is the odious Florida Governor DeSantis, who has been saying that the hospitals need to start distinguishing between those hospitalized with COVID and those who "just happen to have it."  He is right. COVID hospitalization numbers have been contaminated by this problem since the start of the ( Read more... )

My New Years Resolution this year was to cut back on the amount of waste plastic I was pumping into the environment. This requires some thought and some research. In this installment I tackle the Amazon question. Amazon appears to be trying to reduce excess packaging in the products they ship. Probably not out of the goodness of their corporate ( Read more... )

A few years ago I read about somebody who vowed to give up plastic for a year as her way of fighting pollution or global warming or something. I was impressed with the idea at the time, and briefly thought "Maybe I should do that!" until I actually thought about what that would entail. But I feel increasingly guilty every time I regard the ( Read more... )