Posts

• Total Eclipse 2017

  Aug 23, 2017 - 4 min read

  On August 21, 2017 I and my family were lucky enough to be able to travel into the path of totality to view a solar eclipse. I’d been wanting to do so for a few months and with a little planning and a ton of luck we got what we came for.

  

• I Was Wrong About the United Debacle

  Apr 17, 2017 - 2 min read

  Not being quite content with the color of this particular bike shed, I posted this on Facebook April 10:

  The forceful removal of the UAL passenger is very unfortunate and seems to smell pretty badly. But here’s the thing: UAL is within its right to do this. They ask the guy to leave after random selection. He doesn’t (or sneaks back on). Security arrives. Then what? How does this go anywhere but straight to hell? I don’t get it. Do they just plead with him for a few hours? Move onto the next person? The security guy was apparently not acting appropriately (duh) but I still don’t see how the passenger can think this goes anywhere favorable for himself. Ditto for traffic stops that go badly (modulo some very bad incidents involving obviously biased behavior). Guy with gun tells you to do something, fucking do it. Challenge it in court once it is over.

• Hail Mary voting

  Mar 7, 2017 - 2 min read

  There are plenty of reasons and justifications for why Donald Trump “beat the odds” and won the presidency last November. The most compelling, I think, is this one laid out by Mark Cuban in his interview with Nate Silver:

  I made a huge mistake in how I evaluated it, obviously. I thought logic and common sense and facts mattered to most voters. But the reality is, we all — including all of us here — tend to take the path of least resistance.

• Compelling Take on Right vs Left

  Feb 19, 2017 - 2 min read

  I’ve been reading – and greatly enjoying – Scott Alexander’s writing over at Slate Star Codex. I don’t recall how I first ran across this trove of deep though but it’s worth noting that /r/slatestarcodex is also a thing.

  Among his (self-selected?) best-of list is this gem from 2013 entitled A Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum. Part way through, he gives up the goods:

  Okay, I’ll put you out of your misery and tell you my hypothesis now. My hypothesis is that rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment.

• Intel Compute Card

  Jan 14, 2017 - 2 min read

  Intel announced their Compute Card at this year’s CES as a better-thought-out version of their existing Compute Stick. AnandTech:

  The Intel Compute Card has been designed to be a universal computing platform for different kinds of devices, including those that do not exist yet. The ultimate goal is to simplify the way companies develop equipment, use, maintain, repair, and upgrade it. Creators of actual devices have to design a standard Intel Compute Card slot into their product and then choose an Intel Compute Card that meets their requirements in terms of feature-set and price.

• Just Ask Questions

  Jan 12, 2017 - 2 min read

  I hold courteous discourse and reasoned debate in high regard. When engaging someone in a discussion, I prefer to approach it with honesty and an open mind. But humans aren’t wired that way and emotion can kick in awfully quickly.

• Atlas V Launch

  Dec 19, 2016 - 2 min read

  You might think it odd that a guy who grew up in Florida never witnessed a rocket launch up close. Alas, I attended my first this past weekend. My kids, having an ever increasing appetite for spaceflight, came with me. We all enjoyed it immensely.

  

• Introspection

  Dec 15, 2016 - 1 min read

  I’ve been thinking a lot about how to preserve some of my thoughts publicly and what form this site should take. My misadventures with WordPress on the now-defunct breddy.net left me with a bad taste in my mouth for PHP frameworks and I remain skeptical of publish-platform-as-a-service offerings like Medium, Tumblr and Facebook. Twitter is too limiting for reasonable discourse.

• Site Architecture

  May 22, 2016 - 2 min read

  The way it works is I have a bunch of Markdown that gets processed by Hexo and synced to an S3 bucket. This is a process that was ostensibly made mainstream by Jekyll but is now supported by a lot of different tools in the same genre.

• Back From the Dead

  May 22, 2016 - 1 min read

  After what was probably the third or fourth battle with hacked WordPress installs, someone finally completely sunk breddy.net. I’m changing strategy and using static files in AWS.

• 1
• 2