A Blank Life is Quite Unlikely

A Garry Oak was felled to make way for an improved transit exchange at UVic. I made nine objects from it.

Commentary, Take it or Leave it

• When did we start calling cool, dark, wet Junes Junuary?
• New words found among answers on a final exam.
• Hands of Time.
• Found Art: Road crews tasked with filling cracks with tar sometimes add their own flourishes: Tar Art.
• A piece of a Garry Oak felled to make way for an improved transit exchange at UVic. I made nine objects from it.
• Black Ice
• All about Clouds, Mixing Clouds, and Contrails.
• I'm making a wooden bowl each day I'm home because of COVID-19.
• [2016-11-19] My Tom Fletcher is wrong about climate change index page.
• [2019-05-02] Ubuntu 18 Desktop and NIS
• The British Columbia Education History Museum is a collection of artifacts related to education in BC. I built this site from a collection of photos and spreadsheets.
• [2017-02-27] Fan Tan Alley in Victoria is a popular site for tourists to visit. Number 23½ is a beautiful red door that attracts a lot of attention. #fantanalley #VictoriaBC
• There are no "chemtrails". There are contrails. What may be the earliest description in print of contrails appeared in Scientific American in 1919.
• 10 PRINT CHR$
• Dayversaries
• Ponderables
• Research Gate
• [2017-03-04] A series of my photos of glass sculpture at the Chihuly Gardens and Glass gallery in Seattle.
• [2017-02-27] A series of my photos of the Space Needle in Seattle.
• My version of Ed Hawkins' HadCRUT4 temperature spiral.
• [2016-12-30] Michael Hart, Professor Emeritus at Carleton University is wrong about Climate Change.
• A new temperature scale to help christian literalists better express heat-related human misery.
• Bicycle prototypes by ad hoc brainstorming.
• Everyone Should Learn to Program a Computer.
• AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol, Match 3
• According to one person who may have other issues to work on I am in on the secret conspiracy with the Rothschilds!
• There's a cyclist counter on the Galloping Goose trail near downtown Victoria.
• IBM has not caught up with OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) and the Tivoli Storage Manager software no longer works there. Here's how I fixed it.
• 'NASA' wrote about my response to their Earth Observatory Image of the Day post.
• I got some fairly typical climate change denier comments and wrote a long reply.
• A supermoon size comparison.
• The weather station network I manage appeared in the local news. [Archived PDF]
• In which I claim new 120 km/hr speed limits on some British Columbia highways are dumb.
• Here's a good discussion of recent nonsense from Tim Ball and Watts Up With That. This is here to add a link to good things and reduce impact from bad things.
• I'm annoyed by an anti-scientific iPhone app disguising itself as scientific and political called SkyderALERT.
• I wonder if Vernor Vinge got the idea for the singularity from Tron.
  • It looks like the idea goes back to John von Neumann (at least).
• In which I show you what I learned about floating point numbers and the round() function in MySQL.
• My last one cent coins.
• I received an email from a local climate change objector.
• James Dellingpole is not a helpful person. More bitter, angry ranting from Mr. Dellingpole.

  [Edit 2014-07-22 This commentary on James Dellingpole really sums him up well, "I felt sad for Delingpole. Why was he even at this conference? He could be at home with his family, playing Scrabble. It seems he is driven by ambition, but had made it no further than the basement conference hall of a faded hotel in Vegas."]

• We checked the calibration of a NikeFuel Band: GPS Measured Distance Against Counted Steps
• We Got Deer!
• I find Remembrance Day very moving, but for personal reasons.
• Some comments on three articles in Maclean's magazine.
• A letter to the editor in the Saanich News by someone calling himself Jay Currie of Oak Bay makes completely wrong claims about climate change.
• Roger Schank has written more about his opinion that high school sucks. I suggest he has to grow up.
• Just how often does the phrase, "Elementary, Watson" that we all remember actually appear in the text of the Sherlock Holmes stories? Zero times.
• I am getting more and more annoyed with complaints that I hear about the BC carbon tax.
• I read and enjoyed Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks. Local copy of this text is here.
• Complete and utter madness. First that there are things called chemtrails and second that they can be fixed with something called "orgonite".
• More On the Future of Science, speeding up scientific publishing will not cure cancer more quickly.
• Living with the Leaf. What's up with electric cars?
• Gasoline prices continue to rise. Sad, silly, foolish people continue to beat their fists ineffectually against shadows.
• Finally! Real evidence of real chemtrails! Proof at last! I'm quite serious. These are indeed real chemtrails.
• What did I see on the red bicycle bell?
• Rex Murphy has a sorry excuse for an essay in the National Post touching on the Alberta oil sands.
• I rant about advertising on the internet...my rant and the ads
• An essay by Richard Price of Academia.edu spurred me to review openly! Is it time to get rid of anonymous peer review? I say no.
• What about these new millions of CPU computers being planned?

^*Laurence Sterne