Windows 7 Upgrade

First, be warned: It takes forever, over an hour. That’s about what it took to install Vista in the first place. Naturally I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but I want to note it’s much better looking than Vista. There are quite a few more Aero themes and they work better. [...]

Greed and the Pendulum

The pendulum swings relentlessly.
We have seen over the course of history when, coming out of the Slough of Despond, someone manages to rise up and push for what’s right. At least, as far as we can tell. So they build up some momentum, and things look good for awhile. In the past it took a [...]

Old Fears, New Fears, Real Dangers

I went to high school in the early 1970s, mostly in Alaska. We had hippies up there, but it was hard to tell them from rural residents who weren’t native. The antiwar stuff was more a matter of fashion for most kids, but we had some who were serious about it. Along with that were [...]

Uncovering Evil Doesn’t Always Stop It

I suppose it’s possible you haven’t heard about the exposé of the climate scientist’s email and documents. In essence, someone scooped up a copy of lots of private email between some climate guys, along with documents and some software code, all of which indicates these climate guys were lying about what their studies indicated about [...]

Trail Opening Again

Last year’s trail lay fallow this summer due to the massive infestation of deer ticks. Now that cooler nights have returned, they aren’t so fierce. I went back out over the past few weeks and began clearing afresh.
Aside from a couple of trees down across the trail, it was mostly cutting back the sprouts in [...]

Vim for Windows

At first, it was just Cream. I really started liking the extravagant syntax highlighting for my XHTML files. But I never could quite get some of those really off-the-wall keys strokes, even with Cream. Then I spent some time just running on the Linux console, and it became just about necessary to run Vim for [...]

Interstellar Anthropologist, Part 7: Not Exactly Eden

Fortis was thinking how the situation resembled a child starting life over with an adult’s awareness. “How badly was the ship damaged?”
George grinned. “Should you stay with us long enough, and tolerate the travel, you will get a chance to see it yourself. The place was not level ground, but we were too high above [...]

Sporting the Truth

Why do men love “fantasy leagues” so much? Because it allows them to assert their own human logic over something too variable to explain. We have come to the point we can reduce a player’s entire performance to statistics, as well as the coaching staff, and we can even account for the vagaries of pure [...]

Elements of Human Nature

The most fundamental characteristic of what defines us as humans is our choices. That is, it’s not what we are, or what we do, but what drives us, things to which we are committed, things from which we cannot walk away. It is best understood as the process of human development.
We have a body. It [...]

Interstellar Anthropologist, Part 6: The Story

Fortis was surprised the tea was so hot, when the cup was simply warm. It looked and felt like ceramic, but was hardly thick enough to explain the insulating effect on his hands. Another question he would ask later.
Taking a sip, George gazed into his cup, then his gaze drifted to the open tent door. [...]