The Apollo 14 Lunar Module, with its 7° tilt apparent in the picture. The onboard astronauts looked out the module’s window often to ensure it was not tipping over. Image: NASA / David HarlandFor NASA to safely land 12 astronauts on the Moon with the Apollo missions, a lot had to go right. But before it could even attempt Apollo, the agency needed to know what our Moon is like up close. Worrying about the basic nature of the lunar surface and soil may sound mundane now but it was a big unknown…

Welcome back to the Gridiron Deep Dive everybody, where today, I’m going to take a detour from the normal football fare, to talk about former MLB Centre Fielder Glenn Burke.If you know why I’ve come to talk about Glenn Burke today, then you know, but please keep that information to yourself for the next little while, not to ruin it for everybody else.Writing this article took a lot out of me. Thank you for being here!There are several disclaimers that I would like to give before we begin, both…

The Kate Rays is Kim Floyd’s current project. You can find the music she makes with Tony Chance on bass and Mark Hubbard on drums on Bandcamp. I recommend it. But I discovered some tracks on Soundcloud that predate The Kate Rays and that got me curious. Kim who usually sings and plays guitar is now based in Jacksonville, Florida. I believe at some point she was in New York City. I wonder where she was in 1997. The tracks from her project Tintern Abby date from that year. There are three songs…

In most big stories, there are one or two pieces of absolutely essential context that get reported in major outlets but which no one seems to pay much attention to.David Goldman reporting for CNN: Today, neighboring Cushing is the hub of America’s energy market. It literally provides the oil plumbing for the United States. It’s where America’s benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil is priced and warehoused. From there, it’s piped to refineries around the country. In normal times, Cushing stores…

Via my parents. Found in my suit pocket after resting there for nine years.

‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend;’ it may have started as a means to annoy Margaret Thatcher, the tabloid press and conservative society by banding together with a group equally reviled by the British Establishment, but the LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners) assistance and fundraising society formed a genuine bond with the Welsh […]

Some desserts are designed to behave themselves. Clean layers. Delicate sweetness. Restrained presentation. This is not one of them. This cake is dense, dark, warm, and unapologetically excessive. Deep chocolate batter loaded with chunks of dark vegan chocolate, finished with a raspberry bourbon frosting that lands somewhere between frosting, glaze, and controlled chaos. You can make this as a full cake, cupcakes, or smaller lava cakes depending on how dramatic you want dessert to become. The…

Rain starts at first light. A soggy dawn chorus soon subsides, leaving only the new Carolina wren with his exotic accent and enthusiasm. As the rain thickens, he too falls silent.

Comics Curmudgeon readers! Do you love this blog and yearn for a novel written by its creator? Well, good news: Josh Fruhlinger's The Enthusiast is that novel! It's even about newspaper comic strips, partly. Check it out! Intelligent Life, 6/22/26 Everything I’ve learned about all the characters in Intelligent Life has been against my will. I wasn’t thrilled when I realized I instantly recognized this blond guy as “Barry,” the stereotypical jock used as a punching bag by the nerd characters in…

Normally on Fathers Day, dad and I would have met up on the riverbank somewhere before sun rise and then spent the morning fishing and chatting together. Catching a fish was never important, just being there together. Obviously this year that wasn't to be, he definitely wouldn't have wanted me to sit around moping though, he would have wanted me to go and get after those tench again, so that's what I did. I made sure to spend some time reminiscing about the good times we spent together and even…

Note: I am, of course, going to include my books in this. I skipped a few I don't have suggestions for. Character smells like fresh cut grass Song Lyrics: Oh hello, both I Belong to You and Presented with Love would work for this. I Hate Everyone But You: Zomromcom by Olivia Dade National Park: Hello again, I Belong to You fits here as well, with Rock Creek Park. Of Kings and Queens also mentions the Mall. Heatwave: Hot Earl Summer by Erica Ridley Dual Timeline: Cosmic Love at the Multiverse…

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it. My training as a scientist taught me to revere the scientific method, and I continue to hold science in the highest regard. Science can teach us much about the world and ourselves, and as I’ve written elsewhere, it can allow us to see beyond our biases — if we can keep open minds. Yet I’ve grown to understand that not all knowledge worth possessing can come from a book, an experiment or a Google search. Science is…

We paid for our very overgrown hedges to be cut back and shaped. It's not cheap, but the garden instantly looks smarter. It also means I can drive onto the street without risking scratches from bush talons. I then found a pigeon chick in the back garden, just out of reach of next door's little dogs that were barking and scrambling furiously through the chain-link fence. I moved it to safety on the other side of the garden. A nest must have been disturbed by the trimming and the chick fell out.…

It’s no secret that the Hollywood Comet loves musicals. In 2010, I revealed I had seen 400 movie musicals over the course of eight years. Now that number is over 600. To celebrate and share this musical love, here is … Continue reading →

Sir David Attenborough is 100 years old and formed a large part of my love of nature through is TV documentaries through the 80s and 90s. I can remember when TVs went HIGH DEFINITION and Planet Earth (I think) was one of the first shows to take advantage and wow it looked so so good. I read his autobiography many years ago, he is a fascinating, kind, inquisitive, brave, and all round good guy. We should celebrate him, and people like him, more than we do. Highly recommend you watch Making Life…

Sometimes, all we have are bad and worse options. The only way is through.

Frozen food company Amy’s Kitchen issued a public statement this week clarifying that the cooking instructions printed on the back of its popular bean and cheese burritos are completely accurate, putting an end to years of consumer speculation.“We get a lot of emails asking if there was a printing error on the packaging,” said Amy’s quality assurance director Beau Rito. “So let me be clear right here. It is 60 seconds in a microwave, then flip, then another 60 seconds. In a toaster oven, it…

In this week’s issue of The Savvy Diabetic: Want to Participate in Hill Day from Home? Here’s how! GLP-1s/Semaglutide Benefits 17 June 2026 Diabetes Patients on Semaglutide Had Fewer Fractures Semaglutide tied to quality of life improvements vs. placebo in type 2 diabetes, CKD Lower Risk Of Death, Clots Among Autoimmune Patients Taking GLP-1 Drugs GLP-1s may nearly halve risk for hepatic complications in MASLD, type 2 diabetes Why fermented foods are so good for your gut, and 5 ways to eat more…

A centenary conversation celebrating a great conductor and an outstanding Mahlerian The conductor Klaus Tennstedt was born on June 6, 1926. After his arrival from East Germany to the West, he held chief conductor posts with the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg (1979-81), and with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1983-87), with whom he recorded extensively, including a Mahler symphony cycle (of which No 8 won a Gramophone Award back in 1987). To mark the anniversary Warner Classics has issued…

A popular way to explain how current LLMs work is to say that “all” they do is predict the next most likely word in a sentence. From one perspective, this is correct. Trained on all human language, the LLMs distilled billions of word sequences so that they can imitate authentic-sounding strings of words that have never been said before. These sentences sound plausible because, based on training on millions of average human texts, the models were predicting what an average human might say next.…

Note: Commentary on Nebel, A., Kling, A., Willamowski, R., & Schell, T. (2024). Recalibration of limits to growth: An update of the World3 model. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 28, 87–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13442 What the World3 recalibration proves, and the one thing it cannot Nebel, Kling, Willamowski and Schell did something the Limits to Growth literature had talked about for fifty years but never quite carried out: they let a computer search the parameter space. Where Turner and…

Sometimes, very old buildings gain glamor as they age. Another of our pre-Revolution projects with John G. Waite Associates, Architects is the Roslyn Grist Mill, an industrial building from the early eighteenth century that has somehow become glamorous over time. 1919 A grist mill grinds grain, and needs a source of power to turn its wheels. At the town of Roslyn, on Long Island, there’s a stream- and spring-fed pond south of the mill (and south of the original line of the road that used to be…

How did Fred Astaire dance on the ceiling in Royal Wedding (1951)? Discover the rotating room, strapped cameraman, and brilliant engineering behind one of Hollywood's greatest illusions.

Erwin M. Schmidt reached out to point me to a new study of the survival rates of on-screen geologists in movies titled “Geologists on the silver screen—the sequel”.Four geologists at the University of Gothenburg spent more than a decade keeping a list of every film they could find that featured a geologist. Across the 141 movies they tracked, the on-screen geologist died 34% of the time. Usually quite early, and often moments after explaining that the volcano is about to go off. Erwin asked…

Daily Drawing 904

I still see many websites where the main content is in a tiny sans serif font. Why do they go out of their way to make their words hard to read? I suspect it is due to outdated ideas from ye olde web. There was a time when people running websites felt compelled to get as much as possible “above the fold”, so a smaller font would help you get more words at the top of the page. Also, they believed that a sans serif font was better for computer screens because the serifs — those tails on the tops…

📍 ANA LOUNGE As is tradition. BRB, going to Aus Location: Tokyo, Tokyo Prefecture, JapanComment by email

I have had a hardware project in the making for a while now. It's been moving along slowly; I only need to finish the programming part, but I rarely feel like doing it. Because of that, I'm extremely susceptible to distractions. So I saw a mechanical counter in a video. It's not much more than four digits and a button you can use to increment the number. And a knob to zero the whole thing out. A bit later, I ran into a cute little LCD panel. It can show three digits and, given its dimensions,…

Security is ultimately a political problem that may have technical solutions. It's because we can always risk it and hope for the best. Observe a climber, solving the technical problem of ascending after a political decision of taking this route.

Some things are looking up for me. I can see my toes again when I look straight down. Over 1/2 of the swelling and fluid build up is gone. I still think the fluid build up is what is causing my pain when coughing. As my chest expands to cough the fluid is putting pressure on my chest cavity. The swelling and fluid build up I had with my hip operation was mostly gone within 7-9 days. It ain't happening as quick north of that.still squareThere is a wee bit of gap at the front but I'm not going to…