"Very limited amounts of data are presently available for variables associated with ZR and ZL [SLD] conditions aloft." Public Domain figure from DOT/FAA/AR-09/45 ("FZDZ" or "ZL" is freezing drizzle, a form of supercooled large drops, SLD). A tragic accident leads to icing research In 1994 an accident occurred near Roselawn 1, Indiana, USA, that was later attributed in part to Supercooled Large Drop icing (SLD, drop sizes large than those in 14 CFR Part 25 Appendix C) 2. This led to a…

"Modernized Appendix C - The Beauty & Benefits of Digitized Figures" Quote from an unpublished outline of topics by Richard Jeck. Summary The late Dr. Richard Jeck of the FAA 1 in his Icing Information Notes advocated "New Replacement Figures for 14 CFR-25,29, Appendix C". The "Icing Information Note" was essentially a draft of what became Appendix F of DOT/FAA/AR-07/4 2. Here, I will note a missed opportunity to make them available, and offer other "modernized" means of producing figures as an…

"A Treasure Trove" Although horizontal extent is a common term in the icing literature, it has not been defined anywhere. Therefore, it is defined here in a way that is compatible with conventional usage. Public Domain figure and text from DOT/FAA/AR-07/4 1, also contained in a prior Icing Information Note. Summary Perhaps the best summary of Dr. Jeck's works is a summary that he wrote himself. In 2018 Dr. Richard Jeck, retired from the FAA, sent via private email a collection of his "Icing…

"a number of advantages and uses of this new, distance-based format" Public Domain figure from DOT/FAA/AR-00/30. Dr. Richard Jeck 1, retired from the FAA, passed away in January 2026 2. Dr. Jeck had over 60 publications in the area of aircraft icing 3. Many of them have been cited numerous times, and are currently cited in 2026. I knew Dr. Jeck professionally through industry organizations (AIAA, SAE) and meetings with the FAA. I had the opportunity to have a drink with him one evening circa…

Been a fan of this brand for awhile and things like this are why. Borscht from China? Very unique. Let’s give it a whirl! Tang Master Borscht Noodles – China A distributor / import sticker (click to enlarge). Detail of the side panels (click to enlarge). Looks to be meat free but check for yourself. To prepare, add in everything and fill to line with boiling water. Cover 3 minutes. Finally, stir and enjoy! Detail of the lid (click to enlarge). An instant noodle block. A sachet of liquid soup…

This is an idea for an installation. It does not exist, I’m not a full time artist to be honest, and I am writing it down mostly so it stays an idea for a piece and does not quietly become a product somewhere. Products like this one should not exist. As art, maybe it has to. The piece, in one line: a room that learns you. You walk in alone. There is a chair, a screen, and a field that asks for your email address. You type it. Then you wait while the room builds a model out of everything you…

Added my art gallery to my Projects page.

Sonic Youth, Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, New York, October 31, 1986The Pixies on Halloween in 1986 yesterday … how about Sonic Youth on Halloween in 1986 today? I wrote about this incomplete-but-oh-so-neat soundboard recording for this year’s phantasmagoric All Hallows Aquarium Drunkard roundup. Here’s a snippet: Forty Halloweens ago in 1986, Sonic Youth was upstate in Annandale-on-Hudson at Bard College; not exactly Headless Horseman territory, but close enough. Given the occasion, the…

It’s amusing to me that LLMs, the bleeding-edge technological breakthrough so powerful as to cause existential worry, have sparked a renaissance of one of our oldest surviving computing interfaces: the terminal. A few short years ago, many programmers who preferred to “just get stuff done” eschewed the terminal in favor of VSCode and JetBrains IDEs. Me included. But now: TUIs are first-class interfaces across Claude, Antigravity, Pi, etc. Herdr, a terminal multiplexer for agents, is blowing up,…

Flowery Friday is a periodic feature of the blog, usually during the summer as various flowers bloom and die off. It's fun trying to capture the various flowers throughout their lifecycle in different light. Part of the challenge is that they're always in the same place, with same background, and limitations on where I can hold the camera because I can't step into the garden itself. Ants, bees, and water droplets add to the interest and challenge.We've had a wonderful long fall season, but…

About a month ago, I hopped in my car and headed to Schaumburg, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Among the swath of generic office parks and strip malls, the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center Hotel hosted this year’s iteration of the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest. For those unfamiliar, this festival exists in a few different cities worldwide and is organized by several groups. Best of all, the Midwest one is the largest and entirely free to attend. I was only able to attend for a bit…

Emma passed her reading, listening and writing components of the English test she took a couple of weeks ago. There’s still a speaking component that they conduct separately that she has to do. Hopefully that goes similarly well. Speaking of Emma, she went on her first extended trip all on her own. Her school had a camp that took the kids out to Chiba and she was away for Wednesday and Thursday night. Oh my goodness, what a difference a third child makes. I have no idea how parents who have…

U.S. citizens: get out and vote! Don’t mail it in. If you have early voting, do that. If you have a ballot, drop it off at a polling center. Get out Tuesday on Election Day. Are you happy with the state of the country right now? I know I’m not. Your vote is your voice. Voting is your civic responsibility. VOTE!

Lou: That actually transitions me to a question I have, which is what are the kinds of things that you’ve gotten out of it? In the past on this podcast, I’ve talked about there have been so many opportunities, customers, job opportunities, like things like that, that I’ve gotten out of it. Glenn: Oh, Oh, 100%. I used to joke that I think my blog maybe has less than a hundred subscribers, but one of them was one of the VPs at my company. So how many subscribers is that worth to have their…

Today I wanted to share one of my favorite musical/linguistic phenomena: the foreign-language version!It used to be common for musicians in non-English speaking countries to cover songs in their native language. Artists may even release songs in languages they don't speak to cross over into more markets. ABBA themselves recorded in English, Spanish, Swedish, German, and French. They also made Swedish versions of some of their songs to be recorded by other artists on their record label, Polar.…

As a certain very famous poet once not-quite wrote: If Dracula comes, can Frankenstein be far behind? About this time last year (2025), I wrote a post on this schlock horror-western, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. Which is as dumb as its title sounds. Now, as a follow-up, I’m writing this post about this other schlock horror-western, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. Which is even dumber. Why am I doing this? (I hear you all asking…) Well, Because… Well, because these two films, originally…

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. “Picard management tip: Time is the rarest commodity. Manage yours wisely.” —@Picard Tips [RIP Sir Patrick Stewart] “Artificial Intelligence is to Intelligence as Lung Cancer is to Lung” —@DCoder My kid today: “taxis are insane, they’re like Ubers you don’t need an app for” —@JA Westenberg “It’s 1986 and my mother is shouting at me to stop touching the…

NightLife is a game I have had on and off for a number of years. I only ever owned the core rules and the Magic book. I never got a chance to play it, but it is a game we talk about every so often in our Elf Lair Games meetings. The game is quintessentially early 90s. It's filled with blood, dark, and dirty streets, and where you get to play the monster. Vampire: The Masquerade may have done it better, but NightLife gave it its all a year earlier.NightLife is set in New York. A strange New York…

There will never be a leap second again. At least not for UTC. At the CGPM, they decided the last leap second we'll ever see for UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, happened back at the end of 2016. Of course they made that decision while I was out on vacation, so I'm just getting this video up now: But what's the CGPM, why does this matter, and why am I excited about it?

I’ve been meaning to write on Caves of Qud for a long time, but it’s such a huge topic! In the meantime you may enjoy this Youtuber getting a “lesser victory” as a pacifist, never killing a creature, while playing a “Classic mode” permadeath game. (58 minutes) Making it much easier is that there’s a lot of ways to gain experience in CoQ without killing anything, so you aren’t stuck at level 1 the whole game. If you play a mutant character you can pick which mutations you begin with, with Force…

This morning I got a WOD in and actually part way through it I bumped the weight for the hang snatches to 45 pounds. it has been a while with the hamstring. When I was done I noticed it had warmed up nicely. The low was only in the middle 40s I guess. I figured it was the perfect opportunity to go out on the patio and relax in the sun a bit. The wind was picking up and humidity dropping as the cold front had moved through. The temperature was in the lower 70s, and the sun felt amazing on my…

I recently learned about a term for the extra time/efficiency you gain from automation: a productivity dividend. While the dust hasn’t settled on just how much more productive using coding agents makes engineers, it’s clear that at least for producing, investigating, and optimizing code, the dividend is nonzero. A natural question is where to spend it. The most obvious way to spend the dividend is to ship more. You can view vibe coding through this lens: if you use a coding agent and it reduces…

The artwork ranges from mediocre to terrible. The pages seem to overflow with wasted white space. There’s a lack of depth to the material. They neglected to put a price on the cover. The soy-based ink their printer used smears at the slightest provocation, leaving your fingers an inky mess. The prose occasionally slips from one tense to another – the bane of the amateur. The maps are of poor quality and reproduced in a manner which makes them nearly impossible to read. The tagline of the game…

Most teams building with new intelligence tools have the same problem. Fast resolution with a correct direction. Velocity. There are many kinds of agents now. Generalist, specialist, orchestrators, and a few other shapes that appear every month in a new kind of flavour on how to do something in the best possible way. This reminds me of the long, almost obnoxious conversations of tabs vs spaces, React vs the X framework of the moment, GC and non-GC languages, JIT or not, PHP vs ASP.NET, and you…

New links to check out… Dreams can come true it can happen to you — if someone forgets to renew a software license Explanations are “mental acts, not just facts” — Chaz Firestone looks at Tania Lombrozo’s new book on explanation “What shape is this paradox?” sounds like a category mistake — but mathematicians have an explanation for why the Condorect Paradox is in the shape of a Klein bottle “The tragedy is that many people today are deprived of both good company and good solitude. They do not…

BB debuted his “Ghost Skeleton Demon” costume today, hopefully the wings and horns make it through a day of kindergarten. I flipped off a motorbike with two riders in blacked out helmets screaming down the bike lane while we were crossing. They shouldn’t have been doing that, and I shouldn’t have done that. Two wrongs don’t make a right, etc etc.

9729/21648I went up to the attic and found the boxfile containing my scripts (and some other bits and bobs) from Ra Ra Rasputin. What would it be like? Would it hold up? Could there be a comeback?It certainly needs some work and a few of the then topical references are lost on me now, but there's lots of heart and madness and fun in it. I think it could have a bit more heft, though it does explore the way that this story is already a myth, with my Rasputin adding more mist and mystery and lies…

Batching the Billing Ledger: Small Trade-Offs with High Impact is a great article about “systems assembly”, and microbilling is part and parcel of nearly any web app today, certainly when your users call into LLM models. Gotta keep’em tokens counted! Since the start of the agentic era, I’ve been curious about “how much software” we need for workloads like this. After all, my doctrine is less stuff and this looked like a use case too perfect to pass on. Thank you, Vicente, for the pitch-perfect…

Bullshit: a prose-like substance which, on the first sight, looks like it has substance - but it's lacking it. Characterised by being order-of-magnitude harder to dismiss than to produce. It abuses norms of good-faith intellectual engagement. Truth: what actually is, not what someone believes or wishes to be. At odds with motivated reasoning. Reputation: a tool for saving effort on verifying claims from people who are repeatedly full of shit and/or bad actors (the distinction isn't important in…