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A few notes on the oil spill 13 years ago
The actual cost of the BP oil spill won't be known for quite some time. But it's clear that it was big and is ruining a lot of people's fun. Unlike the Exxon Valdez in areas of reduced population, we've got oil washing up on prime beaches. I think of inevitability . Accidents are somewhat inevitable…

Five random Thoughts 13 years ago
Five random things on my brain last week.

Five random Thoughts 14 years ago
Five random things on my brain last week.

The Obama vision of the space program 14 years ago
One of the basic lessons that they teach in places like business schools and need to spend a lot of time hammering into your head... because it feels so unnatural... is the sunk costs fallacy. Emotionally, we hate throwing out something we spent good money on. But sunk costs are gone forever, the…

End of 2009... 14 years ago
So far, June 24, 2007 is still looking like the date where everything changed. 2007 was meh in a lot of ways. It is the wisdom of time that tells me that for $300, some asshole thief taught me an important life lesson. Had I tried to keep going on the course I had been taking, I would, sooner or…

The environmentalist debate is not a game of whack-a-mole 14 years ago
I've spent a lot of time living in traditional "red" states as well as traditional "blue" states. I feel I moved to California from the midwest at exactly the right point in my path of personal growth, because I can look at the positions of the people on both sides of the debate and see the glaring…

Can't do or Won't do? 14 years ago
I was at the lovely new Morrison Planetarium the other day. It's a new digital planetarium based on a set of digital projectors driven by a computer instead of a mechanical projector like the days of old. This means that the planetarium is free to be centered at any point in the sky instead of…

Observations since turning 30 14 years ago
The best software really is as simple as possible, but no simpler. Abstractions really do leak. I found this out while running out of CPU on a network switch and finding out that a NIC chipset that works great for most everybody else doesn't work for my software. If, on Hack Day, where we're asked…

The deep-lodged problems with the BART system 14 years ago
Before World War II, the Key System serviced a huge chunk of the San Francisco East Bay Area (Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley, etc) with an electric streetcar and train network that connected with San Francisco. But, it was discontinued after World War II because trains were the past and cars were the…