The city of Ottawa is quite well provisioned with public art. Some pieces, like the wooden spiral in the park near the mint, are quite charming. The piece above, located in the US embassy compound, is probably the worst of the lot.
As you can see, the sculpture looks a bit like a balloon animal where [...]

Robert Rapier, a petroleum engineer and blogger, recently posted an ‘Open Letter to Our Next President.’ He has recently been doing a good job of showing why ideas like a summer gas tax holiday or suing OPEC for the right to buy oil at the price we want are wrong-headed popularity stunts. He has also [...]

While sleeping off fever, I had a surprisingly coherent and well developed dream. If anyone wants to turn it into a Major Motion Picture Event, they can contact me about the rights.
It begins with a medium-sized dry cleaning shop in an American town dominated by a huge army base. The shop is struggling because the [...]

Positive feedbacks are one of the most worrisome aspects of climate change. Viscious spirals could make controlling the problem far more difficult and, if we wait too long to act, potentially impossible to deal with. A new article in Nature suggests that the pine beetle epidemic in British Columbia has turned the forests there into [...]

Sorry to have nothing interesting to say this morning. Unfortunately, I have been laid low by some bug with a fondness for the cells in my larynx. This seems to be the season for upper respiratory tract infections. Half my floor at work has become an impromptu orchestra of hacking coughs. The situation is similar [...]

Thanks in a large part to Zoom (of Knitnut.net), I have received 54 valid responses to my odds guessing experiment. As those who read the explanation already know, the point of the experiment was to assess how people assess the relative risks of a vague but more probable outcomes versus a concrete but less likely [...]