Category: blather


  • The “Maybe” Binary

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    A note for those who need it: science and engineering are processes that produce binary outputs. But rather than “No” or “Yes,” they produce “No” or “Maybe.” Any scientist/engineer who says “this WILL work, 100%” is lying, delusional or using shorthand for “this will probably work, until something happens that has not been accounted for.”…

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  • “Star Trek IV” and the timeline divergence

    I have long argued that the Star Trek timeline is not *our* timeline. This was obvious as far back as 68 when “Assignment Earth” aired, showing a mythical nuke-armed Sat V launching from a mythical USAF base & crashing in Asia.  But there is also this:   STIV had a number of events that simply…

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  • When did the “Star Trek” timeline diverge from ours?

    The people running present-day Star Trek have tried desperately to tinker with the Trek backstory so that it can be “our” future. But the past as revealed by canon Star Trek, from TOS through TNG, DS9, Voy and Ent, is clearly NOT our future. Fifty years have passed since the advent of TOS, decades which…

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  • The limits of gloating

    In the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, a LOT of people found themselves with exciting opportunities to explore new career options after posting gleeful nonsense online that their employers didn’t like or were downright horrified by. And while I’ve long been opposed to “cancel culture,” this simply doesn’t bother me. If you found that…

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  • Great great great grandfather

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    So a very distant relation in Sweden is working on fleshing out his family history and managed to get in touch with my mother regarding my mothers fathers fathers father, who left Sweden in 1852 and came to Illinois. Included in what we have so far is a translation of a letter the guy sent…

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  • Forgotten dead, remembered again

    A Tweet about the Pixar movie “Coco,” which I have not seen, got me thinking (and I think re-iterating an idea I blathered about on this blog years ago but can’t be bothered to look up again). https://x.com/cirsova/status/1945885686768230903 An interesting theology: you continue to exist in some form so long as someone remembers you, then…

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  • Buttons & Abby

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    Buttons is about 16. While nowhere near the oldest a cat can get, it is, sad to say, old for a cat. All my prior cats made it to 10 or at best 11, so Buttons has outlasted them all. And sadder to say, he has some medical issues that, left unchecked, will end him…

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  • Ebay is getting expensive

    For about 20 years I’ve been buying aerospace documentation on ebay. For a good chunk of those I’ve crowdfunded the purchases of really expensive stuff. And by “really expensive” I’ve meant something like “hundreds of dollars for a single report.” Split the purchase price between one or two dozen people, send all of them high-rez…

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  • 200 K

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    Sadly not $200,000 or 200,000 followers willing to do my bidding, but 200,000 miles on my car a few days ago. Not much of a milestone I suppose, but it’s what I got.  

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  • Hello? Is this thing still on?

    Yeesh, it’s been months since I’ve blog posted much of anything. Of course all my yapping is now done at Twitter (@UnwantedBlog), where I post a handful of things a day. But even with that, I write a hell of a lot less than during my blogging days. It’s a lot easier to tweet. Question:…

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