Urban trees lining streets fare better in dry spells than those in parks – now it seems that leaky water pipes are the reason for their endurance

In honor of Nate Silver’s analysis of when to leave for the airport, and because it’s been an intense week, I thought I’d offer my thoughts on various related questions.

Image by Immanuel Giel, via Wikimedia Commons It’s an old TV and movie trope: the man of wealth and taste, often but not always a supervillain, offers his distinguished guest a bottle of wine, his finest, an ancient vintage from one of the most venerable…

status.href.cat now reports and notifies me if my home power/internet goes down! The other day, PG&E and my landlord emailed me about a power outage. The elevator system needed a technician to reset it. All the e-key readers in the lobby no longer work. This…

Claim: gpt-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics.

Proof: I took a convex optimization paper with a clean open problem in it and asked gpt-5-pro to work on it. It proved a better bound than what is in the paper, and I checked the proof it's correct.…

Don't pick random subnets to avoid IP address conflicts on foreign networks, use VRFs!

Contribute to repomirrorhq/repomirror development by creating an account on GitHub.

On August 21, 2025, an influx of traffic directed toward clients hosted in AWS us-east-1 caused severe congestion on links between Cloudflare and us-east-1. In this post, we explain what the failure was, why it occurred, and what we’re doing to make sure…

AbstractSTUDY QUESTION. Does paracetamol (N-acetyl-para-aminophenol (APAP) also known as acetaminophen) interfere with cell division and thereby disrupt pr

Solar still needs storage cheap enough to move energy between seasons. I have been working on a startup to do this for the last two years.

Do we have to disclaim how we use AI ?

I am a computer professional that helps the public with technology. I have been troubleshooting computer problems for over 25 years. To find out more about me, visit my home page.
In August of 2023, I wrote about my switch to Linux as a Windows-centric professional.…

The adoption of Parquet version 2 is limited due to the lack of support in the ecosystem, which affects its evolution despite its improvements in compression and performance.

SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft.

In an age of AI, we need to return to handwritten assignments.

The Chips Act wasn’t about raising revenue, and an equity share wouldn’t enhance national security.

The Juno spacecraft has rewritten the story on Jupiter, the solar system’s undisputed heavyweight