View From The Porch

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

Monday, April 27, 2026

Fast Company

The guy who won the London Marathon not only set a new world record, but he finished in 1:59:30, half a minute under the once-thought-impossible two hour mark.

The second place runner made it under two hours, too, at 1:59:41. It was his first marathon.

In fact, the third place guy finished in 2:00:28, which would have been good enough to set a world record up until precisely fifty-eight seconds earlier.

At this rate we're a less than a decade out from the first elite distance runner getting ticketed in a school zone.

Tab Clearing...

Coalition Warfare in Vietnam: Part 2

Worried that using AI to do your writing will make it look too much like AI wrote it? There's a special AI tool that uses AI to make your AI writing not look like AI! (Or you could, you know, just write it yourself.)

What if you got hit by a tiny primordial black hole?

Sunday, April 26, 2026

Horrors of the Deep

I was today years old when I learned about the theory that monster sixty-foot long octopuses might have been the apex predators of the Cretaceous oceans and I am absolutely creeped out by that.

Especially when you remember how smart octopodes are and compare that to the walnut-brained plesiosaurs and mosasaurs with which they shared the seas.

Saturday, April 25, 2026

The Soviet space program was a lot more slapdash than they let the world know at the time. Consider that their planned lunar lander was a one-man craft and its occupant would have had to exit the Soyuz, EVA on over to the lander, strap in, land on the moon and take off again, dock with the Soyuz, then exit the lander and EVA back on over to the capsule. The opportunities for disaster there are legion.

Then there was the crew of Soyuz 11, and their trip home from the Salyut space station...

Mission control, to everyone’s relief, ordered them to come home early. They buttoned up Salyut and climbed into the Soyuz, wearing only their leisure suits. Which became a problem when they prepared to disengage and a warning light began to blink. Sounding nearly hysterical at this point, Volkov shouted at ground control, “The hatch isn’t pressurized! What should we do? What should we do?” Obviously they couldn’t disengage if the hatch wasn’t completely sealed, unless they were in their spacesuits and helmets. They tried various procedures suggested by the techies on the ground. Nothing worked.

Ground control finally advised them to tape a piece of paper over the warning light and proceed. Read that sentence again. Nothing shouts “Soviet space program!” like that single sentence.

"Da, comrade. Just put tape over 'Check Engine' light. Should be fine!"

These tales and more can be found in the book I just finished reading, The Wrong Stuff, by John Strausbaugh. Recommend!

Nag, nag, nag...

The Apple Watch has a sleep monitor app which can keep track of your sleep patterns based on, I'm assuming, things like your heart rate and the amount of moving around you do.

Under normal circumstances this is kind of cool, but if you're having a stressful week, your watch will cheerfully add to it by chiming and haptically tapping you on the wrist over breakfast to inform you that "Your sleep score was poor last night".

Thanks, HAL, I was aware of that. I don't need to be chided by my watch before coffee.