A renaissance man for the twenty-first century!
A very rewarding part of my teaching job is being able to accompany talented engineering students in their project work, on their way to becoming IT professionals. It’s particularly nice when I can use my decades’ long experience of making my own problems, mistakes, missteps, goofs and screw-ups to keep them out of the unpleasant […]
Continuing the series, here is the latest addition to my personal fleet of vehicles, parked in front of the mythical “Tell Platte,” where William Tell escaped from the boat of his captors and swam to shore: This is a 2022 Kia XCeed and it is a “mild hybrid,” which means that it has a big […]
This is a snap of my 1990 Ford Ranger pickup truck, that didn’t actually need a name because I thought “The Truck” was name enough. It was the second vehicle that ever entered my personal fleet, way back in 1991, following a 1981 Chevy Chevette that was a terrific first car for me but I […]
Continuing the series, I’m trying now to document all the vehicles that are now or ever have been in my personal fleet, so with this publication of my 1981 Chevy Chevette that I bought used in 1988 for USD $1200, the list is almost complete. The photograph was taken one winter at the Brookhaven National […]
Continuing the series, I’ve had this Honda 125cc scooter in my personal fleet for a few years now: After a very reliable conveyance of over 50K km, the Eiger Chopper could not pass the Swiss vehicle inspection without a significant investment, more than what I needed to buy the Eiger Chopper used.
Since 1997 I’ve followed the tradition of naming my vehicles. In 1997 while studying physics and living in Urbana, Illinois, I bought a 1983 Oldsmobile for USD $200 from a good friend of mine, Andrei Botschkarov, at the time one of the top semi-conductor physicists in the world. (He was not personally a semi-conductor, but […]
I have very much mixed feelings about this blog post. Sadly, Texas is the state where the largest proportion of residents have diabetes – at least count, over 60% of all Texas have diabetes. This leads to mobility problems and, ultimately for many suffers, huge numbers of people with amputated feet. But in contrast to […]
The latest addition to my personal fleet is a 150 PS, 2.0L 2017 Peugeot Business Traveller van that comfortably seats 9 people: The main way to interact with this vehicle seems to be the voice system, so I am in the process of learning dozens of voice activated commands. By the way, it all began […]
This morning I was impressed when I caught a glimpse of the traffic gates closing due to an oncoming tram. And it caused me to start wondering: are there many “transitory things” that I can capture, as they fleetingly move between one stable state and the next? Just like these barricades – no longer up, […]
The Prime Meridian is the universal definition of 0-degrees longitude – but did you know that until recently, there were different prime meridians in use, such as the Greenwich PM and the Paris PM? I only learned this a few minutes ago, when posting this picture I took on the AP-2 highway, near Candasnos Spain […]
A guest blog, by Arlene Ritley We all want to be rich. Being rich means living the good life. Being rich gives us the freedom to go where we want to go and buy what we want to buy. Being rich can and often does create a feeling of happiness or euphoria. Sooner or later, […]