Storm

The storms in the Greater Central Valley of California never get that impressive, at least not in Yolo and Solano Counties. True, there are floods and worse in this area every few years, but, on the whole, the weather around here is very mild. Today, the air has smelled like rain all day; I went [...]

Factoring

The self-teaching guide for pre-calculus that I purchased assures me, "Factoring is fun!" (italics in the original).

Factoring, in case you slept through your high school math classes just like I did, is the process of reducing a polynomial into its more basic components. For example, the polynomial

6x²y+21xy+8x+28

can be reduced [...]

More Frightening

Apparently, for some people, a call for reasoned action is equivalent to a call for no action. I received the following e-mail in my mailbox this morning (no changes have been made to the original letter):

we must take action…do you suggest sitting here and doing nothing?   If we continue to do nothing [...]

Slight Comfort

For the past couple of days I have been listening almost non-stop to NPR’s coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on my computer through streaming audio from the KQED website. I’ve listened as people have poured out their pain, as denials were proferred by various groups, as politicians have postured, as [...]

This Day

I am having such a hard time finding words tonight. From the first moment when I saw the hints in my mailbox that something was wrong to watching end of the day footage on Fox, I’ve been numb. Jennifer and I have been trying to make sense of all of this, and I can only [...]

Majestic

A couple of years ago, before Y2K failed to dim so much as a single light bulb at midnight, studying bizarre and wacky conspiracy theories was quite a hobby of mine. I used to spend hours reading through the more bizarre conspiracy sites, looking up black helicopters, Men In Black, the Majestic-12 group, and so [...]

In Which Richard Ponders World Conquest, and Jennifer has a Revelation

It was the second day of Dragon*Con 2001, one of the largest science fiction gatherings in the United States. Jennifer and I were taking a break from the panels and the dealer room and the art show and were sitting in the eating area of the hotel’s restaurant, people watching. Past us strolled Klingons, angels, [...]