I love crows. According to The Genius of Birds, crows rival primates with their intelligence. They can make tools, solve puzzles, and recognize human faces—even passing this knowledge to new generations. Seriously.
But crows aren’t exactly beloved by all. Among other things, they are blamed for driving down songbird populations.…
The majority party in the US Congress always accuses the minority party of gridlock and obstruction. Bills fail to pass if the majority party can’t get everyone to vote with them and the minority party votes unanimously against something.
I looked at the votes for some of the historically significant bills in the past 60 years.…
Nature is one of the world’s most prestigious and widely-read scientific journals. It can be difficult to slog through research papers, so they also publish an interesting supplement called Nature Outlook. The articles are more in-depth, written in plain English, and are free to everyone. They do a great job of summarizing complicated and contentious issues.…
Among my friends growing up, I was the only one who didn’t get an allowance. My friends would get some spending money weekly, sometimes in exchange for doing chores. I had to do tasks for free! Child abuse, right?
My parents weren’t too poor to give me an allowance; this was all part of their sinister plan.…
No matter where someone lives in the world, chances are they’ll eagerly tell you how their drivers are undoubtedly the worst in the world. And the same horrific acts are vilified: failing to merge correctly, not signalling, cutting in front of other drivers, and rolling through stop signs. And “driving like maniacs” is always a good one.…
As you may know, Portland is a liberal city. And we all know what that means: crime and drugs are rampant, homeless people stubbornly refuse to take advantage of tax credits, trans people regularly urinate in the same zip code as us, and people sometimes show compassion for those less fortunate than themselves.…
I’m one of those naïve people that doesn’t believe violence should be used to solve problems. However, I was involved in three “violent” incidents in grade school, which were embellished and re-told. This gave me an inaccurate but possibly useful reputation.
One day I got up from my desk and ran out of my 3rd-grade classroom.…
This is the job title I use on my résume for this part of my working life. 🙂 I wrote up similar articles about various jobs I held at Apple over the years.
I was one of those people you read about in history books that basically worked his way through college.…
Get it? Ground-breaking?
So we bought this house in Portland, Oregon with audaciously bland landscaping. I know, first-world problems and all.
Since we were spending most of our time at home due to COVID, we decided to burn the existing yard to the ground and start fresh. We had a few stakes in the ground:
I moved to Portland in June 2020, relocating from the San Francisco Bay Area where I lived for 24 years. I was never particularly happy there, but my job at Apple was a great distraction. When I retired in 2019, my dislike of the area came boiling to the surface.
Having lived in Portland for 2 years now, I’ve fielded the inevitable questions about living here.…