Category Archives: Education

Blood Pressure

This isn’t news to me. I’ve always been concerned (to the degree that I am concerned) about both, and in fact, I worry more about diastolic than systolic. I’m trying to get it down with 20 mg of Lisinopril, but it’s still 150/100 on waking. Fortunately, I’ve never had a cardiovascular event, despite having lost both parents relatively young to heart attacks. I think I have a much healthier lifestyle, though. They were both life-long smokers, and overweight (partly as a result of horrible nutrition advice from the government).

Back To Basics

The military is being trained (for the first time in decades) how to manage without computers.

This is good, not just as a defense against cyber attacks, but because it will give them a lot more insight. Even when I started my career in aerospace, I worried that young people were being too confident in computer output, without understanding the fundamentals sufficiently to know whether or not it made sense.

The Truth Comes Out

“Washington has laid all the ugly cards out on the table, and at last we have clarity.”

What a scene it presents. On the one hand is a group of people who think America is the source of all evil that should spend the rest of its historical existence atoning for the mischief it has loosed in the world. On the other hand is a group who believe that for all its faults it is the greatest country in the world and that those who want to destroy it should go back to Somalia. Whichever point of view you subscribe to (or neither) it’s hard to deny that these factions have existed for some time and are only now coming to grips in the open.

Yes.

[Update a while later]

Trump is not a racist: He’s just moving the Overton Window back to normal.

Bicyclists

How do we get them to obey traffic laws?

I almost hit a guy in my neighborhood this week driving Patricia to the bus stop. I was in a four-way stop intersection, about to pull out, when I catch him coming from the left out of the corner of my eye. He didn’t even slow down for the stop sign, let alone stop. It would have been Darwinian if I’d hit him, but I’d still feel terrible.