Unfortunately, looks like it’s only partial on the Left Coast.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Fedora Question
I was thinking of upgrading to 22, and I belatedly discovered that I was still running 20. Do I have to fedup to 21 first, or can I safely just go straight to 22?
[Update a while later]
OK, just discovered why I’m running 20 when I thought it was 21. All this time I’d been thinking that I was booting from my SSD, but it turns out that I’ve been booting from my hard drive, with the older OS on it. I went in to change the boot order, and I can’t find the SSD. The OS can see it with pvdisplay, the BIOS shows it in system status, but it doesn’t appear anywhere in the boot menu. Anyone have any idea what’s going on, or how to get it to show up?
[Update a few minutes later]
Wow, weirder and weirder. I unplugged the hard drive, then rebooted. It booted with the SSD. I went back into the BIOS, and now the SSD is a boot option. I made it highest priority, then shut down and plugged in the hard drive again. Now in the BIOS the hard drive won’t show up as a boot option. Which is OK, because I didn’t want to be booting from it, but it seems like strange behavior from the BIOS.
Anyway, I’m booted into 21 now, and doing a ton of updates. It had been booting from the wrong drive for weeks, and I hadn’t realized it.
Functional Mechanical Gears
This is pretty cool. Of course, the Intelligent Designers will have a field day with it.
Heart-Attack Tissue Damage
Could it be repaired with a protein patch?
Let’s hope.
[Update a while later]
Growing new nerves with 3-D printing.
I think if I can hang in for a few more years, I’ll have an opportunity to live a long time.
[Friday-morning update]
Kidneys have been grown from stem cells that are fully functional in pigs. No obvious reason it won’t work in humans as well. This will save and improve millions of lives, and money for dialysis.
[Bumped]
The Golden Spike Company
Their domain has become available.
It could be that they simply forgot to renew, but this doesn’t seem like a good sign.
We Need A War On Termites
Not just because of the damage they cause to our property, but because they generate ten times as much CO2 as all of human fossil-fuel combustion?
If that’s true, the policy implications would seem sort of profound.
The Space Policy Mess On The Hill
Michael Listner (at his new space-law blog) has a good description of the difficulty of reconciling the House and Senate bills.
However, even if the learning period expires next week, George Nield knows that both houses want to extend it, and he’s not going to waste any resources trying to suddenly start rule making.
Coffee
…is turning out to be an unlikely elixir.
It’s the only reason I choke down the swill every morning.
And please, no recommendations about how I’m just not making it properly. I’ve had lots of coffee from people who assure me that it is how coffee should taste. It always tastes like coffee to me (i.e., terrible).
Alone On Mars
Would Mark Watney have been able to stay sane?
I think it’s realistic to think he’d have been fine, as long as he had some level of hope, and tasks with which to occupy himself.
Growing Tomatoes
This is the sort of thing we’re going to have to figure out. But at least we’re building an unaffordable monster rocket.