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One of the metrics to emerge from the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq was the "Freidman Unit." One Friedman unit  is equal to six months, specifically the "next six months," a period repeatedly declared by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman  to be the most critical of the Iraq War, even though he repeated this prophecy at least 14 times over more than two and a half years. The term was coined by the blogger Duncan Black (Atrios/Eschaton). The prophecy of self-driving cars has proven every bit as absurd and groundless, as Duncan Black reminds us. We need a Friedman Unit for the self-driving car. GM: Rumors of self-driving vehicles by 2018 ... Ford: Truly self-driving vehicles by 2021 ... Honda: Self-driving on the highway by 2020 ... Toyota: Self-driving on the highway by 2020 ... Renault-Nissan: 2020 for autonomous cars in urban conditions, 2025 for truly driverless cars ... Volvo: Self-driving on the highway by 2021 ... Hyundai: High...

" In the end, I suppose the thing to do is compare 2010 to 2019. How did life change most drastically? Smartphones and social media are candidates, especially if you take a global view. Travel didn’t change much. Despite lots of hype, entertainment didn’t change much. War became noticeably less effective except against neighboring countries. CRISPR was probably the most important genuinely new invention. Racial justice gained a higher profile, but nobody did much about it. Religion continued to slowly decline, but that was the latest of a longtime trend. Wall Street mostly just regrouped after the Great Recession." https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/the-aughts-were-the-decade-of-the-smartphone/ CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats--aren't you sorry you asked?) refers to a bacterial genetic mechanism to defeat viral infections that has been hijacked for gene editing. And now it rates a mention by a blogger for Mother Jones. I hate t...

Here's a detailed summary of the (in)action to date on climate change. It is abundantly clear to me that, given the half-life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, no amount of conservation now will mitigate catastrophic warming in the decades our children and grandchildren will see. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lost-decade-climate-change-action-2020_n_5df7af92e4b0ae01a1e459d2 The catastrophe that this inaction will visit on the planet will be coastal flooding, desertification, and loss of fresh water and arable land. But the real near-term threat to humanity is not loss of habitat per se, it is resource wars. People who are denied living space, water and food due to global warming won't just sit and die. They will fight for the resources that remain. None of us wants to live in such a world, but nothing will be done until it is too late. I tremble for the future of humanity.

A commenter on a FB thread remarked that her daughter kept her "maiden" name because after all the work she put into getting her PhD, she didn't want to be known as "Dr. [husband's name]." My mom used her married name for publication, but she had already been married for 20 years and was comfortable using that last name. My wife and I started graduate school two weeks after we were married. We discussed names (both changing or keeping mine or changing or keeping hers) and she elected to use my last name. I've known female MDs and PhDs who done either one. The challenge historically has been if you change your name after you've already published; then some of your publications wouldn't show up on a simple search. Of course, you can do a boolean search on Pubmed, so I don't think this is an issue anymore. My daughter and her partner solved the name problem by creating a new last name that is a chimera of each of their "maiden" names...

Now I understand why I've been block twice on FB. It turns out that FB has compiled a comprehensive list of trigger words that they consider hate speech, and "illiterate" is one of those words. If you want to know whether your particular adjective is on the list, it's published here: https://m.facebook.com/communitystandards/hate_speech Henceforth, I guess I'll need to screen my posts against the 100 naughty words your not allowed to post on Facebook (pace George Carlin).

Currently, I’m midway through my first year of phased retirement. I’ve dropped to 70% effort (and 70% of my previous compensation). I can stay there for 4.5 more years, or drop to 50% or 30% effort and salary in later years. Or I can retire fully before 1 July 2024. It is a great luxury to be able to phase into retirement instead of accepting a buy-out and quitting cold turkey. My dad retired at 62 or 63 from Martin-Marietta and Oak Ridge National Labs. But after moving to upstate NY, he continued to fabricate in his basement a device he’d patented, earning money for piecework for several more years before settling into retirement. My mom continued teaching correspondence courses online for several years after they moved. Even after retiring, my dad did volunteer work as the consulting engineer for the Covered Bridge Association of Washington County, and my mom volunteered as a child advocate for the state court in Bennington VT. My brother and his wife (seven and ten years youn...

Retired? Planning to retire soon? Expecting your nest egg to provide substantial income in retirement? If so, you should be keeping a wary eye on the economy in the next year. I'm a scientist, so data mean more to me that soothsayers. I default to blogs that provide data to substantiate their prophecies. "  In the short term, I remain on “recession watch,” but the base case going forward remains slowdown only. That’s because the risks are still elevated, at least for the next few months. Manufacturing remains in a slight contractionary trend, and there are a few hints, like in elevated jobless claims for 5 of the past 6 weeks, that the weakness may be spreading out into the wider economy. If this were 40 or 50 years ago, it would almost certainly mean a recession. But with less than 10% of all jobs in manufacturing now, the consumer side of the economy is relatively much more important. And the most usual driver of consumer contraction has been a spike in the price of gas. ...