The only way to an empty mind is not to push everything else out and decree silence. It is only by being open to every thought and allowing them to arise until they slow to a trickle. This may take a while, but it is quicker than the other option which is unending.

There is a strange irony of difficult times like the current moment, when everyone expects everyone else to be tense and short-tempered. The podcasts, newsletters, and smartphone notifications say the world is coming apart at the seams. People expect bad things to happen.

The result is that the slightest moment of friendliness has a magnified effect. A smiling nod, holding the door for someone, a kind word of thanks to a stranger. It's so unexpected

I'm not sure what you were planning to do with the next 24 minutes (16 if you watch at 1.5 speed like I do with most talking-heavy videos) of your life, but I have a good suggestion: Smarter Every Day's video about building a supersonic baseball cannon. This episode is actually fairly light on explaining the underlying science that is often a part of his other videos. There's more of than in the one-hour

When I set out to build this blog, it was deliberately a place to tinker. I already have one blog running on WordPress and there wasn't a "cool factor" to starting up another one.

Why? Because WordPress is so old-fashioned. It's built in PHP, a programming language that is a few generations out of date and quirky. People who have other options would never choose to start a new project in PHP these days. There

I've come to the decision that there is nothing of intellectual substance that can be done in under two minutes, which is the amount of time I am most often looking to fill on my smartphone.

At best, I can review things and eliminate the ones that don't need attention: emails I don't need to read, RSS reader posts I'm not interested in, notifications that don't require a response.

But even those tasks only take

Meditations 6.1

Nature is pliable, obedient. And the logos that governs it has no reason to do evil. It knows no evil, does none, and causes harm to nothing. It dictates all beginnings and all endings.

So long as the ending is natural, it cannot be evil. It is simply the symmetric ending to a beginning set in motion years ago.

When we moved into our house, there were a number of bushes planted in various places by the builders. We pulled a few out because wanted to put other things there. Another one died on its own which was just fine with us.

But the two bushes next to our back porch we actually liked quite a bit. In a few years when they're larger, they'll provide a nice bit of visual screening to the

Mozilla Corporation, the commercial arm of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, announced this week that they are laying off 250 people, which is a quarter of the company. The official press release on the Mozilla blog is very upbeat, including bits about "acting more quickly and nimbly" and that they will "experiment more."

Piecing together reports from Twitter and elsewhere, however, it looks like the entire team of the Servo browser, an R&D project

(Part 2 of this story)

When I was doing my research to find a used Chevy Volt to buy, the news that the Volt was being discontinued after 2019 crossed my notice. Not a big deal, I thought. I wasn't planning to buy a new one anyway.

But after driving this car for six months and really coming to like it quite a lot, I've noticed there's that voice in the back of my head.

(Part 1 of this story.)

I've never been a car guy. I appreciate a nice Mustang or Corvette as much as the next American but I always knew I was way out of my depth compared to the guys who had been studying hot rods since high school.

Then came the beginning of this year, and it was time to replace my aging Ford Focus hatchback that was I quite fond of. It was getting