There’s a fellow magician, a friend I’ve known for many years, whose performances would be even better if only he could stop doing an impression of Derren Brown. My friend’s act is wonderful. He does some beautiful mentalism. He’s self-deprecating, but he has authority. Still, he engages in Derren-Brown-isms like rolling up onto the balls of his feet as he raises his voice and gestures up, or snapping his fingers, or ending sentences with “yes?” These tics don’t help his act.

He isn’t a professional failure by any means. He makes a decent living, but I can’t help but feel…

I’m a pretty technical guy, but CNCing was still an adventure for me. It combines computer science with art and material science. I love it. I made gifts with it and now I use it in my watchmaking hobby. I thought I’d take to it like a duck to water, but it wasn’t so simple. Bear in mind I have built workstations, hacked Apple code to make FCP work on an old computer without enough VRAM, and gone to not one, not two, but three art schools, where, among other things, I cut alabaster with medieval tools. Since then I’ve…

The United States is politically divided, but when wasn’t that true? Every time I hear someone saying that we are divided as never before, I recall the last time I heard that, be it in the Trump, Obama, W. Bush, Clinton, H. W. Bush, or Reagan administrations. Without hard evidence, I think the reason it feels this way is that, due to new innovations like social media, we are more aware of the thoughts of those around us. Some of us recoil in shock at how our neighbors think, while some do not believe their neighbors even exist, discounting their…

Full disclosure: I make watches for fun, but my feelings about wearing watches hasn’t changed since long before I started tinkering with them. There are plenty of reasons to wear an old-fashioned, non-smartwatch. Of course, if you’re reading this, you may be thinking of reasons regular watches are stupid. And you know what? I can’t argue with you on that score. You’re not all wrong.

People wear wristwatches because they supply us with convenience. They do something useful for us. Smartwatches do plenty of useful things, but the relationship between one’s worn accessories and oneself is not like between one’s…

Some prick recently posited (and I’m paraphrasing here) that one needn’t worry about if one’s neighbors have been vaccinated if one has been. After all, on average the vaccines are, according to the aptly named Sen. Johnson, 95% effective. Never mind that his numbers are wrong, let’s address why his logic doesn’t work.

The way you should assess likelihood is by assessing its opposite. In this case, let’s look at how ineffective the vaccines are. A 95% efficacy means a 5% chance of infection. That’s one in twenty. Let’s assume you have a revolver capable of holding 20 rounds. …

For those of us who earn our crust of bread through our mastery of English, the last four years were like a bad LSD trip. The world lived in the shadow of a US President who used language for the opposite of its intended purpose; obfuscation, not illumination. He’d say something that didn’t really mean anything and decide what it meant later, once everyone had done their interpretations of his words. Thus he could pick the reaction he liked best. Did he say he believed the Russians? He misspoke. Did he say someone should hack his opponent? He was just…

In the very early 20th Century, New York learned what it meant to have a disease acting like a serial killer. Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant and cook, worked for a family in Oyster Bay, New York. Mary was a carrier of Typhus, an often lethal disease. As a carrier, Mary didn’t experience the disease’s symptoms meaning that, as far as she was concerned, the disease wasn’t a problem.

But it was a problem. The problem was that she could pass the disease to others by, among other activities, cooking for them. In the first seven years of the 20th…

Thanks to the Democrats and only the Democrats, the federal rescue package was passed. Dayenu. They really really had to work the rules of the Congress to hustle the bill past an intransigent GOP. Despite professing to be a mind reader, I can’t say why the Republicans voted against it, but that doesn’t stop me from turning that choice over and over again.

The Republicans passed the Trump tax cuts in 2017, increasing the federal deficit by about $2 Trillion. Biden’s bill costs about the same. Why vote for one and not the other? How are they different?

Instead of…