I Guess YouTube Will Flag the Boring Video, Too

YouTube is doing some strange things these days, and this is yet another: YouTube announced Friday it will start flagging videos published by organizations that receive government funding. Viewers will be able to see labels on videos from government-funded outlets above the video's title on the page. “News is an important and growing vertical for us …

No, Columbus Wasn’t Worried About Falling Off the Edge of a Flat Earth

I think it's fair to say that most Boomers (and some who came afterwards) were taught that one reason Columbus sailed west to determine whether the earth was flat.  But this won't wash, as BizzareVictoria notes: Everyone knows that in the medieval era, everyone thought the world was flat, and Columbus discovered the Americas in …

Catholic and Christian, the Sweet Combination

Evident in the obituary for a Texas A&M classmate (we both were engineering majors) of mine: Thomas Craig Kohutek, 63, was called home to be with the Lord January 1, 2018...A faithful servant of the Lord, Tom was an active member of St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church as well as the Knights of Columbus. …

Sometimes Science Takes a Detour

And it's not the detour we're told happens, either.  Consider this example from J.E. Gordon's Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down, during a discussion of Robert Hooke and the development of the theory of elasticity: In fact, throughout the eighteenth century, remarkably little real progress was made in the study of elasticity.  The reasons …

Why did Gondor not move the Palantir at Minas Ithil before it was captured? or, what Tech People Wonder About When Not Thinking About Tech

Check out this interesting thread at Stack Exchange, one of the premier sites for programmers of all kinds.   There are at least 2,400 other questions on Tolkien topics, and you can check them out, too.

Revisiting the Adventure of Offshore Oil

It may seem that posts on this blog are slowing down, but elsewhere it's another story.  There are actually four sites to this "family" and one of them, vulcanhammer.info, is being moved to WordPress hosting.  (The other two, vulcanhammer.net and Chet Aero Marine, were moved around the first of the year.) Moving a site that …

Another Good Reason Why They Filmed Lord of the Rings in New Zealand

It seems that it, too, is the residual of a sunken continent: In a paper published in the Geological Society of America’s Journal GSA Today in February, researchers made the case that it should be considered a new continent. They said it was a distinct geological entity that met all the criteria applied to Earth’s …

New Series on vulcanhammer.net: STADYN Wave Equation Program

We're starting a new series on the companion site vulcanhammer.net about the STADYN wave equation program.  This may be a little arcane for most readers of this blog, so it will be over there. The first installment, however, concerns using a very old language (FORTRAN 77) to generate HTML code, which of course appears on …

Prevention is Still the Best "Kill Switch" for Malware

A very ingenious solution to a very serious problem: An “accidental hero” has halted the global spread of the WannaCry ransomware, reportedly by spending a few dollars on registering a domain name hidden in the malware. The ransomware has wreaked havoc on organizations including FedEx and Telefonica, as well as the UK’s National Health Service …

So What Will We Do When We Don't Have to Think?

In this article about my friend Ethan Hereth, the following: Like others before me, I have the perception that the education of quality engineers in the field of CFD has been falling short recently. It feels to me like there are very few engineers in this arena that grok CFD like many of the founding …

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