The ham radio shorthand Q code sign QRZ means "Who is calling me?" You'll hear it often if you're listening to a shortwave radio during an amateur radio contest or when an operator is located on some exotic location with thousands of hams trying to get through to earn a QSL card, which is basically a postcard that verifies the two-way contact. When spoken, it's usually, "Q R Zed?"
QRZ is also the name of the magazine published by the Amateur Radio Relay League, or ARRL, which is the…
Whoops! My apologies, I have neglected to post about my garden lately, which historically means that I have been neglecting my garden. This year, however, I have been able to get down and dirty just often enough to keep the garden from getting choked out with weeds. When I last wrote, we were entering into…
In the swirl of social media, I occasionally run across a climate change denialist. Or, for that matter, a denialist of anything that is established science. My own beliefs about science, validity, and truth are complicated, but rather than getting bogged down in the epistemological quicksand of determining whether someone is being a skeptic or a denialist. But there is one test for me: whether the argument is expected to be resolved in the same manner as the melodramatic…
An intriguing week.
The first thing that happened was my gym making the news.
For those not in the know, weightlifting is a sport that requires specific equipment, namely bars with "life" or "spring" and rubber plates that can be dropped from overhead. You have to drive the weight up quickly and dive underneath it, and you're never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to be doing that at Planet Fitness or the YMCA, who were convinced by the lawyer brigade years and years and years ago…