I remember a couple of days on quarks and particle spin in high school physics, but I never made it past classical electromagnetism in college physics courses. And except for one class in "discrete" mathematics (set theory, graph theory, etc.) I didn't get much past basic differential equations in college math. Nevertheless, since I was a kid, I've always loved reading about advanced physics - not enough that I would be able to pass even the simplest college quiz, just enough to get the very big picture. Cosmos-level knowledge.

This week, I've been trying to find something to explain the current state of physics to me - Quantum Field Theory and beyond. Of course most of what's out there is pretty heavy that jumps right into the advanced math (gauge theories, Lie groups, Lagrangians, etc.). Dummies on lunch break are not the typical audience for this stuff. But this one, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Quantum Field Theory is pretty good at the big picture and doesn't require any heavy math to understand ('understand' in a very abstract way since many of the concepts thoroughly defy intuition). It's also clear that it's not trying to fool anyone into thinking any of this stuff can be truly understood without the math. But I'll take what I can get. Even imprecise and somewhat baffling analogies can be interesting.

Turns out that our new house is just down the road from a rather fabulous recording studio that the founder of Red Hat built.

I've run past it a couple of times but didn't even know it was there (can't really see it from the road).

U.S. lawmakers on Thursday expressed doubts about Sept. 11 legislation they forced on President Barack Obama, saying the new law allowing lawsuits against Saudi Arabia could be narrowed to ease concerns about its effect on Americans abroad.

A day after a rare overwhelming rejection of a presidential veto, the first during Obama's eight years in the White House, the Republican leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives opened the door to fixing the law as they blamed Obama, a Democrat, for not consulting them adequately.

"I do think is worth further discussing," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, acknowledging that there could be "potential consequences" of the "Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act," known as JASTA.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Congress might have to "fix" the legislation to protect U.S. troops in particular.

Perhaps you shouldn't have passed the fucking thing without fixing it first.

It has finally happened: an SD card has now broken the 1 terabyte threshold. SanDisk and its parent company Western Digital today unveiled a new 1 terabyte SDXC card, ushering in a new era of tiny memory cards with massive storage capacities.

The prototype memory card was unveiled by the brands at Photokina 2016 over in Cologne, Germany. This announcement comes 16 years after SanDisk unveiled the world’s first 64 megabyte SD card — a breakthrough in capacity at the time. Less than two decades later, we can now cram nearly 16,000 times the data onto a memory card of the same size.

Holy crap.

I've never even come close to filling the 64GB card I keep in my Nikon D90. It holds 3600 or so pix.

Large-scale animal sacrifices marking the Islamic festival of Eid al-Adha combined with heavy rains have turned the streets of Bangladesh’s capital into rivers of blood.

Holy crap.

WTF

Sandy actually did drown on the beach that day. As she drowned, her brain deprived of oxygen, she had a vivid coma fantasy involving her summer fling Danny, where they shared a magical year of high school together. The visions get increasingly outlandish as time passes, until finally, as Danny desperately tries to resuscitate her on the beach, she sees herself flying into Heaven in her dying moments. The entire movie was a drowning woman’s coma fantasy.

The co-creator denies this. But I think he's lying.

This one time, in 1752, September lost 11 days.