The last 15 incoming calls on my phone have been telemarketers.

Some of the highlights of his stage act involved sound effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms, as well as playing "'O Sole Mio" and "La Marseillaise" on an ocarina through a rubber tube in his anus. He could also blow out a candle from several yards away. His audience included Edward, Prince of Wales; King Leopold II of the Belgians; and Sigmund Freud.

The classics.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it's perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there's no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.

How morally bereft does one have to be to not understand, or worse - to pretend to not understand - that a lack of consent is what constitutes rape?

26 hours without power. Maxed out our wireless data plan. Very boring. Could be worse. 

It's been raining for 12 hours, calmly.

But the wind has just arrived.

Matthew is here!

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.