I occasionally like to Google my last name, to see if anything scurrilous or interesting shows up.  (Hint: if you teach for a living, unless you are in a particularly masochistic mood, don’t look at ratemyprofessors.com).  The other day, for a change of pace I clicked on the “Images” icon at the top of the …

I am an avid but picky science fiction reader.  I never really had much use for stylists like Gibson or other cyberpunk-y, edgy authors.   Give me a good space opera, like Asimov’s Foundation series, or Peter Hamilton’s apocalyptic Reality Dysfunction trilogy.  Still, I think my favorite SF author is a former UCSD professor of computer …

I haven’t posted in a while.   We seem to be hurtling towards world-changing events faster than history usually moves, and my blog entries from just a few months ago already look hopelessly outdated.  Whatever endgame Putin (or anybody else) envisioned in Ukraine, it is clearly not happening according to plan.  Instead, it looks increasingly likely …

Russian troops withdrew from north of Kiev four months ago, leaving the debris of mindless cruelty in their wake.    Corpses of civilians and soldiers, both Russian and Ukrainian, lay on roads, in cellars, or buried in hastily dug graves.  Some of the dead were executed, with their hands tied behind their backs.  Others were casualties …

I took sabbatical leave last fall, spending two months in my collaborator’s lab at the University of Michigan.  It was a great experience:  The group I was working with was enthusiastic, energetic and knowledgeable, and some of that energy rubbed off on me.  Ann Arbor is a nice town, and aside from the madness of …

Well, another week, another school shooting:  I tried to summon the rage that I felt after the Sandy Hook and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas massacres.  Instead all I felt was hopeless.   I was going to write another screed about shameless, gutless GOP politicians, but really, it’s been said before, and there is little point in belaboring …

I grew up in a large Catholic family, seven kids, spread in age roughly evenly over a twelve-year period, so figure a new sibling arriving every year and a half.  Catholic parents took “be fruitful and multiply” seriously during the Baby Boom years.  My dad’s job paid enough so that, with careful spending, hand-me-down clothes, …

Soviet (and now Russian) military doctrine since World War II has relied heavily on deception, or “maskirovka”.  Wikipedia defines maskirovka as “a military doctrine developed from the start of the twentieth century (that) covers a broad range of measures for military deception, from camouflage to denial and deception.”  From the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942 …

Tucked up in the northwest corner of Ukraine, near the borders with Poland and Belarus, lies the village of Pochapy.   If you go to Google Earth, you can see it for yourself, and there is even a Google street view, if you care to look.  I cared, because that is where the Pochapsky family name …

I have shamelessly stolen this title from Hunter S. Thompson, one of my favorite political writers.  He used it to describe the Democratic Party in the days of Ronald Reagan, for their habit of putting up liberal darlings as national candidates who would then get beaten like gongs (another HST-ism).   The Whigs, you may recall …