Paul Krugman included a terrible plot in his Substack post this morning. It’s meant to support his contention that Kevin Warsh, Trump’s soon-to-be nominee for chair of the Federal Reserve, is a political hack. It does, but it’s still terrible. Krugman’s not to blame—at least not entirely—for how bad the plot is. It...

A few days ago, I was poking around in Apple’s Weather app and came across some interesting stuff hiding behind the sunrise/sunset box. First, there’s a plot that shows the movement of the sun throughout the day, followed by sunrise and sunset times: The little dots under the “horizon” represent the beginnings and...

In his excessively long speech to the World Economic Forum yesterday in Davos, Donald Trump did some surprising backtracking. Not the stuff about Iceland Greenland, but on his method of calculating price reductions. For weeks—maybe months, time has been hard to judge this past year—Trump has been telling us that...

The Midwest is expected to have very cold temperatures this weekend, which got me thinking about burst water pipes. Water expands about 9% as it freezes, and a lot of people think it’s pressure from the outward expansion of ice that ruptures pipes, but it’s more complicated than that. My favorite reference for this...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] At the end of last week’s belaying post, I said we’d look into the condition in which the climber and belayer don’t weigh the same. And we will. But first, I want to talk about...

My apologies to those of you hoping for another pulse-pounding post on the mechanics of belaying, but I’m going to talk about Apple again. The belaying follow-up should come out this weekend. What prompted this post was being chastised by my phone this morning for getting only about an hour of sleep last night. This...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] I’ve been bothered by this little physics problem for a couple of days. It appeared on Rhett Allain’s Medium site on Monday, and he linked to it on Mastodon. Prof. Allain...

I strained my right thigh and hip this fall doing something, but I don’t know what it was. Eventually, after several weeks of thinking it would work itself out, I decided it wouldn’t and started going to physical therapy. Several of the exercises I’m supposed to do at home involve getting into a stretching position...

Do you remember the Acid Tests? Not Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests; even I’m not old enough to remember those; I only read about them in Tom Wolfe’s book. No, I’m talking about the tests that checked browsers on how well they complied with web standards. Back in the mid-aughts, Apple talked a lot about how well Safari and...

After writing this morning’s post, I went down to Channahon for a walk along the I&M Canal towpath. On the drive there and back, I thought about redoing the project in Python instead of Mathematica. It seemed like a fairly easy problem, and it was. Recall that the goal was to reproduce this table from a recent...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] As a general rule, I don’t get the fascination mathematicians have with Fibonacci numbers, but I did enjoy this recent Numberphile video. It’s about the Zeckendorf...

If you pay any attention at all to the Apple-centric web, you saw an explosion of links yesterday to this article by Nikita Prokopov, which rightly eviscerates the proliferation of menu icons in macOS 26. I may write up my thoughts on menu icons in a future post (short version: they don’t belong), but today I have...