A great collection of animal photos...

A great collection of animal photos...  See them all here.  Sample at right is for my pistol-packing mama, who's a big fan of owls...

Highlights from the 2014 Budapest air show...

Highlights from the 2014 Budapest air show...  There's some mighty fine flying in here, along with some very interesting aircraft...

Debbie's meniscus tear, the photo...

Debbie's meniscus tear, the photo...  At right is the most interesting photo of the 20 or so images her surgeon took through his arthroscopic apparatus.  What you're looking at is the space between the outside ball and socket in her right knee.  The fuzzy white material is the torn up meniscus, which is most likely the source of the knee pain she's been having ever since her injury last June.  The metallic object at the right (just above center) is part of the surgeon's arthroscopic tool kit.  He tried to describe it to me; it sounded like a cross between a pair of scissors and a router.  Anyway, he used some of these tools to cut away all the torn part of the meniscus.  The tears were all on the outer edge of it, which means there's a good chance it will repair itself.  Even if it doesn't, Debbie's knee pain should be gone.

Despite being a technology guy my whole life, I was still surprised that the surgeon could walk out to talk with me just a couple of minutes after he finished with Debbie, carrying a set of high-quality photos of the operation he had just performed.  Using the photos he was able to describe to me – about as far from a medical expert as you can get – exactly what he found, what he did, and the likely outcome.  Technology has transformed our world in many ways during my lifetime, and this is “just” another one of those ways – but even so, it seems pretty miraculous to me...

Too much evidence can be a bad thing...

Too much evidence can be a bad thing...  This is a fascinating article that shows how evidence that is “too good to be true” often really is untrue – the result of a systematic bias of some kind, or outright fraud.  I particularly like the article's lead – it's not the sort of thing you see every day in a science journal:

Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counter-intuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.

Armed citizens stopping crime..

Armed citizens stopping crime...  Who'd have thunk it?  Here's an interactive map showing the places in the U.S. where armed citizens stopped crimes in one year (7/1/2014 - 7/1/2015, the most recent data available).  The screenshot at right is a sample...