How the Higgs Field Causes Mass – sort of

Article at Quanta.

Well, it's better than the soup, molasses, or duck tape fairytales.

Mathematical Groups Explained – sort of

Over at Quanta.

Mathematicians are like cats: they do arcane, often inexplicable things, that ultimately turn out to have some meaning or utility.  But what that might be is frequently not intuitively obvious without some study.

Hurricane Michael Repairs Underway

Six years after Hurricane Michael, repairs to Leslie Street are underway.  Details at WOYS blog.

A very long road to fix a very short street.  Hey, better late than never.

I Felt a Great Disturbance in the Force

James Earl Jones, RIP at 93.  Find the article yourself at your favorite news outlet.

I don't usually tag the Star Wars series as scifi, but hey, what else fits better here?

Hoo Boy, We're Back to This

Cat Becomes Well-Cited Scholar With New Scam Method

6.5 minute explanation over at the zootubes, watch it and weep.

This is what happens when a blind metric replaces human oversight.

A Case of the Late Summer Busies

Many small things going on this week, and none of them were particularly interesting.  Easiest way to knock out a blog post is with a bullet list:

• Work continues installing the radios into the FCEM mobile EOC trailer.  Painfully slow progress, but it doesn't help to rush these things.  Program and test gear, install a couple of items, measure for the next step; wash, rinse, repeat.  It doesn't pay to get too far ahead, because it's hard to guesstimate (say) coax cable lengths before we sort out where the radios and antennas are going.  And most of that is cut-to-fit work.
• New tool bag!  Behold.  Just big enough to hold field electronics tool basics yet small enough that it's not bulky and not tempting to over-stuff.
• I'm giving the mountain bike front brake one more good spray-down with brake cleaner before I either (a) order a bunch of new parts, or (b) take it to the shop and say "Here, y'all deal."  The squeal is only there under hard braking, but that's enough to make riding unpleasant.  Kind of a barking airhorn sound with a side order of fingernails on a chalkboard.
• I really need to order some new mountain bike gloves and shorts, but I'm waiting until these brakes get sorted.  There's nothing so maddening as the one-week-later-oh-one-more-thing shipping charges.
• Re-watched Sam Fuller's Big Red One, about one squad in the First Division during WWII.  Reportedly one of the few war movies that gets things about right.  In fact I watched it twice, once with and once without the restoring director's commentary.
  

After all that, it's been rainy and there hasn't been much chance to go biking.  Then there's what's showing in the embedded graphic, which may or may not amount to anything.  Let's hope that it doesn't.

Definitely September.  Stay tuned, because fall adventure weather is right around the corner.  I want to get a bunch of these lingering items wrapped so that I can go have some fun outside.  Soon.

Definitely September

I'm just waiting for hiking weather to start in a month or so.  Scallops... total bust, St. Joe Bay is completely cleaned out.  Mullet fishing is picking up though.  It's still hot, but it's backed off about eight or so degrees from the real summer heat.  So now it's... fall?  At least, it's now "meteorological fall," i.e., starts by definition on September 1st.  "Astronomical fall" begins on the fall equinox, which this year falls (sorry) on September 22nd.

Honestly, the Sept-Oct-Nov fall has always felt right to me.  It coincides more closely with the start of school years and other fall-associated activities, even if thermometers still bump 90F most days around here.  Shoehorning Christmas into a fall time slot because it comes a few days before the winter solstice just seems wrong.

But what season is this weird hot-shorter-days-in-between-time really?  We all know that one: