I've decided to wind up my guest blogging a couple days early, but I want to thank Mark Frauenfelder for offering me the unique and wonderful opportunity to post here.… Read the rest of the article: Signing off

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Back in the mid-1990s, the successful fight for the right to use strong encryption seemed hugely significant. Some of us believed that within just… Read the rest of the article: Easy Encryption

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) No doubt some BB reader can name this far-fetched creature, which I found pinned to some styrofoam in a display case at the Butterfly… Read the rest of the article: Name this Insect

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Here are two more books that examine climate change from other perspectives. They differ in their tone and message, but they're both intelligently written.… Read the rest of the article: Climatic Heresy: 4.

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) In the 1990s an attorney named Christopher Horner was appropriately disconcerted when Enron, his employer at the time, told him to lobby in favor… Read the rest of the article: Climatic Heresy: 3

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) The graph above shows surface temperatures in the Sargasso Sea, a 2 million square mile region of the Atlantic Ocean, with time resolution of… Read the rest of the article: Climatic Heresy: 2

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) At the risk of stimulating outrage, I'm going to ask some questions about climate. No one disputes that planetary warming occurred during the second… Read the rest of the article: Climatic Heresy: 1

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) The Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona offers the only opportunity you'll ever have to inspect a Titan II missile close-up. It's an astonishing… Read the rest of the article: Arizona continued

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) In April 2005, while driving with my significant other on Arizona back roads near the California border, we noticed some clumps of strange orange… Read the rest of the article: Homage to Arizona: Continued

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) The North American Rail Car Operators Association (NARCOA) is an affinity group for people who own railroad motorcars (such as the one above) and… Read the rest of the article: Driving on the Railroad

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Two of my favorite books are titled Modern Inventions and Our Wonderful World of Tomorrow, both written during the 1930s by A. M. Low,… Read the rest of the article: Yesterday's Tomorrow

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) As I begin my second week here as a guest blogger, I'm going to risk venturing into a couple of contentious political areas. My… Read the rest of the article: Life at Wal-Mart

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) When I owned a pickup truck, my cat Eddie used to enjoy sitting on top of the instrument panel, under the windshield, where he… Read the rest of the article: Communication with Cats

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Rudy Rucker, whose online zine Flurb is worth a look, introduced me to the fascinating world of cellular automata back in the 1980s. They're… Read the rest of the article: Artificial Life

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Just one more sample. While agreeing that infra-red photography can be a gimmick (similar to false color, oversaturation, and many Photoshop effects) I like… Read the rest of the article: The Strange Realm of Infra-Red: 4

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) While driving through Dallas, I stopped to visit the museum in the old Texas Book Depository building from which Lee Harvey Oswald took a… Read the rest of the article: The Strange Realm of Infra-Red: 3

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Even this very humble shack in Louisiana looks mysteriously beautiful when the visible spectrum is blocked. If we had infra-red sunglasses, the world might… Read the rest of the article: The Strange Realm of Infra-Red: 2

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) My friend Richard Kadrey introduced me to infra-red photography. Sensors on digital cameras can detect infra-red, but normally are shielded from it by a… Read the rest of the article: The Strange Realm of Infra-Red: 1

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Still on the topic of population and mortality (more or less), here is some light relief. I redraw the chart from a source that… Read the rest of the article: Charts: 4

(Charles Platt is a guest blogger) To what extent do we feel overcrowded, as a species? I'm not talking about resources; just psychological factors. To create this chart I turned… Read the rest of the article: Charts: 3