Check out this article from azcentral:
Shakshuka is about to be your new favorite breakfast. Here's a recipe
https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/dining/recipes/2026/02/20/shakshuka-recipe/88707352007/
_- Steve
Friday, February 20, 2026
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Inherited IRA rules changed. Don't get mired in high taxes, penalties
Check out this article from USA TODAY:
Inherited IRA rules changed. Don't get mired in high taxes, penalties
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2026/02/18/inherited-ira-rules-2025-taxes-penalties/88690348007/
_- Steve
Inherited IRA rules changed. Don't get mired in high taxes, penalties
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2026/02/18/inherited-ira-rules-2025-taxes-penalties/88690348007/
_- Steve
Monday, February 16, 2026
Post by Cato Institute on X
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_- Steve
Saturday, February 14, 2026
Friday, February 13, 2026
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Monday, February 09, 2026
Sunday, February 08, 2026
mountainish inhumanity « PoemShape
What had you got? I'll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/mountainish-inhumanity/
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another.
https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/mountainish-inhumanity/
_- Steve
Saturday, February 07, 2026
Friday, February 06, 2026
Thursday, February 05, 2026
Wednesday, February 04, 2026
Tuesday, February 03, 2026
Monday, February 02, 2026
Saturday, January 31, 2026
'Melania’ Review: A Tedious, Criminally Shallow Propaganda Puff Piece
https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/reviews/melania-documentary-review/
Although the film ends with a comically large number of chyrons claiming Melania Trump changed the office of the First Lady forever — by doing hitherto unthinkable things like [checks notes] meeting the victims of natural disasters — the film's laser-focus on fashion suggests that human interest is a side hustle. "Melania" concludes with a glamorous photo shoot in the White House because, according to Brett Ratner's movie, that's what the White House turned into: A gaudy two-dimensional backdrop that only exists to feed the ego of its current residents, who claim to care about other people, but spend all their time focusing on how good they look while making those claims.
Meanwhile, innocent people are being shot and killed in public by these people's secret police. They could be doing something about that, but they'd rather sell tickets so you can get a good look at their shoes and hear them sing in the back seat of their limousines. Now that's cinema. Unfortunately.
_- Steve
Friday, January 30, 2026
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Monday, January 26, 2026
Friday, January 23, 2026
Thursday, January 22, 2026
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
Saturday, January 17, 2026
Friday, January 16, 2026
Thursday, January 15, 2026
From Tokens to Burgers – A Water Footprint Face-Off
AI and water: One extremely large AI data center has about the same water footprint as 2.5 In-N-Out Burger locations. One burger is about the same water use as 7 million interactions with an LLM.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/from-tokens-to-burgers-a-water-footprint
_- Steve
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/from-tokens-to-burgers-a-water-footprint
_- Steve
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Engineering
Several books stand out for capturing the intense, high-stakes world of **large-scale engineering projects**—including the technical challenges, team dynamics, management pressures, bureaucratic hurdles, politics, and human drama—much like Tracy Kidder's *The Soul of a New Machine* (about the frantic race to build a new minicomputer at Data General) and Charles Murray's *Apollo: The Race to the Moon* (co-authored with Catherine Bly Cox, detailing the engineering, organizational, and political epic of NASA's moon program).
Here are some of the strongest recommendations that deliver a similar immersive, narrative-driven feel:
- **Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed** by Ben Rich and Leo Janos
This is a classic in the genre. It chronicles the secretive, high-pressure development of groundbreaking aircraft like the U-2 spy plane and SR-71 Blackbird at Lockheed's advanced projects division. It vividly portrays the engineering ingenuity, deadline crunches, resource battles, innovative management (often bypassing bureaucracy), and interpersonal tensions in massive, classified aerospace efforts—echoing the "skunkworks" intensity and outsider energy in *Soul of a New Machine*, while matching *Apollo*'s scale in technical ambition and government-industry politics.
- **The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation** by Jon Gertner
A deep dive into Bell Labs' massive, collaborative projects that birthed transistors, lasers, Unix, and much of modern computing/communications. It captures the culture of large R&D teams, creative problem-solving under loose-but-high-expectation management, resource allocation fights, and the blend of genius and grind in long-term, high-impact engineering—similar to the organizational scale and innovation drive in *Apollo*, with echoes of *Soul*'s team obsession.
- **The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering** by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Drawing from Brooks' experience leading IBM's massive OS/360 project (one of the largest software efforts of its era), this timeless book dissects the realities of big, complex projects: why adding people makes things worse, the politics of deadlines, communication breakdowns, and the human/organizational side of engineering at scale. It's more essay-based than pure narrative, but it profoundly captures the frustrations and insights of large-project management, much like the lessons embedded in *Soul of a New Machine*.
- **One Giant Leap: Iconic Photos from Apollo 11** or more relevantly, broader Apollo-focused works like **One Giant Leap** by Charles Fishman (focusing on the engineering and manufacturing behind the program)
These build on Murray's book by highlighting overlooked aspects of the massive industrial effort—supply chains, workforce scale (hundreds of thousands involved), and problem-solving under existential pressure—offering complementary views of the same moonshot bureaucracy and triumph.
Other strong contenders that come up frequently in discussions of similar "big project" experiences:
- **House** by Tracy Kidder himself — shifts to residential construction but nails the interpersonal, budgetary, and logistical chaos of a real-world build project.
- **The Innovators** by Walter Isaacson — covers multiple large-scale computing/internet projects with team and institutional drama.
- **Failure Is Not an Option** by Gene Kranz — NASA's mission control perspective on Mercury-to-Apollo, heavy on real-time crisis engineering and team coordination.
If you're drawn to the gritty, human-side realism of engineers grinding through impossible deadlines amid corporate/government politics, *Skunk Works* and *The Idea Factory* are probably the closest spiritual successors overall. They deliver that same sense of awe at what massive teams can achieve—and the toll it takes.
— Steve Smith
Here are some of the strongest recommendations that deliver a similar immersive, narrative-driven feel:
- **Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed** by Ben Rich and Leo Janos
This is a classic in the genre. It chronicles the secretive, high-pressure development of groundbreaking aircraft like the U-2 spy plane and SR-71 Blackbird at Lockheed's advanced projects division. It vividly portrays the engineering ingenuity, deadline crunches, resource battles, innovative management (often bypassing bureaucracy), and interpersonal tensions in massive, classified aerospace efforts—echoing the "skunkworks" intensity and outsider energy in *Soul of a New Machine*, while matching *Apollo*'s scale in technical ambition and government-industry politics.
- **The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation** by Jon Gertner
A deep dive into Bell Labs' massive, collaborative projects that birthed transistors, lasers, Unix, and much of modern computing/communications. It captures the culture of large R&D teams, creative problem-solving under loose-but-high-expectation management, resource allocation fights, and the blend of genius and grind in long-term, high-impact engineering—similar to the organizational scale and innovation drive in *Apollo*, with echoes of *Soul*'s team obsession.
- **The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering** by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
Drawing from Brooks' experience leading IBM's massive OS/360 project (one of the largest software efforts of its era), this timeless book dissects the realities of big, complex projects: why adding people makes things worse, the politics of deadlines, communication breakdowns, and the human/organizational side of engineering at scale. It's more essay-based than pure narrative, but it profoundly captures the frustrations and insights of large-project management, much like the lessons embedded in *Soul of a New Machine*.
- **One Giant Leap: Iconic Photos from Apollo 11** or more relevantly, broader Apollo-focused works like **One Giant Leap** by Charles Fishman (focusing on the engineering and manufacturing behind the program)
These build on Murray's book by highlighting overlooked aspects of the massive industrial effort—supply chains, workforce scale (hundreds of thousands involved), and problem-solving under existential pressure—offering complementary views of the same moonshot bureaucracy and triumph.
Other strong contenders that come up frequently in discussions of similar "big project" experiences:
- **House** by Tracy Kidder himself — shifts to residential construction but nails the interpersonal, budgetary, and logistical chaos of a real-world build project.
- **The Innovators** by Walter Isaacson — covers multiple large-scale computing/internet projects with team and institutional drama.
- **Failure Is Not an Option** by Gene Kranz — NASA's mission control perspective on Mercury-to-Apollo, heavy on real-time crisis engineering and team coordination.
If you're drawn to the gritty, human-side realism of engineers grinding through impossible deadlines amid corporate/government politics, *Skunk Works* and *The Idea Factory* are probably the closest spiritual successors overall. They deliver that same sense of awe at what massive teams can achieve—and the toll it takes.
— Steve Smith
Sunday, January 11, 2026
Thursday, January 08, 2026
Wednesday, January 07, 2026
Sunday, January 04, 2026
Flu cases are rising in 32 states. Check maps and see how to stay safe
Check out this article from USA TODAY:
Flu cases are rising in 32 states. Check maps and see how to stay safe
https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2025/12/31/flu-cases-rising-in-us-where-maps/87945691007/
_- Steve
Flu cases are rising in 32 states. Check maps and see how to stay safe
https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2025/12/31/flu-cases-rising-in-us-where-maps/87945691007/
_- Steve
Nicolás Maduro, wife in New York to face charges after US strikes on Venezuela
Check out this article from azcentral:
Nicolás Maduro, wife in New York to face charges after US strikes on Venezuela
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/world/2026/01/03/jets-and-blasts-shake-venezuelan-capital/87244708007/
_- Steve
Nicolás Maduro, wife in New York to face charges after US strikes on Venezuela
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/world/2026/01/03/jets-and-blasts-shake-venezuelan-capital/87244708007/
_- Steve
Thursday, January 01, 2026
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