Tia Ghose writes about the relationship between the stress of strangers and empathy.

In what is potentially very important for Africa right now and may be important to us in the future, scientists are working on a steam machine that turns fecal material into drinkable water.

Who doesn’t want to read a story about beavers, parachutes, and Idaho?

You know what we need to extract and recycle rare earth metals? We need fish sperm, apparently.

Unrealistic beauty standards for babies?! The article is (I’m pretty sure) a joke, but my wife would applaud the development, as they can’t really use real newborns and it drives her crazy when they use older babies to represent newborns.

Men smoke more than women in almost all of the world. Exceptions: Sweden, Icesland, and Nauru.

If you have $1,000,000 to spend, there’s a mech robot for sale.

I have some old smartphones sitting around. If this pans out, I may be able to combine them into a computer.

Sheldon Richman argues that some libertarians spend too much time trying to feel superior and not enough time trying to actually win people over.

It seems to me that posting sample photos on a “fake boyfriend or girlfriend” site is kind of counterproductive.

Check out some artifacts of war.

Matthew Yglesias makes the case that small employers pay less.

Did you know that if you are perceived to be a smoker, you have a higher chance of getting lung cancer?

So it snowed a little bit today, but mostly it was cold and rainy. When I went to the store, I had to pull over because rain was falling on the windshield and immediately sticking, to the point that after a couple of miles, I couldn’t see anymore. I ended up turning on defrost to the maximum. By the time we got the store, Lain and I were both sweating and she was crying from the heat. But I could see!

That’s not actually the story that this post is about. The story is…

So Clancy is spending the night at a neighbor’s house. About one tenth of a mile from here. Worry not for the Truman-Himmelreich marriage. She’s there because she can’t get here. She drove up our street, which has an incline, and the car decided that it could go up no further and decided to go back down again.

This is the incline:

She can walk a bit, but for the most part is still on crutches. We decided that she should not tread up an incline that the car could not. So she’s down there.

After putting Lain to sleep, I needed to let the dog out. While the dog was out, I decided I would throw some salt on the driveway. After taking care of the area immediately in front of the house, I decided to see if I could make any progress on this part:

Given the level of ice, you might have some sort of idea what happened next. Sure enough, I lost my balance. No, wait, losing my balance isn’t quite right. What happened was that I started shifting. Surfing, as it were. Except without a board. And on ice and concrete instead of on water. Realizing what was happening, and that there was no stopping it, I decided that the best course of action was a controlled fall, and then laying flat on my back in case I got more traction and to make sure I wouldn’t lose my balance.

Above you see three arrows. The red arrow is was I was when I started. The blue arrow was where I ended up. The green arrow is where the incline was such that Clancy’s car couldn’t make it. In between the blue arrow and the green arrow is apparently a place sufficiently level and/or ice-free (I don’t remember, my mind being distracted by other things) that I didn’t slide all the way to the street below.

Here’s another view, a picture actually taken not far from where I ended up in fact:

When my hands heal, I’ll probably think it’s funny. Under different circumstances, it might have actually been fun. When I was going down, it made me think of those waterslides that you lay on your back and slide down with a gush of water. Except, once again, ice instead of water. And a driveway instead of a tube.