Category Archives: Comics

An act of self-deception

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Thanks to XKCD, I have been paying more attention to hand dryers. Randall Munroe points out (via aircraft-towed aerial billboard) that the hand dryer feels cold because the water on your hands is evaporating. That’s true even if the air is quite hot. But that’s the best-case scenario with hand dryers. I’ve run into plenty that definitely do not have warm air. And I’ve also encountered empty paper towel dispensers that I thought were touchless blower hand dryers and waved my hands around wildly under them. My frustration has become art by way of MidJourney. Let’s talk about placebos.

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Anti-science on the internet

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I had to take a break from social media because I was spending too much time worrying about people being wrong ABOUT SCIENCE on the internet (credit to XKCD for articulating it first). I moved house and had to focus on catching up at work. But the subject nagged me. I started working on a long form writing project about anti-science online. Why are people against science? There are a lot of answers to that question. It’s not as simple as just saying “fundamentalism” and throwing my hands up. I want to understand the problem better.

As I started researching the issue, I found a book called The War on Science. I realized that I don’t need to write a book about this because it has been done already (and better than I could manage). The book is exhaustive.

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“BDSM Eye Drops” turned out to be a bad idea

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My wife and I have the weirdest conversations, and I absolutely love that. I am a lucky man. I found someone who can turn her magical perspective into a set of tiny numbers in a computer that we perceive as colors that are then assembled into a picture that makes me laugh. This person is called an “artist.” The result is this week’s comic. There’s a video version of this post available, too.

Life is full of unpleasant things. Everything from having-to-put-in-eye-drops to the-inevitable-fact-of-our-demise. But it helps me to find a little humor where we can. And… while the script is loosely based on true events, in the interest of the joke, the comic did take liberties with the outfits.

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Distractions and the Drexler-Smalley Debate

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I was still thinking about the pernicious effects of smartphones on attention when I wrote the comic. I have been trying to listen to more audio books instead of doomscrolling. I listened to “Deep Work” by Cal Newport and “Effortless” by Greg Mckeown over the last few weeks. There is an interesting tension between them. I agree with both. It takes deep work to make progress. It takes real, effortless recreation to recover from that deep work. Maybe I’ll write something about that at some point.

I posted a video this week about the Drexler-Smalley debate. The big question was “Can we make a nano-3D printer that can fabricate literally anything?” My PhD is in chemistry, and I have experience with using photolithography for microfabrication as well as building simple bio-inspired nano-machines. So I have some of the relevant background and context to explain this. I put the edited text-version at the end of this post.

I’ve collected a bunch of cool articles and links, too.

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