I think I can safely describe myself as a power user of portable solar panels. I: Use them almost daily Set them up and break them down again sometimes multiple times per day Carry them up and down eleven flights of stairs a couple times a day when I have roof access Carry them a few blocks to the park and back through Manhattan streets when I don't have roof access Carrying and using wears out anything, new technology even more. I chanced into EcoFlow when I bought a used power station of theirs from someone on Craigslist. I wasn't looking to become a tester or influencer. I didn't even know if I could use their equipment, let alone rely on it for all the…

This week I finished: Version 1.0.0 Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Carlo Rovelli: I didn't know when I borrowed this book that it was an international bestseller with over 13,000 online reviews. I only knew it was short and on a topic I loved. I was indulging in an old passion I haven't indulged in for decades. The early stuff about relativity and quantum I had studied. Some later theoretical stuff I had gotten close to learning in school, but didn't reach. I had pursued mind-bending things that were consistent with experiment no matter how crazy they seemed. Still, just descriptions don't do justice to solving the problems and learning about the experiments. Part of me missed doing physics, as opposed to reading about…

This week I finished Apocalypse Never, by Michael Shellenberger: He seems sincere in his beliefs, but I kept thinking, "he's close, but keeps not getting the issue." For most of the book, I made mental notes of what to write about here that he missed, but I lost track after too many of them. Sorry, I'm not a professional book reviewer, so I'm not going to cover how much this book misses and misleads, but I see it as way off. It seems like the book was designed 1) to paint environmentalists as shrill and acting on religious fervor, not reason and 2) to call nuclear clean. It's so easy to paint your opponents as unreasonable and overzealous, everyone does it. I mean, he seems…

This week I finished: The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker: A friend I considered insightful recommended this book over a decade ago. At last I got a copy from the library. Reading it made me glad to have the PhD in physics. Otherwise, I'd feel stupid. It read to me like a salad of hard words strung together, maybe more like spaghetti. It seems like Freud created a bunch of models for people based not on experiment, but just making things up and writing about it. Then a bunch of intellectuals took up his ideas and started expanding on them, with complex language. I quote below one of the craziest passages, surrounding one of the most implausible and eyebrow-raising sentences, "Why is it that…