Over The Edge – Dan Rosenbaum's random musings

Life on Coney

Lovely piece in the NYTimes today about a particularly unlovely road, Coney Island Avenue. I’m working these days deep in New Jersey, past the Mall Belt.. This means I get in my car every morning in Brooklyn, point it north and west, and drive 30 miles. Besides the distinct lack of physical activity (and the […]

You Gotta Fight For Your Right

One of the reasons I’m sure that the Cosmos has a sense of humor is that I have somehow found myself on President Bush’s re-election e-mail list. I remain subscribed for the same reason I read the WSJ editorial page: a firm belief that externally generated spikes in blood pressure are ultimately a Good Thing. […]

NASCAR: The Next Generation

I’m just marveling at the part where the kid got the key into the ignition and turned it far enough to get the starter motor cranking: TAMPA (AP) – Authorities said a [2-year-old] toddler slipped out of his mother’s locked motel room, climbed into his family’s car and accidentally drove it through the room’s door […]

OK, Everybody. As You Were….

Update on that asteroid: A newly discovered asteroid has zero chance of colliding with Earth in 11 years, although preliminary data had suggested such a doomsday scenario was possible, astronomers said this week. New data allowed a more refined projection of the orbit of the space rock, dubbed 2003 QQ47 — ruling out more than […]

Time to Re-evaluate Those Retirement Plans

British scientists say they’re tracking an asteroid that might strike Earth on March 21, 2014. The odds of this happening about 900,000 to 1 against, the article says. The odds of my hitting NY Lotto are about 22.5 million to 1 against. I buy Lotto tickets every so often, but don’t plan to worry about […]

Gee, That’d Be Nice

From the Independent (U.K.), by Andrew Gumbel: Cast your mind forward to the morning of 3 November 2004. Imagine, just for a moment, that George W Bush has gone down to ignominious defeat in the US presidential election, his once sky-high popularity ratings pickaxed and bludgeoned into the ground like some rotten fencepost on a […]

How Best to Interview

I once had an ex-girlfriend who said that I type for a living. (Since at the time I was a reporter for UPI — and UPI was the second-largest news organization in the world — you understand why she was ex.) Closer to the truth is that I talk to people people for a living. […]

Hey, Kids! What Time Is It?

The Net likes to know what time it is. (So to TV networks and cable systems and any other distributed resource.) When the Internet was small-ish, it was no big deal to have a few thousand routers checking in with a couple of places to make sure everyone was in sync. Generally, these conversations go […]

The Kind of Health News I Like

There’s a new health study today — and isn’t there always — that contains unaccustomed good news. Well, good for me, anyway. Seems that the Journal of the American Medical Association and the journal Nature published studies this week indicating that eating chocolate will lower your cholesterol. Not just any chocolate. Dark chocolate. The good […]