Gambling is a funny thing, because everything in life is a gamble. You roll the dice every morning you back out of the driveway—that the other fellow will stop at the red light, that the deer won’t jump the fence on the curve by the creek. You gamble when you pour your second glass of…

In July, I posted an article titled “AI Data Centers: A Path to Innovation,” arguing that the power demands of these facilities—often criticized for their environmental impact—were justified by the long-term societal gains. My friend, a former insurance salesman who still thinks broadband is a type of hearty bread, left a comment “elitist tech nonsense.”…

Yesterday I had a little fun and blogged about the NFL predictions for the first week of the season. That apparently shook loose a few readers who’d been hibernating since last Thanksgiving, because my inbox promptly coughed up the political equivalent of “Okay, smart guy, what about the midterms?” As if forecasting whether the Giants…

Sixty-seven years ago my grandmother dealt me into my first hand of penny poker, and the itch never left. Every fall since I started this blog I’ve put out my NFL picks for the season, and I’ll say this: leaning on the numbers rather than the gut has kept me on the winning side of…

As expected, my article on myths, cults, and religions shook loose a fair number of responses. Several readers wanted to know what I actually believe, which tells me they had some difficulty reading past the parts that stepped on the toes of whatever they were raised to hold sacred. Fair enough. Rather than simply share…

I have spent a long time around people who confuse confidence for credibility. I have sat in rooms where a man with a firm handshake and a laminated chart convinced a roomful of otherwise sensible adults that he had located the truth, and I have watched those same adults nod along because the chart had…

Let me tell you something that is going to irritate a significant portion of my readership, and frankly I am looking forward to it. The collective meltdown—pun absolutely intended—over AI and data centers has reached a pitch I can no longer ignore. This is not a new phenomenon. When the cotton gin arrived, people lost…

Last April, the man who holds the office of Secretary of Defense—and who had by that point taken to calling that office the War Department and himself its Secretary of War, as though the renaming of a thing changes what it does—announced via social media post that the United States military would no longer mandate…

Today was a particularly melancholy day in Kentucky. The gunmetal skies hung low and heavy, with winds that howled and rattled the windows, gusting to 40 miles an hour. After yesterday’s cautiously optimistic news suggesting my wife’s recent cancer treatment was finally showing results—her bloodwork numbers improving for the first time in months—we both just…

I have been a dog owner all my life, and there are few things I have treasured more than my canine companions. After my coal-black lab Prince—with his velvet ears and graying muzzle—passed away last year, I am now a 73-year-old man with just one little companion: a little bug-eyed chihuahua named Poppy who weighs…