Until recently it was easy to criticize Salesforce for its position on sustainability. Its efforts to help fix the climate situation seemed more showmanship than well considered climate strategy. For instance, the idea of planting one trillion trees stumbles on issues like finding land and water for the young trees…

Denis Pombriant is a retired, board certified, medical technologist. Understanding Elizabeth Holmes’ guilt is as easy or as difficult as knowing what a femtoliter (fL) is. It’s an impossibly small volume, 10–15 liters, for comparison a milliliter is 10–3 or one one-thousandth of a liter. A femtoliter is fivefold smaller…

Simone Biles’ Olympic breakdown, or whatever you want to call it, serves to teach us again about the relationship between performer and audience but, at the same time, it can also extend our understanding of a sports injury. …

Okay, we did batteries last time and you all did very well indeed. As I’ve noted before this newsletter is about the how of solving climate change. …

I love Joy Reid. I love her show on MSNBC, “The Reidout”. I love the way she focuses on long neglected stories like those dealing with white supremacy and other topics the majoritarian press covers from arm’s length. …

The number of justices on the Supreme Court was fixed in 1869, not as a constituional amendment, but by a simple law. So it could be changed relatively easily though few politicians on either side of the aisle want to make the effort. So why should the administration go about…

Two covid vaccines share a common thread that might account for blood clotting in rare cases. Note: I am not a doctor and am not advising anyone on a particular course of action. This piece is intended to inform the general reader. The common thread between the Oxford-AstraZeneca covid vaccine…

It’s been playing a shell game for decades. Although we don’t have definitive proof, running a few numbers and observing what real nuclear powers had to do to get nukes makes us suspicious. …

The pandemic exposed some long-existing gaps in our civic life that had been dismissed or simply overlooked as we ran our busy lives. These gaps can be most easily explained as the duties we owe each other in a free society. Some duties are political like the duty we owe…