A few years ago, solar seemed like a small slice of future electricity generation: it was expensive, took up a lot of space, and was intermittent. Recently, the plummeting cost and increasing efficiency of solar panels has combined with a similar revolution in lithium-ion batteries has transformed solar into a huge part of the future mix. What's particularly wild about it is the potential for decentralization where individuals and isolated areas can push the changes forward themselves.

It's fashionable to ask if the aircraft carrier is obsolete: small uncrewed aircraft can operate from smaller ships or extremely-far land bases, long-ranged anti-ship missiles put them at risk, and they're extremely expensive to build and operate. My opinion is that the carrier is still valuable as long as it can re-focus the carrier strike group for range and endurance.

I've attended the Cleveland National Air Show regularly since 2008. Because I'm such an aviation geek , I love giving tours to the people who come with me. And sometimes I attract attention.

As I've been defining my "brand" of what I do well, one of my early attempts at a brand was "force-multiplier" or a creator of force-multipliers. I've found that most people don't have the (normally military) background to understand the term right away, so I wanted to write about how I came to the term. For me, it was webcomic Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler .

I've gotten a broad view of the various aircraft out there today, and have been involved in the design or manufacture of many too. All photos are mine or public domain.

Last month (May 2025) I was excited to learn from Hyundai that they planned to ship me a free adapter that would enable my 2023 electric car to use Tesla-style chargers. But I when got to try out the adapter for the first time last week it didn't work. Nothing was wrong with the car, adapter, or charging station - but the situation is more complicated than I thought.

Update schedule change: I'm dropping my Friday updates going forward: with my childcare duties and having burned through much of the backlog of items I wanted to blog about, I'll be updating only two days per week: Monday and Wednesday. Now on to the (last?) Friday musing: Inauspicious Beginning This post was inspired by poor phrasing: on March 6, 2025, Aviation Week quoted General Randall Reed , the chief of the US Air Force Transportation Command, as stating that for the brand-new B-21 Raider bomber, “it’s going to be a little bit higher requirement specifically in the fuel transfer”. At the time, Aviation Week reported that meant that the B-21 would require a faster fuel-transfer rate, i.e. that a single aerial refueling tanker could deliver X gallons per minute more than it could today. Later, Transportation Command clarified they meant that the US Air Force needed more tanker aircraft, not a faster pump. I had a whole rant planned on how something had to be horribly...