You can recognize avarice in any community, and the carps at the US National Arboretum are no different. It is no accident that the one fish with its mouth wide open and ready to eat is also the largest one in the pond.

I don’t often leave online reviews and when I do it’s usually to commend. Not this time.

I might have cooled off by the time I got back home, but then I noticed that the worst auto repair shop in DC has left me a surprise.

No better place for critter-watching than the beach. This one was on Captiva island in 2021, one year before the big hurricane. I hope it made it.

Always great to see a treatment mature from the lab to clinical trials to a write-up in The Atlantic. This is about post-transplant cyclophosphamide, initially developed at Hopkins for haploidentical (“half-matched”) stem cell transplants, now used even for full matches as it works so well in preventing graft versus host disease. Cheap as chips too, if you can get it (but of course low price and short supply are closely related).

As a long-time subscriber to the FT and a fan of Janan Ganesh I was glad to see that they both got head-nods from kottke.org (and before that, Robin Sloan). Yes, it is well worth the price.

Exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, on loan from Angola: a Mosasaurus skull, leg and spine.

I don’t think we knew about these when I was a kid, but my own children knew all about it. From YouTube, where else.

The same pond as yesterday, with more light but alas without the heron.

🍿 Finding Dory (2016) was a disappointment. For perspective, I have seen Wall-E and Ratatouille dozens of times beginning-to-end, but it took me 8 years to finish this over-plotted under-baked mess which managed to omit everything that made the original Finding Nemo so brilliant. Quo vadis, Pixar?