Welcome to Spherical Bastards.

About this site

This is a little corner of the web carved out for me to post various thoughts and rants from time to time. I am a technologist, but I have many more interests than just that. You may see posts here on all kinds of topics. Many of them likely related to Information Technology, since that is how I feed myself, my dog, and my other activities. I may comment on politics, science, culture, aviation, travel, and all the many other things I try to keep abreast of.

Why Spherical Bastards?

The name of the site is inspired by Fritz Zwicky.

Fritz was known as being both abrasive and a curmudgeon. Both things that I, myself, have been accused of a time or two. He was well known for referring to his Astronomy colleagues as "Spherical Bastards". Why spherical? "Because they were bastards, when looked at from any side".

Behind the abrasiveness was a creative genius. He was the first to imagine the existence of Dunkle Materie, or Dark Matter. He also is remembered for predicting gravitational lensing from the mass of galaxies in 1937, later observationally confirmed 5 years after his death in 1979 by the observation of the "Twin Quasar" Q0957+561. He and colleague Walter Baade coined the term supernova, and he also hypothesized the source of cosmic rays.

I do not kid myself into thinking I will ever approach the genius of this man or many others, but this is my spot on the web, and I will use it to share my musings. At times, I will let my curmudgeoness and mysanthropy show through. And when I do, I will remember that image of Fritz Zwicky shown above and bask in my abrasiveness.

-Just another spherical bastard