IT Insights Blog — The Mysteries of the Universe

The Transcona Grain Elevator, built at Transcona in Canada's Manitoba province, is notorious in civil engineering circles for its near collapse in 1913. The structure's bin house — the part that includes the bins, or vertical cylinders (65 of them in this particular instance), where grain is stored — famously tilted 27 degrees to the west in a single day. This occurred shortly after the structure's initial opening, when it was filled with 875,000 bushels of grain.

With all of the Democratic presidential campaigns out there — we already have nearly two dozen candidates — there are lot of campaign promises floating around that boil down to, "If elected, I will ensure free and unfettered access to [desirable thing] for everybody." Free and unfettered access to Medicare is popular with almost everyone running. Some are promising free and

We've spoken out here before about the damage done — both to IT certification as a whole and to individual careers — by exam candidates who cheat to pass a certification exam. Most people in certification can probably empathize with anyone experiencing the various stresses that cause people to resort to gimmicks and shortcuts to pass an exam. Yet because of the ripple effects of cheating, a certification cheater really is the proverbial bad apple that spoils the whole bunch.

Don't look now, but NASA just landed a spacecraft on Mars. Somehow, news of the landing broke Monday and Tuesday with (more or less) zero fanfare. Which is odd, considering that we just completed a successful process that involves flinging a spacecraft way up into the exosphere, piloting it across hundreds of millions of miles of deep space, and safely getting it down to surface, intact ...

There's an old 19th-century Christian hymn written by British-born immigrant historian John Jaques that attempts to frame the oft-thirsted-after concept of capital-T "truth." In Verse 1 of "Oh Say, What Is Truth?," Jaques declares that truth is the "fairest gem that the riches of worlds can produce," while in Verse 2 he acclaims it the "brightest prize to which mortals or gods can aspire."