Right now, for those on Earth who see it when they look up, the Moon is as full as it can get without moving into the shadow of the Earth . Which it will. Shortly. Here is where Earth’s shadow is right now, as I write this, at around 10 PM Eastern Time: The outer […] | Continue reading
Hockey vs. Football. Suddenly this looks more likely. | Continue reading
I need to learn French. This is lovely. Who is this girl? Here's one clue. Another. Look for more. Never heard of her before today. Hello, I still love you. The Doors are 60 this year. Or would have been. Good and legendary as they were, I think they are woefully underrated. Manz … | Continue reading
What follows is a conversation I’m having with ChatGPT about personal AI. I guarantee it’s unlike any conversation about AI you’ll find anywhere else. It’s copied and pasted. I may be adding to it, though its probably long enough. Enjoy! You said: I am thinking about what persona … | Continue reading
Just learned about this, here. Thank you, Andy Sylvester! | Continue reading
My most-visited blog post of the last couple of weeks is Radio's Death Knells. I have a feeling those visits are more from people in the business than from people who listen to radio. Sad but interesting to see how many listings on my old blogroll (frozen in Augst 2007) are from … | Continue reading
The final round of the 10th Indiana International Guitar Competition just happened, here, as well as in the natural world. We saw it in the latter. Amazing performances. Bloomington is a fabulous small city anyway, but the Jacobs School of Music—and the whole music scene here—put … | Continue reading
For eight years I blogged here in a style that was basically tweeting with titles. Now I'm doing it again here, with Wordland. David Weinberger explains why it's awesome. | Continue reading
The big and scary news about the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, is that she died first, and suddenly, of hantavirus, which kills up to half the people it infects. It's bad shit—specifically, from rodents. Hackman, who had advanced Alzheimer's, died later of h … | Continue reading
Great speech by David Brooks at a recent ARC conference in London. I read here that he was booed and heckled, but in the video one only sees smiles, warmth, and occasional laughs (e.g. to "At Chicago I had a double major in history and celibacy"). It's a short, deep, and caring t … | Continue reading
Even in a small city such as Bloomington, one can make fun discoveries all the time. Yesterday, for example, I discovered Redbud Books, which had a table set up to sell books from Cory Doctorow's increasingly vast oeuvre while the man himself spoke to a packed classroom in the Me … | Continue reading
This informative video by @lainaminute (L.A. in a Minute) on Instagram expands on something I anticipated when I shot this photo album of the KSPN/710 transmitter site in Burbank, almost four years ago: that the land under the transmitter—19 acres of fenced-in grass surrounded by … | Continue reading
Writing with Wordland is like Tweeting, but on my personal press (this blog) instead of Elon's. Or any other giant's. As a difference in kind, it's absolute. | Continue reading
The radio station known since 1935 as KSFO/560 was for most of its life a landmark on the Bay Area radio dial. Others were KGO/810, KCBS/740, KFRC/610, and KNBR/680. KFRC went away in 2005, as religious programming moved to AM from 106.9, and KCBS added that channel as the FM ser … | Continue reading
Naming today's tab dump after one of The Mamas and The Papas best songs. Here is a lipsync'd video on YouTube. Dig the old-skool stereo. Where I explained customer-to-company AI agent-to-AI agent interaction (you know, markets as conversations) in May of last year. | Continue reading
If I share the link to one of my open tabs and close it, the reader gets a new tab when they click on the link, no? So, in that case I'm giving away tabs, seems to me on a Sunday afternoon. I don't have Hulu, and I don't have cable, but I do have […] | Continue reading
27th in the News Commons series Nearly everything I’ve been writing in the News Commons series has come out of breakfasts Joyce and I have enjoyed with Dave Askins at the Uptown Cafe in Bloomington, Indiana. (A tech perspective: The Uptown is to Bloomington what Bucks of Woodside … | Continue reading
Testing Wordland, about which Dave says more here. The predecessor fo this blog, which started in 2007, is this one, which (courtesy of Dave) started in the last year of the prior millennium. I had hair then. And wore glasses. Is this true? I want more sources. Irony of wanting m … | Continue reading
On the left is Tom Evslin, former CTO for Vermont, among many other distinctions. On the right is the golden dome atop Vermont’s capitol building. Underneath that dome, and in countless spaces in government bodies everywhere are meetings recorded in video. Reviewing or reporting … | Continue reading
I’ve never had writer’s block. Give me a writing assignment and I’ll blab something out. It might even be good, or at least good enough. But I don’t write in final draft. Or talk that way. I know people who can do either or both. But I don’t know how they do it, much as […] | Continue reading
This morning Wired published This Ad-Tech Company Is Powering Surveillance of US Military Personnel. It’s a good piece, which is typical of Wired lately. But what caught my eye was “Ad-Tech” in the headline. Some writers say “ad tech.” Others say “adtech” or “AdTech.” I’m highly … | Continue reading
Every so often a product shows up that is so bad somebody needs to sound a warning. So I’m sounding one for the Ion Retro Glow. For the last month or so, it’s been on display and selling at the Sams Club here in Bloomington, Indiana. That’s where I shot the photo above. At first … | Continue reading
Somebody just gave the 31st upvote to my answer to the Quora question “What do you regret as you get older?” So I thought it might be worth repeating. Here’s a short list: Not learning at least one other language. Not learning a musical instrument (or to sing) well enough to play … | Continue reading
Twenty-fifth in the News Commons series Southern California has two seasons: Fire and Rain. Rain didn’t begin this year until a few days after Fire ended apocalyptically, incinerating much of Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Now Rain is here, with the occasional atmospheric river … | Continue reading
United Airlines details 6 big inflight entertainment updates, including all-new Control Tower map, by Zach Griff in The Points Guy, is thick with welcome news for frequent United fliers, of which my wife and I are two. (So far I have clocked 1,533,214 miles with United, and she h … | Continue reading
When Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina, the Swannanoa River rose three storys above its shores, all but erasing the town named after the river, and leaving hundreds homeless. But the challenge for Swannanoa was not just recovery. It was regeneration. For that, Swannanoa … | Continue reading
Twenty-fourth in the News Commons series. 3:45pm—Watching the Los Angeles TV stations (each with a tab in my browser) cover the Hughes Fire. I have them arranged by channel number, going up, left to right, top to bottom. (Note that NBC’s 4 and Telemundo 52 are in tandem. (The rep … | Continue reading
Twenty-third in the News Commons series Disaster coverage tends to go through four stages: Live reporting. TV stations stop all advertising and go into round-the-clock coverage. Radio stations drop the feeds from elsewhere and go wall-to-wall with live reports. Newspapers drop th … | Continue reading
Nineteenth in the News Commons series. Facts don’t matter, or they matter much less than people think—Daniel Kahnemann Facts don’t matter. What matters is how much we hate the person talking—Scott Adams But facts do matter when life and death are on the line. Or when one is recov … | Continue reading
Eighteenth in the New Commons series. Several generations ago, my pal Jerry and I were cutting a hole between the ceiling joists of a rented house in Durham, North Carolina. This was our first step toward installing a drop-down stairway to an attic space that had been closed sinc … | Continue reading
3:22pm—Hats off to Miles Archer for the links below, one of which goes here— —showing all the aircraft and their paths at once. You can start here at https://globe.adsbexchange.com/, which is kind of your slate that’s blank except for live aircraft over the Palisades Fire: Meanwh … | Continue reading
10:15pm—Here is a Google Earth Pro view of the Palisades fire crossing the wilderness north of Pacific Palisades and south of “Dry Mulholland”—the dirt road that serves as a firebreak along the ridge of the mountains south of the San Fernando Valley: The large squares are MODIS s … | Continue reading
Seventeenth in the News Commons series. That collection of tabs is my dashboard of major media that inform my writing about the #LAfires. There are tabs for five TV stations, one radio station, and one newspaper: KNBC/4 “4 Los Angeles” KTLA/5 “LA’s Very Own” KABC/7 “7 Eyewitness … | Continue reading
6:50am Friday, January 10, 2025—I will now shift my blogging about the #LAFires from the kind of continuous coverage I’ve done for the last three days to what we might call coverage of coverage. Or something beyond that: shifting to a new kind of news model: grounded in facts rat … | Continue reading
Here is the FIRMS map of the Los Angeles fires, as of 7:50am Pacific time: The VIIRS and MODIS satellites pass over about once every 100 minutes. Neither has picked up on the Woodley fire yet. That one is in the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area, which is the northwest side of the … | Continue reading
We’re watching KABC/7 from Los Angeles, live on our Roku TV (which has it among hundreds of “Live TV” channels), and in a browser on this laptop. One screen grab: Fire.ca.gov has much information, and maps. Here’s one for the Palisades fire: Winds are so strong that there is no f … | Continue reading
My wife and I are moving upward through The Final Demographic. Productively: working, traveling, doing stuff. But we are dealing with some of the usual infirmities required by aging, which means we are intimately involved (mostly in very slow motion) with what we generously call … | Continue reading
I think up Onion headlines all the time: American Dream Ends When Nation Wakes Up. CAPTCHASTAN Capitol Lacks Bicycles, Motorcycles, Buses, Crosswalks. Local Pothole Has No Bottom Earthquake Denies Acting For God New Trump Fragrance Line Based On Fake Blood, Sweat. Then this morni … | Continue reading
“The intention economy” arrived in the world in a Linux Journal column by that title, written by me in March 2006. A few months later, when I became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, I started ProjectVRM for the purpose of making that economy happen. Six years after tha … | Continue reading
Imagine what would have happened had Martin Winterkorn not imploded, and if Volkswagen, under his watch, had not become a datakranken (data sea-monster, or octopus), spying on drivers and passengers—just like every other car company. What would the world now be like if Volkswagen … | Continue reading
Sixteenth in the News Commons series. Dave Askins is shutting down the B Square Bulletin. This is tragic. And not just for Bloomington and Monroe County. (Dave covered the governing bodies of both like a glove.) It’s tragic for journalism. Because Dave was far more than an exempl … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, my sister and I drove a cache of archival stuff from her garage in North Carolina to my office in Indiana. One box was filled with boxes and carousels of slides nobody had seen for many decades. I also brought along my parents’ slide projector, and digitized each … | Continue reading
That’s what Charlie Schweik and friends will be talking about in the next salon in the Beyond the Web series at Indiana University, hosted by the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. The salon will be held at the latter for locals and … | Continue reading
I just looked for the word “weave” among my half-million photos, and found this: We’ve been trying to solve identity problems online since the Internet showed up, roughly in the middle of the curve in the image above. It wasn’t much of a problem before then. Consider what Walt Wh … | Continue reading
Thank Dewayne Hendricks for Wi-Fi. Hell, thank him for what Bob Frankston calls ambient connectivity: the kind you just … assume. Like you are now, connected to the Internet without wires. That item was my biggest take-away from the 3+ hour memorial zoom we had yesterday for Dewa … | Continue reading
Rush Limbaugh started it. Dozens of wannabes filled the rest of talk radio with it. Fox News took it to cable. And now Rushians rule the News Commentary roost on Apple Podcasts, and score well overall. It’s not much different on Spotify: As Michael Tomasky puts it in The New Repu … | Continue reading
If you’re tired of moaning (or celebrating) the after-effects of the U.S. election, or how all of us seem trapped inside the captive markets of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and other feudal powers, take in a talk about something constructive that’s nowhere near any o … | Continue reading