And maybe even essential Thanks to her wise, literate, grounded, and funny videos (plus her music and much else), I have fallen in like with Elle Cordova. She's brilliant. Casually so, which makes her even more brilliant. | Continue reading
Digressing we shall go I find myself in Boston, home of Fenway Park, in the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood, half-named after The Fenway, now a parkway that runs along the Back Bay Fens, which is a jewel in the Emerald Necklace of Boston parks. I arrived at this digression while thin … | Continue reading
QOTD "People used to have computers. Now computers have people." | Continue reading
Still a wonder to watch Just took in this Starlink launch from Vandenberg. Got a lot of pix. These things are common now, but I’m still a big kid, and space stuff excites me. I also seem to be here when launches aren’t happening, so it was great to catch this one. What you see [… … | Continue reading
Check it out Watching a presentation by SwissVault right now. Looks cool. | Continue reading
Circling the drains BBC will be shutting off its Radio 4 service at 198 kHz longwave (LW) on 27 June. Being old in age and fashion, I travel with a radio and have always loved listening on the LW band, especially to hear Radio 4 on 198. (For example, here. In that post, I pointed … | Continue reading
I expected the Knicks to win tonight. I also expect them to win the NBA championship. Two reasons. One is what I said about the Cavaliers ten years ago: they’re a better story. And something I said about the Warriors in that post applies to the Spurs now: they feel entitled. They … | Continue reading
Wandering about geology In the vastness of John McPhee's writings on geology (within which he is the field's Shakespeare), he writes (in Annals of the Former World and earlier works), If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choo … | Continue reading
Frogmarch I am not calendar-blind, but I am disabled around dates. I frequently get today's date wrong, and dates for future stuff tend not to stick in my mind—or I have them wrong. But I am accurate about days of the week. So I know today is Tuesday. I also know Tuesday is Pre-E … | Continue reading
In Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout said, “Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.” So consider what’s happening in the minds of everyone who has long depended on Google to be what it has al … | Continue reading
How DuckDuckGo can be a hero In Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout said, "Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect." So consider what's happening in the minds of everyone who has long depended o … | Continue reading
Being old, I get lots of ads for Chair Tai Chi, Chair Yoga, and other positional challenges toward staying alive, limber, and not much closer to dead than you are without them. So this one occurred to me yesterday. And, since I can no longer draw (arthritis, talent), I handed ill … | Continue reading
Lessons to be learned A Blue Origin rocket blew up at Cape Canaveral today. | Continue reading
Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy—Thesis #7, The Cluetrain Manifesto AI subverts everything, including hyperlinks. Go to the big AI machines—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Meta, whatever—and ask a question. If it pauses for a moment, there’s a good chance it’ll say “Searching the Web.” But … | Continue reading
Not cheap, but appealing Is my future portable drive one or more 8 TB strips (such as one of these) that I carry with me and plug into one of these? | Continue reading
Remembering the future What matters most about Memorial Day is that we stop killing each other, especially over problems that could have been solved without anyone dying. Word Pope Leo on AI. The whole thing. | Continue reading
Whether report The Sun is behind clouds here in Santa Barbara, but I still have faith that it'll be clear by late afternoon, which is how things go here. Meanwhile, Bloomington has had lots of rain while I've been gone. Monroe Lake is moving toward flood stage, with 1,605 cfs (cu … | Continue reading
That's weekend, auf Deutsch. As happened yesterday, something I wrote here in Wordland got too long, so I made it a separate post, titled So maybe it’s not too late to teach it to myself. German, that is. I still have the book I failed to versteh in 1962, so why not? And all of t … | Continue reading
In my Oofday post, I shared a post in Hackrnoon titled We Treated Potholes Like Software Bugs and Accidentally Built a Civic Hacking Playbook. The story is about a civic hack in Sofia. The writing is vivid, clear, and useful. Everything in the piece is excellent. My only problem … | Continue reading
This one is already knows, and is too good at them I just wasted an hour of writing and research by hitting the wrong chord on my keyboard here, because I failed to save the @#$%^& work in progress. You can't teach an old dog old failings. | Continue reading
Talk me out of it. Or into something else. I need a mic for doing podcasts and similar audio work here in my Santa Barbara office. Thing is, I'm here much less than I'm in Bloomington, which is kitted out. All I really need is a mic that's not too expensive. Currently leaning tow … | Continue reading
CPDP stands for Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection. The theme of this year's CPDP is "Competing Visions Shared Futures." The MyTerms future is replacing consent with contract in our online dealings with websites and digital services. Consent is what cookie notices speciously … | Continue reading
Success story Susie James: Three chords, the truth, and a woman behind the signal is a nice piece about good local radio in Lebanon, Tennessee. It's in the Lebanon edition of Good News Exchange, which explains itself here. | Continue reading
I love basketball. I love watching it, and in my youth (columns A and B above, row 2), I loved playing it. I wasn’t good. My only skill was shooting the ball, which I did flat-footed from the nether regions of the court called “outside” or “downtown.” I hit about half of those sh … | Continue reading
Coasting I'm in Santa Barbara now, and it is typically perfect outside. Love living here, even though I mostly don't. Talk about dumb Last Thursday's post, titled Person Networks, was occasioned by outreach by a friend who urged me by email to join Intelligence.com, a slick new-i … | Continue reading
The first version of this post became Snucked and sucked, but never mind that. I'm also packing to fly tomorrow, so I'm just sharing a link pile for the rest of what's left of today. If you want stories that aren't from the amen corners of the left and the right, Reason is useful … | Continue reading
When you read a gruesome story on a polite service, and it sources a story on another polite service that still doesn’t give you the information you want—the gory stuff—you continue digging. The story in question here is a FlightAware one titled Frontier plane kills fence-jumping … | Continue reading
I’ve been invited by a friend to join Intelligence.com, which “helps you reach the right people, through those who know you best. It’s simple, thoughtful, and built on trust, just like the best introductions.” The inveterate among us will recall that this what LinkedIn tried to d … | Continue reading
Which is smarter? I've been invited by a friend to join Intelligence.com, which "helps you reach the right people, through those who know you best. It’s simple, thoughtful, and built on trust, just like the best introductions." The inveterate among us might recall that this what … | Continue reading
Let's get it in the OED I've been throwing away leftunders, a word I just made up and then found in the Urban Dictionary. And it will probably be very bad A super El Niño is coming this year. | Continue reading
Death to #2 Dentistry numbers your teeth. Number one is the top right back tooth. If you’ve got one, that’s a wisdom tooth, one of the four that erupted last through your gums. Your other top wisdom tooth is number sixteen. Below it, your bottom left wisdom tooth is number sevent … | Continue reading
Boo School's out. 50,000 students and their families are gone from Indiana University this morning, and Bloomington becomes, relatively speaking, a ghost town. | Continue reading
In Know your .agent, Esther Dyson suggests that we need a DNS-like registry of AI agents. She and her colleagues at the Agentic AI foundation (gentcommunity.org) have started one, and it has some good premises, such as accountability for AI agents and their operators. .agent is c … | Continue reading
It's personal. Again. Esther Dyson's Know your .agent suggests that we need a DNS-like registry of AI agents. This suggests to me that it's 1995 again. That's when I registered searls.com and started collecting other domains. | Continue reading
So far we have Release 01 The US War Department now has a UFO site. Which it is, here in Bloomington. The graduate schools suffered rain yesterday for their ceremonies, but it's clear today for the undergrads. I'm going to leave my desk here and tour the countryside. | Continue reading
Down and out While finals week at countless schools has been disrupted by a ransomware cyberattack on Canvas, more than 21,000 students are graduating from Indiana University this weekend. About half of those will do that here in Bloomington. | Continue reading
Preach! Kevin Kelly has a catechism for robots. A sample: Are robots slaves to humans, or their masters? Neither. Human beings were created with the spark of autonomy and the dilemma of free will. Humans manage their free will with long moral training. The humans have used their … | Continue reading
All the way down, but not out This visit to an abandoned radio station speaks volumes about what remains of the industry. | Continue reading
Maintenance report Visited the retinologist this morning. All is well enough. My vision in both eyes is better than 20/20, but I've got a lot of new floaters left over from the cataract surgery. Early macular degeneration (consistent with my antiquity) seems not to be progressing … | Continue reading
Where and how everything might be wrong Riley Hughes says we live in an age of default disbelief. As an example of this at work, Phil Windley and I went through the doomscroll-bait in my Facebook feed, and co-decided what was fake and what wasn't: Mountain goats doing impossible … | Continue reading
Agents by agents for agents with agents around agents over agents without agents beside agents… I'm at the Agentic Internet Workshop, where most of the sessions are about what personal AI agents can do: for you, with each other, and (choose a preposition) each other. Wow: https:/ … | Continue reading
Convention Naming I didn't know until reading this that Oakland International Airport, better known as just OAK (with the slogan"I Fly OAK") had named itself San Francisco Bay Oakland International Airport, and earned in the process a lawsuit by San Francisco, objecting to usurpa … | Continue reading
Greater Good Government Phil Windley nails a use case for MyTerms. Lesser Good Government Wired: ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Here’s Where It’s Going Next—ICE plans to lease offices throughout the US as part of a secret, monthslong expansion campaign. Good C … | Continue reading
There is no liquid soap that can outperform good bar soap at cleaning a stinky, hairy armpit. Which is why I hate that hotels have replaced bars of soap with bottles of "body wash" or whatever. I'm at one of those hotels now. Corporatization is a form of enshittification While dr … | Continue reading
Today I flew from IND to DEN— Then from DEN to LAX— —Where I had plenty of time to fantasize about what could or should be done with the iconic but idle Theme Building in the heart of the airport, while waiting for my wife to pick me up. (She was, in the city tradition, […] | Continue reading
Your private future, that is. Your present isn’t private. Not in the digital world. Not while you always agree to their terms, and not them to yours. With MyTerms, they agree to your privacy terms. Ones that, for example, disallow being tracked everywhere like a marked animal. Th … | Continue reading
Near the end of this Pivot podcast, starting at about the 55 minute mark, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway give a great summary of why podcasting is “the fastest-growing ad-supported medium.” Among other things, they say “People actually listen to the ads,” and that host read-over … | Continue reading
Same goes for Customer Commons and MyTerms, btw "Creative Commons is one of the most amazing feats of stunt-lawyering ever attempted, and it has been an unmitigated success, with tens of billions of works licensed CC, including all of Wikipedia. Like EFF, CC is a charitable nonpr … | Continue reading