Three and a half weeks after cataract surgery on my left eye, vision improvement seems to have plateaued. I'd say it's 20/80. The new lens is fine, but the corneal edema persists, so it feels like it's smeared with vaseline. My right eye, which had its cataract replaced with a new lens fifteen years ago, is 20/10, so I rely on it entirely, even though my left has always been the dominant eye and wants to take over, layering a blur over everything. It also has a lot of floating debris that looks like pepper grinds or small insects in the air. I'm going back to see the surgeon this afternoon, because there are other symptoms (irritation, headaches), and I'm leaving for two weeks on Wednesday (California, Hawaii). Anyway, that's why a lot is going undone and unwritten.
I don’t know either. I have almost 100,000 better photos on Flickr.
But their work has not
My photos on Flickr (here and here) have had more than 20 million views. The photo with the most views is this one (above) with 83,000+ so far. It was shot with a camcorder to accompany a conversation I was having with somebody about gold crowns and inlays, of which I have many, all installed more than fifty years ago by students at the University of North Carolina Dental School, for $25 apiece. One student was John Berry, who practices (or practiced) in Durham. The other was Steve Herring, who practices (or practiced) in Fayetteville. Both studied primarily under Dr. Clifford Sturdivant, who passed in 2008. John and Steve were both younger than me, but not by much, so I’m guessing they’ve both retired.
Preach!
Luke Kornet is not a saint. Not yet. But he was my favorite Knick before becoming my favorite Celtic, and he is now my favorite Spur. He is also my favorite blogging pro player in any sport. Here’s his blog.
Luke hardly mentions that his claim to fame in college was shooting more threes than any player seven feet or taller (I think he’s 7’3″, though he’s listed two inches shy of that) something he rarely does in the pros, because his main role is blocking shots, which he does a lot. (One game-winning example.)
Last week, Luke stretched his blogging game by throwing a block against the Atlanta Hawks. Dig:
This week, the Atlanta Hawks “announced a special one-night collaboration to celebrate the city’s iconic cultural institution Magic City” during the team’s home game against Orlando on Monday, March 16. In its press release, the Hawks failed to acknowledge that this place is, as the business itself boasts, “Atlanta’s premier strip club.” Given this fact, I would like to respectfully ask that the Atlanta Hawks cancel this promotional night with Magic City.
His reason:
The NBA should desire to protect and esteem women, many of whom work diligently every day to make this the best basketball league in the world. We should promote an atmosphere that is protective and respectful of the daughters, wives, sisters, mothers, and partners that we know and love.
Here is Luke’s first post, which lays out his mission, so to speak. Like my wife and I, Luke seeks out interesting Catholic churches as he travels about with his team. There are, as Luke and we both know, a huge variety of those. It’s a big old church. Lots of choices.
Here is a graphic Luke added to this blog post. Says a lot about him.
Is Conditional Consent compatible with MyTerms? This—_Instead of "accept all" or "reject all" per site, users define rules across three dimensions: cookie purpose, website category, and third-party processor. Allow analytics on shopping sites but deny tracking on news sites — your preferences, your logic._—suggests the answer is yes. Or at least maybe.
Cumulus Media, one of the three big owners of commercial radio stations, just filed for bankruptcy.Audacy, another of the big three, did that two years ago. iHeart, the third, did it in 2018, came out later, and today is less weak than the other two. But the whole commercial radio station business is doomed.
For the civilized world, radio was for many decades the main way to hear music, news, and talk over the wireless connection we called “signals,” which came from “stations” and heard on devices called “radios.” Now we can listen to an infinite variety of music, news, and talk using smartphones, which are also required for much else in our civilized lives. Want a radio for your house? You won’t find one at CVS, or even Best Buy. (Well, maybe online.) But you’re likely to find one at a thrift shop or an antique store.
The value of AM stations is diving to zero. When Cumulus took its off-the-shelf conservative talk programming off KSFO/560, and put it on its 810 AM signal, it turned off the 560 signal completely, and erased the KGO callsign on 810, ending KGO’s century-long landmark existence, during which it ruled ratings for something like eighty years. Apparently, there is no market for the 560 AM signal, even though it could easily be diplexed onto any number of other stations’ AM towers around the Bay. Nobody wants to spend money on AM at all.
In cars—the only places where broadcast radio still has listeners—the makers are burying radio functions behind others on dashboard “infotainment” systems. Gone are knobs for tuning. What people mostly want now is to put their phone screens on the dashboard, with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, and then play whatever they like.
I have a lot more to report on this, but I will save it for another post somewhere. Meanwhile, I will say I have hope for noncommercial (public, religious) radio. I think they’ll be most of what’s left after the market collapses, simply because their listeners will pay for it. Advertising at most has been a side thing for them.
For reasons unknown, I had two posts called Headnesday (because I had to name it something), and I trashed the wrong one because I was in a hurry. Then I
No app shows more, FAIK
Windy is by far the best site and app for weather geeks. Right now we have a thunderstorm in Bloomington, and Windy reports the location of every lightning flash. Such as right now, here.
Coach in Peace
The great Lou Holtz died today, at 89. Two stories. First, Coach Holtz did a kindness for my ex-wife when she was stuck somewhere, and as a UNC fan found then-NC State coach and asked for help finding her a ride, which he did. Second, he coached my cousin Andy Heck during Notre Dame’s college championship season in 1988. Andy is now the offensive line coach for the Kansas City Chiefs.
Still beautiful, I guess
Camp Aheka, the Boy Scout camp where I was homesick but had fun in the Summer of ’59, is long gone and now an estate for sale.
This news came in a thread where I gave my wish list for old-app resurrection by Muggles using AI. Here it is:
Raise MORE from the dead. MORE was the best writing tool ever invented. It ran only on Macs and died around the turn of the 90s, but I continued using it into the late 90s. I still miss it every day.
Raise Phase One Media Pro, formerly Microsoft Expressions, originally iView Media Pro, from the dead. I explain here how it was, for me, the best workflow software ever made for photography.
Raise Adobe GoLive from the dead. It was a great WYSIWYG HTML editor. I don’t need something that complex, but I miss writing with it.
Hell, combine #1 and #3. I don’t care.
God (now with AI!) help us all.
I always hated time as a measure of work. I sucked at keeping time sheets, and even screwed up punch/time clocks before that: for example when, in the late ’60s, I made 60¢ an hour in the Guilford College kitchen, and 83¢ an hour delivering food and washing dishes at Wesley Long Hospital. Both still exist: the places, that is, not the pay scales and systems. Anyway, toward life after all that, Joe Mandese writes, Billable Hours Are Dead, AI Killed Them, Here’s How To Survive. Of course, AI helped Joe write it.
Jeffrey Epstein is a black hole topic: a gravity well of human interest and consequence into which everyone with a connection to him falls and no light escapes. Joi Ito is one of those people. In hope of shedding light, Joi has issued a public statement describing how he used Epstein to raise funds for the MIT Media Lab. Joi is an old friend. I thought (Epstein aside) that he did a great job with the Media Lab when he ran it. While I also don’t think anyone with connections to Epstein (and no connections were good ones) will ever fully recover, I hope that Joi, like everyone else, can get on with a productive and happy life.
We won’t have better news until we have better ways of paying for it. EmanciPay is one we thought up at ProjectVRM almost twenty years ago. Maybe the time is finally ripe for it.
I learned that a small plane landed on the Hudson near Newburgh, NY* from a notification on my laptop that said the story was from WNYC. So I went there. Found nothing. Then I went to Google News and searched for plane+hudson. Wanting to give some linklove to one of the local news (formerly newspaper) outlets, I went to the Times-Union, which accused me of blocking ads (which I don’t: I block tracking) and tried to shake me down for a subscription, which I don’t want because I don’t live there. But (this is key) I am glad to pay a small amount using EmanciPay. which doesn’t yet exist, but should.
Bear this in mind: the Web is all hypertext. Files on it are meant to be linked. When you defeat that purpose, you defeat the Web itself.
Stop now and read The Longing, one of David Weinberger‘s chapters in The Cluetrain Manifesto. David wrote it in 1999, or maybe earlier. But it’s still spot-on about what the Web is, and what we risk by losing it. Excerpts:
There are many ways to look at what’s drawing us to the Web: access to information, connection to other people, entrance to communities, the ability to broadcast ideas. None of these are wrong perspectives. But they all come back to the promise of voice and thus of authentic self…
The voice that the Web gives us is not the ability to post pictures of our cat and our guesses at how the next episode of The X-Files will end. It is the granting of a place in which we can be who we are (and even who we aren’t, if that’s the voice we’ve chosen).
It is a public place. That is crucial. Having a voice doesn’t mean being able to sing in the shower. It means presenting oneself to others. The Web provides a place like we’ve never seen before.
Maybe the way to save both the Web and these periodicals is to come up with a better way for people to pay what they like, in countless small amounts, like we have with the convention called tip jars.
So far, I haven’t seen anything better than EmanciPay for doing that. Because only EmanciPay starts by giving readers their own way to pay whatever they like, wherever they like, automatically and with minimal friction. Installing mechanisms and valves on the sell side alone works for a few large publication, but fails for all the rest of them.
We need solutions that start on the readers’ side. EmanciPay is one of them.
*Credit where due: that link goes to the Mid Hudson News, and reported by Hank Gross, who founded it. It has no paywall. Hats off.
We’ll never have civilized life in the digital world while people have no way of their own to signal and enforce their privacy preferences and requirements, as they do in the natural world with what we call manners and clothing. In the absence of personal agency over privacy, adtech has normalized violating privacy by building a vast surveillance fecosystem. MyTerms will obsolesce that fecosystem. But it won’t start there. It will start where adtech’s moon don’t shine: with sites and services that don’t depend on adtech and surveillance. There are millions of those. Hi, guys!
MyTerms is Status Go toward markets based on full personal agency. Adtech is a $trillion Status Quo based on full agency for corporate entities alone and full subordination of the persons who depend on them: a one-sided power asymmetry manifest in every cookie notice.
But, while it is easy to characterize MyTerms as a way to flip the script on cookie notices, and to imagine hordes of people fed up with surveillance storming the walls of Business-as-Usual, the smarter and simpler approach for MyTerms is to start with websites and services that aren’t part of the Ye Olde Fecosystem. There are a lot of those:
Meanwhile, on the regulatory front, officials concerned about personal privacy and mindful of the consent system’s failures, typically continue to look for ways to fix things from the corporate side, because that’s where all the power is. It is hard to imagine that people are more than “data subjects,” and can be just as capable as companies to act as first parties in privacy agreements.
So we have two challenges on our hands. One is to get MyTerms implemented where the surveillance fecosystem doesn’t operate. The other is to remind regulators that contracts are laws that any two parties can make for themselves. And that enforcement can happen inside the framework of plain old contract law (plus plain new ODR—Online Dispute Resolution).
We don’t need a fix for consent that strengthens the status quo and prevents MyTerms from making operative Art. 6 GDPR 1.(b), which specifies contract as one of six grounds for lawful processing of personal data.
In case you’re wondering about the title image, it contains an improvement on this seat I’ll bet is the oldest and most isolated privy in Wyoming. It was built in the very early 1900s by John Love, whose pioneering is immortalized in John McPhee‘s Rising From the Plains (best read as a chapter of the Pulitzer-winning Annals of the Former World). I write more about Love Ranch here.
Here in Bloomington, Indiana, we have a lot of these large-eyed, big-eared roaming free-range cattle that seem not to care much about the two-legged kind and are mindful of traffic. For example, I was headed east on Howe the other day, approaching Euclid, and spotted these two girls on the sidewalk:
After walking to the corner, this one looks first back up Howe behind my car:
Note that her left and right ears are up and down the cross street, which is Euclid. She’s on Howe. Next, she looks straight north up Euclid:
Note that her ears are still trained in both directions. Next, she looks to the right, down Euclid to the south:
Again, ears in both directions. Don’t you wish your dog could do that? (Cats can. Watch for it.)
After that, I kept driving east on Howe, and saw both these girls in my rear view mirror crossing Euclid. Didn’t get a picture, but I did notice them ignoring a two-legged pedestrian nearby.
My sister Jan and I, aged 3 (her) and 5 (me), at our neighborhood park in Maywood, New Jersey. We loved that place. Can we create the same kinds of places on the Net? Eli Pariser thinks so.
One thing I cited from The Filter Bubble was a subchapter that Eli titled “A Bad Theory of You.” Those five words nailed what the whole surveillance fecosystem was already based on back then. That was before it got worse, then much worse. And now it’s more personalized than ever, thanks to Big AI.
This is one of the outcomes that Eli and his team at New_ Public are working toward. You can find out more at that link, at the New Public Substack, and with what they’re doing with Roundabout. Eli will also give us a tour of some local public spaces already forming on the Net through that work.
—because New_ Public is working to bring something that works in the natural world into the digital one. Which is not easy. For one thing, we’ve had the analog world since the Big Bang, and we’ve had the digital one for decades at most—and it will be with us for millennia to come. It ain’t civilized yet, and won’t be until it has public spaces.
Please come. If you can’t make it to Room 008 in Ballantine Hall at IU, you can also register here to attend online.
Not quite finally, my thanks to the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School for co-organizing the whole Beyond the Web series, now in its fourth year here. It’s not quite a local public park yet, but it’s coming closer.
A thank you to Brian Linse for his kind words on Bluesky. Fact: one of the best parties I’ve ever attended was at Brian’s house in Laurel Canyon, back in blogging’s most golden age. At the party, it seemed everybody was talking about this one blogger, Tony Pierce. I hadn’t met Tony yet, so I assumed that a sort of familiar-looking smart-sounding guy hanging in the kitchen must be Tony, since he seemed to have accreted some fans and well-wishers. So I asked somebody who had been talking about Tony if that guy was him. “No,” they said. “That’s Warren Zevon.” I’m a fan, so I should have known. This was also not long before Warren’s ride arrived. These days Tony blogs at Hear in LA. More about Brian here.
Thanks to Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (who was also at Brian’s party) for this amazing piece of music on an instrument he describes as a “Nick Benjamin custom semi-baritone hybrid guitar. Designed to be 1/3 Bass, 1/3 guitar, and 1/3 slide. It’s constructed largely from sustainable maple, with separate pickups for the bass strings, and banjo tuners for the top strings.1/3 Bass, 1/3 guitar, and 1/3 slide. It’s constructed largely from sustainable maple, with separate pickups for the bass strings, and banjo tuners for the top strings.” I didn’t want it to end.
While out running errands, I listened on SiriusXM to the Knicks creaming the Spurs at the Garden this afternoon. Broke the Spurs’ eleven-game streak and proved again that the Knicks can beat anybody. Very reassuring.
Law360: Are New Police Drone Programs A Big Help Or Big Brother? Before even reading it, I would have said the latter. Once drones become as common as guns (which outnumber people in the US), and some become armed to kill (whether for law enforcement or bad guys), just the sound of one will creep the shit out of people.
Teaching Dialogic Intelligence with AI, by Rupert Wegerif. Pull quote: “Skeptics insist AI can’t be a true dialogue partner because it lacks empathy. Yet its very other-ness lets it serve as education’s outside voice—embodying everything ever said in a field and inviting students into that living conversation. From there it can prod them to leap beyond inherited ideas and co-create tomorrow’s knowledge.” That’s how I learn from (and presumably with) it. HT to David Weinberger for the pointer.
What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon. Make good trouble.
How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice? It isn’t, except where it happens in nature. And there are no limits.
What is new in your approach, and why do you think it will be successful? Talk and write about it. Because it has to happen eventually anyway, and talking and writing about it might make it happen sooner.
Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make? Nobody does yet, but some will, and the difference will be everything.
What are the risks? That it will take longer than I’d like.
How much will it cost? Nothing.
How long will it take? Enough
What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success? Imagine asking that question of speech, writing, printing, clothing, the Internet, the Web, or other inventions.
Still, good questions.
This blog post from March of 2020 is getting visits for some reason. Interesting to read it again. I wrote it before the virus became known best as Covid.
It’s great to see Bob Frankston mull out loud about AI and programming. One pull-quote: “Perhaps more to the point is that the current tools have been trained on corporate programming dogma, so they developed all sorts of what I consider are bad practices while others see this as the best of breed. This is not an intrinsic flaw but a teething problem.”
The front page of today’s Los Angeles Times. I can read it, because I subscribe. I also recommend that everyone subscribe to newspapers, because facts still matter to those troubled entities, regardless of how screwed their business is.
You may have noticed there is a war going on. I’m not here to cover it. I’m here to cover, or at least visit, stories about it.
See, stories themselves are a problem, both in human nature (we love and live stories) and in journalism, which feeds and is fed on the human appetite for stories, all of which have three elements:
Character—a person, country, cause, team, player, whatever, that one might have feelings about (love, hate, anything but disinterest or indifference)
Problem—a situation that causes or is comprised of conflict or struggle
Movement—whether forward, backward, or sideways, it must maintain interest and at least hint toward a conclusion, even if one never comes
War cranks all that stuff up to eleven. As General Pattonput it, “Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God help me, I do love it so.” (Bonus link.)
I’ve written about the story’s problem for journalism in all of these:
Among other places. A common thread: facts, while good to have, aren’t required. In fact, a story might be more compelling if it’s just about your most or least favorite character, or characters. For maximum engagement, it might be best not to use facts at all. Or to use fake ones. As Scott Adams put it, “Facts don’t matter. What matters is how much we hate the person talking.” Daniel Kahnemann agreed: “Facts don’t matter, or they matter much less than people think.”
With those framings in mind, here are some sources you might want to visit:
See Dale Carstensen’s comments below for what this icon means. I just want to surface it here.
Apple’s Mail.app sucks. I could give reasons, but it would only make me more tired than I already am from dealing with my storage issues. I just downloaded and set up Thunderbird for my Searls.com address to see if that works better. I’ve stayed away from Thunderbird since 2013, when it did real damage somehow. Things have changed. It looks a lot better now. [Later: but it crashed. Hmm.]
Richard M. Stallman gave a talk at Georgia Tech in January. Hard to make out what he’s saying since it’s recorded from the audience rather than the stage. Is there a better source of audio for it? Maybe one or more of you knows.
A GrandPerspective map of my laptop’s hard drive. The vertical green block is Apple Photos. The large yellow blocks are videos I neeeded to offload to an external movie drive. Lots of smaller ones had to go too.
I hit a storage crisis yesterday when I needed to copy a lot of fresh photos to my laptop’s hard drive, and it was clear that I would soon run out of room there.
The laptop is a 16-inch 2023 M2 MacBook Pro with an 8TB hard drive—the most loaded and maxed-out computer I could get at the time. On it, I keep most of my life’s digital work, going back to the early ’90s, including a zillion photos and a smattering of videos, though some of them are large. Externally, I have—
an 8TB WD Elements external drive for offloaded archives
a 16TB Unionsine external drive serving as my maxed-out Time Machine.
I started dealing with the problem by offloading some videos still on the main drive to the movie drive. After that, I erased the videos on the main drive to clear space, but discovered that the move had failed (I was tired, and my vision hasn’t fully recovered from cataract surgery), so I needed to restore all of the erased videos to the main drive from the Time Machine. I could see where they had been on the main drive because I had created a GrandPerspective tree map visualization of my drive contents before the move. That’s what you see above.
[Later: I just discovered that I had my old 4TB portable drive, formerly devoted to movies still hooked up. It was to that drive that I offloaded the videos, thinking they were going to the new Sandisk 4TB SSD, to which the contents of the old movie drive had already been moved.]
I’ve moved them again, along with a lot of other .mov, .avi, and .mp4 files, but I’m still left with less than one TB of open storage space on the laptop. But that’s enough to hold me for a while.
Meanwhile, I am thinking about how I want to expand archiving and backup. So, a situation analysis.
First, I’m 78. So I need my archives to be easily navigated by my heirs and others who value my life’s work. I need to name my directories, files, and drives in ways that make their contents obvious and navigable.
This I have mostly done, at least for my photos and videos. The directory structure and file names for my photos are simple and easy to navigate. For photos, the directory is called photos-by-year, and every directory path goes YYYY/MM/DD/subject (named by date: YYYY_MM_DD_subject). Every photo in folders at the ends directory paths is named YYYY_MM_DD_subject_###.jpg, .png, or RAW file type (CR2 for Canon photos and ARW for Sony).
Most of my videos are now on the external drive, where my iMovie library also lives. My writing is less organized, but fixable.
Second, it’s clear by now that Apple will not offer storage larger than 8TB on its laptops. In three years they have gone from M1 to M6 CPUs without raising the ceiling on storage. This sucks, because I would like to work on my whole photo collection on one drive, internal or exteral. So 8TB is all I will ever have to work with, even if I get a newer laptop. So I need to look at external drive options and configurations.
Right now, I am leaning toward getting a SanDisk 8TB Extreme Portable SSD, which is $1067 at Amazon, just for most of my photos. I’ll leave the rest on my laptop drive,. For a Time Machine, I’m looking at this 30TB drive for $919. I’ll back up all three drives on that one.
That’s just to get me out of my current mess.
Of course, I want more than one backup. Not sure what to do there yet. So I invite advice.
This is the time of year when California turns into Ireland, but with big highways. This scene is I-580 westbound through Altamont Pass, across the Diablo Range between the Central Valley and the East Bay. Shot it on my way from San Marino in SoCal to San Rafael in NorCal.
Apologies for the relative silence. Between travels and slow recovery (still far from over) from cataract surgery for my left eye, looking at screens and writing on them hasn’t been easy. But things are improving.
The digital world is not civilized. If it were, we’d have real privacy, rather than its opposite: wanton and uncontrolled surveillance, mostly in service to the adtech industry.
In the civilized natural world, privacy is a tacit matter. We all understand and respect it, though we can’t explain it in explicit terms.
The digital world has no tacit, because it’s all bits and code. So we need to make our privacy requirements explicit and enforceable.
Contract is the only way to do that. The organizations you encounter online need to agree to your terms, not you to theirs.
MyTerms is the only standard supporting that approach. Therefore,
MyTerms is the only path to real personal privacy in the digital world.
Afterwards, I was amazed to be greeted right away by Esther Dyson, an old friend I hadn’t seen in a few years. We had a brief catch-up, which for a while included an inveterate advertising guy. Esther left me with this observation, based on (among other things) her ten years on the board of WPP: advertising is”a parasite.” I’ve been thinking a lot about that since then.
Pretty much everything I do is in the Venn overlap of ProjectVRM and Customer Commons. Now that MyTerms is in the world, there are many ways to get involved with either or both of them. If you’re interested, let us know.
Today I’m trying to blog in the style of Dave Winer, whose Wordland is my tool here. It’s a break from trying to blog the way I did on my original blog. With those (in case that link doesn’t work), the punchline of each day’s sub-posts was the subheadline. Like this:
I uploaded my iPhone video of the February 19 tornado in Bloomington, Indiana, here. Watch it in full-screen, and you can at least see the funnel shape coming down from the thunder cloud, lit by lightning flashes.
I left dinner at the Uptown to stand at the corner of Kirkwood and College in downtown Bloomington, Indiana, to shoot the tornado my phone just told me had formed eight miles west of there. That’s where I was facing when I shot this video, from which I pulled a bunch of screen grabs in Photos’ edit view. This covered about four minutes starting at 7:03 PM.
Earlier, when we got the first tornado warning, I went out and shot this video, from which I have a similar series of screen grabs:
That was about five minutes, starting at 6:42 PM.
Both these videos and all these screen-grabs are free to use, and Creative Commons licensed to only require photo credit. And I’m also not prickly about that. It’s just fun to see where they prove useful. Have at ’em.
And if you’re interested in news, and how we can start remaking it, starting here in Bloomington and towns like it, see what I’ve been writing about that, with a big hat tip to Dave Askins of Bloomington’s B Square Bulletin.
