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Monthly Archives: September 2020
Remembering Gail Sheehy
It bums me out that Gail Sheehy passed without much notice—meaning I only heard about it in passing. And I didn’t hear about it, actually; I saw it on CBS’ Sunday Morning, where her face passed somewhere between Tom Seaver’s … Continue reading
How early is digital life?
Bits don’t leave a fossil record. Well, not quite. They do persist on magnetic, optical and other media, all easily degraded or erased. But how long will those last? Since I’ve already asked that question, I’ll set it aside and … Continue reading
Posted in Digital Life
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On Moral Politics
I spent 17 minutes while exercising the other day, thinking out loud about what @GeorgeLakoff says in his 1996 book Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t, (also in his expanded 2016 edition, re-subtitled How Liberals and Conservatives Think). I also tweeted about … Continue reading
Posted in Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Politics
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Saving Mount Wilson
This was last night: And this was just before sunset tonight: From the Mt. Wilson Observatory website: Mount Wilson Observatory Status Angeles National Forest is CLOSED due to the extreme fire hazard conditions. To see how the Observatory is faring during the … Continue reading
Posted in astronomy, california, wildfire
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On fire
The white mess in the image above is the Bobcat Fire, spreading now in the San Gabriel Mountains, against which Los Angeles’ suburban sprawl (that’s it, on the right) reaches its limits of advance to the north. It makes no … Continue reading
Posted in california, fire, Science
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The smell of boiling frog
I just got this email today: Which tells me, from a sample of one (after another, after another) that Zoom is to video conferencing in 2020 what Microsoft Windows was to personal computing in 1999. Back then one business after … Continue reading
Posted in Business, infrastructure, Internet
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