Doc Searls
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Reanimating a Corpus. Or Two. Or More.
For many years, I have despaired of ever saving the contents of my old blog (1999-2007), my writing for Linux Journal (1996-2019), and countless other articles, essays, and posts, published mostly on the Web—which looks and sounds like a permanent place (“sites,” “locations,” domains”), but in fact is a whiteboard. Then, last week, I asked… Continue reading
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A Wham on the Moon
The Moon has a new crater, called McGetchin. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera people have the story here. (That’s their before and after view.) NASA calls it a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Specifically, Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after… Continue reading
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Why Charlotte Should Build a Museum of Broadcasting in the Antenna Age
In the foreground are three towers standing on nineteen acres in Charlotte’s south side. They transmit the signal of WBT/1110 AM, a 50,000-watt giant with a signal that stretches from Canada to Cuba at night: WBT-AM was born 104 years ago and is about to die, because the land under its towers is worth more… Continue reading
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Linkalongday
War prep redux Given the size of my corpus here, most visiting to it, on most days, is to old stuff. One currently getting some action is Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky, which I posted ten years ago. I've shot its scenes (five of them) often since then, while… Continue reading
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Nextings
See them while you can Later: I turned this section into a Big Idea. Read it there and skip this section or read this section and continue over there. As I’ve been writing about at length on my Trunkline blog, broadcast towers are both a lifelong preoccupation of mine, and (like all of us) doomed… Continue reading
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Boomerangday
Just the Anthropocene, rolling along The photo above was shared in a group I’m in. It was photographed by ornithologist and naturalist Robert Ridgway in November 1875. The tree is identified as an American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) in the lower Wabash River bottoms of Gibson County, Indiana, across the river from Mount Carmel, Illinois, Ridgeway’s… Continue reading
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AI as a Teacher of Athletes
On the whole, AI writing is good. Yes, I’ve called it “AutoTune for the human kind” and “fancy blah.” Claudio Nastruzzi called it “semantic ablation.” But Big AI’s grammar, styling, and prose still tends to beat the shit out of the ways most people write. Does that have to be a bad thing? Nearly all of… Continue reading
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Fraturday
John Venn has the perfect historical marker. Cory Doctorow makes sense of wtf is happening with AI. The Indiana Hoosiers football team, still-undefeated national champs (17-0 including last year and this one) take on the Howard Bison today at noon. I’ll be watching. (It’s on Fox One.) How Tony Pierce’s busblog took off on 9/11.… Continue reading
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The Day After
There was far more, and often better, processing of what we hadn’t yet named 9/11 in the days that followed. Here is my own blog, twenty-five years ago today. Again, this is reverse-chronological. My learnings and writings that day go from bottom to top. Wednesday, September 12, 2001 Blog bloat Up to almost 4400 visits… Continue reading
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Remembering 9/11
Tuesday, September 11, 2001 Stars. Just stars. Walking back from a meeting at school this evening, the kid and I looked up at the sky, as always. But it was … different. What was that behind the high branches of an Oak tree? A star or an — no, it couldn’t be an airplane. There… Continue reading
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Lureday
You can buy a new Duo 18 folding iPhone with max storage (2 TB, which is what I have in my iPhone 16 Pro Max) for the low-low price of just $3199. For that you get bigger display but a lesser camera on the back side (two lenses rather than three in the Pro series,… Continue reading
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Fearday
So much doom and gloom about AI. Lordy: Samuel Marks on X. Ted Gioia on that one and many more. Quoth The Raven Jeffrey Snover And I'm exactly at the expected age: Life expectancy vs. Health costs Not good Nicholas Cage's house has a hole Seems NPR is super-serving its core demographic Continue reading
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Readings and Leadings
Dig your way through Bye Bye Workforce. Read all the links. Strong stuff. One sample: On a musical note, I want to hear the rest of this Connor Morrison piece. I’ve ordered danah boyd‘s new book, Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census, from… Continue reading
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Pre-Labor Day
Yesterday I was working in my office when I suddenly remembered that the first IU football game of the season was on. So I went downstairs, turned on the TV, found the Indianapolis station carrying it (we still use an antenna here, 60 miles away), and started watching in time to see what I thought… Continue reading
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Free-Range Childhood
Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond is a story in Reason, which adds this subhead: “The government also placed Karyann Parkinson on its child abuse and neglect registry, where she will remain for seven years.” The distance to the Pond was half a mile. I turned five… Continue reading
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Undeadlines
Here is some stuff I’ve noticed, thought about, or wrapped up, while ending a summer of travel and work (the order is random): Continue reading
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Blame Canada?
Canadian universities are poaching American academics who could use a more hospitable work and research environment. Here’s McGill’s brag on its bags, one of which is my good friend Ethan Zuckerman, who will be leaving his beloved job at U.Mass Amherst to take a new and promising position at McGill, in Montréal. He explains, Canada… Continue reading
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What next for Hugging Face?
Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. That’s what Reuters says The Information says. The latter is behind an expensive paywall, so I’ll take Reuters’ word for it. In The Price Of Independence Was $5.9 Billion, AI Secret says, 🌍 How this hits reality: Last year, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia at… Continue reading
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Moneyday
Turing Testings Like “Goldie Boone,” whom I wrote about here last month, “Luna Azul” (above right) is a fake singer. Pure AI. Her music too, I suppose. I’m sure of it. But neither artist nor music are identified as AI-generated. “New music every week,” Luna’s YouTube channel says. At first, I thought she traced to… Continue reading
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Umday
It can happen where you are too. No data center required. Spotted and obeyed on West Bloomfield Road in Bloomington, Indiana: a robot traffic control flagger. Hard to wear, but that’s not the point My wife just reported from the Iris van Herpen show in Brooklyn. Wow. I remain charged about both Wired has a… Continue reading