Category Archives: fire

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

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A side view of the Ranch 2 Fire

What you see there is a flammagenitus cloud rising to the north above Ranch 2, a wildfire about fifteen miles east of here in the San Gabriel Mountains, just north of Asuza (one of too many towns to remember, in … Continue reading

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Making sense of what happened to Montecito

Montecito is now a quarry with houses in it: So far twenty dead have been removed. It will take much more time to remove twenty thousand dump truck loads of what geologists call “debris,” just to get down to where … Continue reading

Posted in fire, Geography, Geology, infrastructure, Journalism, Links, News, Places, Politics, problems, Technology, weather, wildfire | Tagged , , , , | 61 Comments

Doing the after math

When I flew out of California on the 14th, this blog was still working. When I went here to post about the Thomas Fire on 15th, it wasn’t. (Somebody later told me Harvard was moving servers around, so maybe that … Continue reading

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The real problem is Decoy News (and decoy content of all kinds)—and the platforms can’t fix it

The term “fake news” was a casual phrase until it became clear to news media that a flood of it had been deployed during last year’s presidential election in the U.S. Starting in November 2016, fake news was the subject … Continue reading

Posted in advertising, fire, Internet, Journalism, marketing, Nature, problems | Tagged , , | 3 Comments