Geology
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Holiday Findings
Literally Rocks in Canada that are older than dirt. About half the cover price The Intention Economy is now just $13 on Amazon in hardcover. I can't think of a better metaphor Christmas is foreplay. See if you can ace this A list of sixteen contractions a good mind can hold at the same time. HT to Continue reading
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A Wrong Road
An English Ford Consul, such as the one above, was the worst car I’ve ever owned. I got it after rolling my parents’ ’63 VW bug in the summer of ’66. I did that on a backroad outside of Greensboro, North Carolina, when I was about to turn nineteen and trying to get my grades Continue reading
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Items
Death sells. So far today, this blog post has had 13 visits. Meanwhile, Radio’s Death Knells has had 356. Since I need to go out, I’ll call it a day and put a picture on top. See what happens. What was Indiana thinking? These days sunrise in Bloomington is about four hours before noon, and sunset Continue reading
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Fire and Rain
Twenty-fifth in the News Commons series Southern California has two seasons: Fire and Rain. Rain didn’t begin this year until a few days after Fire ended apocalyptically, incinerating much of Altadena and Pacific Palisades. Now Rain is here, with the occasional atmospheric river flowing across the faces of hills and mountains whose beards were just Continue reading
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And Now the #HughesFire
Twenty-fourth in the News Commons series Eigth on the #LAfires 7:35 am January 23, 2024—It’s morning now. The Hughes Fire is 17% contained but no longer interesting. The Sepulveda Fire broke out last night along the 405 freeway. It stopped at forty acres, and doesn’t matter much now. Here’s the path of one fire helicopter Continue reading
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Death is a Feature
When Parisians got tired of cemeteries during the French Revolution, they conscripted priests to relocate bones of more than six million deceased forebears to empty limestone quarries below the city: a hundred miles of rooms and corridors now called The Catacombes. It was from those quarries that much of the city’s famous structures above—Notre Dame, et. al.—were built Continue reading
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Will our digital lives leave a fossil record?
In the library of Earth’s history, there are missing books, and within books, there are missing chapters, written in rock that is now gone. John Wesley Powell recorded the greatest example of gone rock in 1869, on his expedition by boat through the Grand Canyon. Floating down the Colorado River, he saw the canyon’s mile-thick Continue reading
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The universe is a start-up
“Pillars of Creation” is a live view of stars forming in a neighboring region of the Milky Way. (Inside the Eagle Nebula, 5,400 to 6,100 light years away.) The Solar System, formed 4.6 billion years ago. Earth became a planet .46 billion years later. That was 9.247 billion years after the Big Bang, which happened 13.787 billion years ago, meaning Continue reading
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Saving the Internet—and all the commons it makes possible
This is the Ostrom Memorial Lecture I gave on 9 October of last year for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. Here is the video. (The intro starts at 8 minutes in, and my part starts just after 11 minutes in.) I usually speak off the cuff, but this time I wrote it out, originally Continue reading
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Revolutions take time
The original version of this ran as a comment under Francine Hardaway‘s Medium post titled Have we progressed at all in the last fifty years? My short answer is “Yes, but not much, and not evenly.” This is my longer answer. In your case and mine, it has taken the better part of a century to Continue reading
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Shooting the Bluecut Fire
To get away from the heat today—into a little less heat and an excuse to exercise, I drove up to Mt. Wilson, where I visited the Observatory and walked around the antenna farm there. As it happened, the Bluecut Fire was also visiting the same San Gabriel Mountains, a few miles to the east at Continue reading
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Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky
I’ve been fascinated for years by what comes and goes at the Fort Irwin National Training Center— —in the Mojave Desert, amidst the dark and colorful Calico Mountains of California, situated in the forbidding nowhere that stretches between Barstow and Death Valley. Here and there, amidst the webwork of trails in the dirt left by Continue reading
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Oil and Water on California’s South Coast
Oil in the water is one of the strange graces of life on Califonia’s South Coast. What we see here is a long slick of oil in the Pacific, drifting across Platform Holly, which taps into the Elwood Oil Field, which is of a piece with the Coal Oil Point Seep Field, all a stone’s throw off Continue reading
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Where the dead receive guests
This is about visiting my great-great grandfather, Thomas Trainor, dead since 1876 and reposing in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York. Thomas and a friend bought the Trainor family plot, two graves wide, in 1852. It now lies roughly in the center of what’s called “Old Calvary,” the oldest section of the largest cemetery in Continue reading
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Content as Icebergs
(Cross posted from this at Facebook) In Snow on the Water I wrote about the ‘low threshold of death” for what media folks call “content” — which always seemed to me like another word for packing material. But its common parlance now. For example, a couple days ago I heard a guy on WEEI, my Continue reading
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The Giant Zero
Many years ago, Craig Burton shared the best metaphor for the Internet that I have ever heard, or seen in my head. He called it hollow sphere: a giant three-dimensional zero. He called it that because a sphere’s geometry best illustrates a system in which every end, regardless of its physical location, is functionally zero Continue reading