Geology
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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 layers… 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
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The Most Spectacular Place You’ll Never See
Unless you look out the window. When I did that on 4 November 2007, halfway between London and Denver, I saw this: Best I could tell at the time, this was Greenland. That’s how I labeled it in this album on Flickr. For years after that, I kept looking at Greenland maps, trying to find… Continue reading
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Every thing has a face, and vice versa
That line came to me a few minutes ago, as I looked and read through the latest photographic blog posts by Stephen Lewis in his blog, Bubkes). This one… … titled Farmyard, Grandmother, Chicken, and Ovid in Exile, is accompanied by richly detailed text, including this: The courtyard in the photo no longer exists; it and and… Continue reading
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#10books that changed my life
There’s a challenge going around Facebook: to name ten books that have changed your life. So I’ve thought about my own, and kept a running list here in draft form. Now that it’s close enough to publish, methinks, here they are, in no order, and not limited to ten (or to Facebook) — War and… Continue reading
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The long run
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And… Continue reading