Life
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Headnesday, the Longer
Haste makes Trash For reasons unknown, I had two posts called Headnesday (because I had to name it something), and I trashed the wrong one because I was in a hurry. Then I No app shows more, FAIK Windy is by far the best site and app for weather geeks. Right now we have a thunderstorm Continue reading
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Four-legged pedestrians
Here in Bloomington, Indiana, we have a lot of these large-eyed, big-eared roaming free-range cattle that seem not to care much about the two-legged kind and are mindful of traffic. For example, I was headed east on Howe the other day, approaching Euclid, and spotted these two girls on the sidewalk: After walking to the Continue reading
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Keeping Up
Apple’s Mail.app sucks. I could give reasons, but it would only make me more tired than I already am from dealing with my storage issues. I just downloaded and set up Thunderbird for my Searls.com address to see if that works better. I’ve stayed away from Thunderbird since 2013, when it did real damage somehow. Continue reading
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Everwhat
Um… Shanaka Anslem Perera: The Megawatt Mirage: NVIDIA’s $4.5 Trillion Valuation Depends on a Grid That Cannot Deliver. Chips Ready. Software Ready. Power Infrastructure? Eight-Year Queue. Credit Markets? Flashing Red. The tweet version: “Microsoft’s CEO admitted GPUs are sitting in warehouses unplugged. Not demand. Not defects. Power. Transformer lead times: 4 years Grid interconnection queues: Continue reading
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Keeping the Light On
2 B Bob Weir is gone. He and Jerry Garcia were (at least to me) the sonic and vocal backbone of the Grateful Dead. He was less than two months younger than me. Jerry was older, but dead at 53. Phil Lesh made it to 84, dying in October 2024. Bill Kreutzmann is still with us Continue reading
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We’ll see
Daniel Barkhuff has a serious one-liner bio (“Husband, Dad, Emergency Medicine physician, Veteran”) and speaks with earned authority from all of them, especially the last two. His latest, On Living Memory, reminds me of two dads. One is my father, who re-enlisted in 1944 at age 35, because he wanted to fight in The War. Among other Continue reading
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Leavings
I live a full and active life. In fact, I’m probably more engaged than I’ve ever been, with faith that at least some of my ideas (here are three big ones) will play out in constructive ways over the coming years and decades. But, at 78 (still a year younger than the current US president), Continue reading
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Tuesday, 1 July, 2025
I was overheard to have said… Doc Searls on Reloading the Intention Economy: Your Data, Your AI, Your Terms, by Nico Fara, of The Immergence podcast. Just some perspective. I just removed this from a post I’ve been writing: Walt Whitman put the profundity of human life in a kind of perspective when he said, “and I Continue reading
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Wednesday, 18 June 2025
A summer lamentation Yesterday was the 69th birthday of Sparky, the puppy I got for my 8th birthday in 1956. He died at age one, and is buried under the parking lot at the Boulevard Square strip mall that paves the paradise of scrub oak and pitch pines that was our summer playground at the Continue reading
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On Regrets and Their Absence
Somebody just gave the 31st upvote to my answer to the Quora question “What do you regret as you get older?” So I thought it might be worth repeating. Here’s a short list: Not learning at least one other language. Not learning a musical instrument (or to sing) well enough to play in a group. Continue reading
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An arsonoma
While walking past this scene on my way to the subway in New York last week, I saw that a woman was emptying out what hadn’t burned from this former car. Being a curious extrovert, I paused to ask her about it. The conversation, best I recall: “This your car?” “Yeah.” “I’m sorry. What happened?” Continue reading
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Going west
Long ago a person dear to me disappeared for what would become eight years. When this happened I was given comfort and perspective by a professor of history whose study concentrated on the American South after the Civil War. “You know what the most common record of young men was, after the Civil War?” he Continue reading
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About face
We know more than we can tell. That one-liner from Michael Polanyi has been waiting half a century for a proper controversy, which it now has with facial recognition. Here’s how he explains it in The Tacit Dimension: This fact seems obvious enough; but it is not easy to say exactly what it means. Take an example. We know Continue reading
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On renting cars
I came up with that law in the last millennium and it applied until Chevy discontinued the Cavalier in 2005. Now it should say, “You’re going to get whatever they’ve got.” The difference is that every car rental agency in days of yore tended to get their cars from a single car maker, and now Continue reading
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On presuming competence
A few weeks ago, while our car honked its way through dense traffic in Delhi, I imagined an Onion headline: American Visitor Seeks To Explain What He’ll Never Understand About India. By the norms of traffic laws in countries where people tend to obey them, vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the dense parts of Indian Continue reading
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An evacuated view on the #ThomasFire
Here’s the latest satellite fire detection data, restricted to just the last twelve hours of the Thomas Fire, mapped on Google Earth Pro:That’s labeled 1830 Mountain Standard Time (MST), or 5:30pm Pacific, about half an hour ago as I write this. And here are the evacuation areas: Our home is in the orange Voluntary Evacuation Continue reading
Broadcasting, data, Family, Geography, Life, Photography, problems, ThomasFire, Travel, tv, weather, wildfire -
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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What are the lessons people most often learn too late in life?
That’s the question asked by Quora here. I’ve camped on our planet for awhile now, so I wrote a few answers. Here they are: I doubt people learn the following lessons “most often” or “too late,” but I still hope they help. The purpose of life is death. Death produces materials that add beyond measure to feed and Continue reading
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Open Word—The Podcasting Story
Nobody is going to own podcasting. By that I mean nobody is going to trap it in a silo. Apple tried, first with its podcasting feature in iTunes, and again with its Podcasts app. Others have tried as well. None of them have succeeded, or will ever succeed, for the same reason nobody has ever Continue reading
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Exploring the business behind digital media’s invisibility cloaks
Imagine you’re on a busy city street where everybody who disagrees with you disappears. We have that city now. It’s called media—especially the social kind. You can see how this works on Wall Street Journal‘s Blue Feed, Red Feed page. Here’s a screen shot of the feed for “Hillary Clinton” (one among eight polarized Continue reading