Category Archives: Life

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Life | 2 Comments

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 … Continue reading

Posted in history, Life, Personal | 10 Comments

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Identity, language, Law, Life, privacy, problems, Research, Science, security | Leave a comment

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 … Continue reading

Posted in adtech, advertising, Blogging, Business, Cluetrain, Geography, history, infrastructure, Law, Life, marketing, publishing, Technology, VRM | Leave a comment

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Journalism, Life, Links | 6 Comments

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Broadcasting, data, Family, Geography, Life, Photography, problems, ThomasFire, Travel, tv, weather, wildfire | Leave a comment

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. … Continue reading

Posted in Geology, Law, Life, Personal, Politics, problems, Technology, war | Tagged | 3 Comments

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Life | 3 Comments

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Blogging, Business, Events, infrastructure, Law, Life, Outlining, podcasting, publishing, Technology | 4 Comments

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 … Continue reading

Posted in adtech, advertising, Broadcasting, Business, Culture, data, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, Life, Links, marketing, News, Politics, privacy, problems, publishing, Research, Technology | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments