Life
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We’re all going to need clothes
In the physical world we know what privacy is and how it works. We know because we have worked out privacy technologies and norms over thousands of years. Without them we wouldn’t have civilization. Doors and windows are privacy technologies. So are clothes. So are manners respecting the intentions behind our own and others’ use of those things. Those manners… Continue reading
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Listening to Serial? Remember the West Memphis Three.
On Saturday I invited Serial listeners to recall the Edgar Smith case. Smith got away, literally, with murder. He did it by convincing the media and the public (and to a lesser degree the courts) that he was innocent man, falsely convicted of brutally killing a teenage girl. After he was released he attempted another… Continue reading
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Winter arrives
It’s already snowing across eastern Pennsylvania and much of New Jersey and upstate New York: Still raining steadily here in New York, but hey: snow might come. Either way, Winter’s here. 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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Lives of the dead
A couple weekends ago I visited the graves of relatives and ancestors on my father’s side at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx. All of them died before I was born, but my Grandma Searls and her sisters often visited there, and I thought, Hey, now that I’m in New York a lot, I should visit these… Continue reading
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A visit to the old ‘hood
A couple weeks ago I took a walk around the historic neighborhood in Fort Lee where my extended family had a home — 2063 Hoyt Avenue — from the turn of the last century into the 1950s. It’s where my parents lived when I was born, and where my aunt and grandmother sat for my sister and… Continue reading
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Remembering Dr. Jack Ramsay
Back in the early ’90s I was waiting for an elevator one night at a high rise hotel when I was joined by a group of Miami heat basketball players and Jack Ramsay, who was then most famously the former coach of the Portland Trailblazers, a team he led to an NBA championship in 1977. But… Continue reading
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Short Attention Spasm Theater
This post is a hat tip toward Rusty Foster’s Today In Tabs, which I learned about from Clay Shirky during a digressive conversation about the subscription economy (the paid one, not the one Rusty and other free spirits operate in), and how lately I’m tending not to renew mine after they run out, thanks to my wife’s rational… Continue reading
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You can’t sled on slush
I grew up on Woodland Avenue in Maywood, New Jersey, a few miles west of where I am now in New York City. The street was unremarkable, except when it snowed. Then the town would often block it off, so kids could sled on it. It wasn’t a big hill — just an ideal one… Continue reading
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Into the dark
The power is out and won’t be back for awhile. That’s what the guys in the hard hats tell me, down where they’re working, at the intersection where our dead-end street is born. Many trucks are gathered there, with bright night-work lights illuminating whatever went wrong with the day’s power pole replacement job. The notices… Continue reading
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Close to home
Fort Lee has been in the news lately. Seems traffic access to the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee was sphinctered for political purposes, at the spot marked “B” on this map here: (This was later the place where “bridgegate” took place.) The spot marked “A” is the site of my first home: 2063 Hoyt… Continue reading
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Can we at least try not to kill 440,000 patients per year?
Obamacare matters. But the debate about it also misdirects attention away from massive collateral damage to patients. How massive? Dig To Make Hospitals Less Deadly, a Dose of Data, by Tina Rosenberg in The New York Times. She writes, Until very recently, health care experts believed that preventable hospital error caused some 98,000 deaths a year in the United… Continue reading
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A toast to strong women
Grandma Searls‘ footstone says “1882 – ” and is hardly and overstatement. She died pushing 108 in 1990, and was lucid, loving and strong in all the ways that matter. She was one of four sisters in her family. That’s them, with their dad, on the left. Grandma is the one on the bottom right.… Continue reading
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Hart Island: a movie we need, about zombies as heroes
As Halloween approaches (and death itself, for all of us, eventually), I find myself thinking, Do zombies always have to be bad? And, What if zombies were good? And, Hey, maybe good zombies are what we call ‘angels’. Then I find myself wondering where one would recruit armies of zombie angels (let’s call them “zangels”), besides your basic… Continue reading
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Digging Hart Island, New York’s Million-Corpse Potter’s Field
A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization. — Samuel Johnson Visitors to New York’s Orchard Beach (at the top of the photo above) probably don’t know that the low wooded island offshore will, at the current rate, contain a million buried human bodies, if it doesn’t already. The site is Hart… Continue reading
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Getting kicks at 66
A year ago I entered the final demographic. So far, so good. @Deanland texted earlier, asking if I had a new affinity with WFAN, the New Yawk sports station that radiates at 660 on what used to be the AM “dial.” Back when range mattered, WFAN was still called WNBC, and its status as a… Continue reading
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Springing in Paris
That’s the Parc de la Villette, also variously known as Parc La Villette, Parc Villette, or just Villette, here in Paris. I shot it two days ago, when we got here and the weather was clear. It got cloudy and wet after that. But it looks like things will clear up for::::: From the About… Continue reading
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People will do more with Big Data than big companies can
The history of computing over the last 30 years is one of lurches forward every time individuals got the power to do what only big enterprises could do previously — and to do a much better job of it. It happened when computing got personal in the ’80s. It happened when networking got personal in… Continue reading
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How advertising can regulate itself
When you see an ad for Budweiser on TV, you know who paid for it and why it’s there. You also know it isn’t personal, because it’s brand advertising. But when you see an ad on a website, do you know what it’s doing there? Do you know if its there just for you, or… Continue reading