Nature
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Sunlint
A taller way to tell time Liblice II, the tallest structures in the Czech Republic, are about to come down. They carried the 1.5 million-watt signal (30x the maximum power of an AM station in the US) of Czech Radio Two until 2021 on 639 mHz. The cool thing is this (from that last link,… Continue reading
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Burrsday
A flipping iceberg. I subscribed to the Los Angeles Times early last year when I was writing about the challenges for journalism in covering the wildfires there. That was in my News Commons series, which I think has some brilliant and useful stuff. But it didn't go anywhere, so I wasn't sure about renewing. But… Continue reading
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Unotherday
Another Para Digm Spotted one of the above, flying up and down East Beach in Santa Barbara. If I were half my age, I’d be up there too. Unhuman Matt Hinkle: The Week AI Agents Got Hands. It begins, The chat window era just ended. This week, AI agents got hands — Cloudflare shipped a… Continue reading
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Whetherday
Digressions & shit, or vice versa Willy Staley in the NYTimes: To O’Mara, the diet is not just a temporary means of losing weight but a way to eat for good. He has been doing it for 10 years, and credits it with turning his life around. At one point in our conversation he pulled… Continue reading
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Ladderday
Ed Zitron's latest two are good reads: Exclusive: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, With Spending Hitting $34 Billion Premium: The Silicon Valley Bubble (Part 2) I've worked in the Valley, both on-site and in the world, since 1977. (On site was '85 to '01.) It ain't the same. On the contrary?::: Notebook LM does… Continue reading
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Staturday
Kind of a Christo thing Mission TARONI put a silk-wrapped mannequin in space. From The Dorothy Project. It has implications. Today it’s frost The Monroe County Alert System just called me. I didn’t answer, because they call too much. Glad to hear from them when there’s a tornado risk, or when one is coming. Deep… Continue reading
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Turtles all the way up
I’m fascinated by Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia mydas), which bask on the sands of Poʻipū Beach, here on the south shore of Kauaʻi. Known locally as honu, they typically range from 200 to 400 pounds, but some have weighed in north of 800 pounds. They can also live more than 90 years, are the largest hard-shelled sea… Continue reading
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HI Day
They’re watching us too Hundreds gather to watch turtles on Poipu Beach in Kauai. Overheard. In Hawaii: “I was only following odors.” “I didn’t catch his name. I think he said “Mahalo.” Your next Aurora From Spaceweather.com (slightly edited to explain stuff): A NASA model predicts a CME (Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun) will arrive… 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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Webless Day
Perspective 10 Largest Things in Nature That Will Make You Feel Incredibly Small. The only one I didn’t know about was Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. It covers 4,086 square miles. News Thunderstorm hits Santa Barbara. (Very rare.) Delays at Newark after smoke in the cockpit forces a JetBlue plane to return. Here’s the… Continue reading
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Saturdaze
Exceedingly common, turns out I was excited to see and shoot a butterfly (above) that a search (remember that?) tells me is a Common Buckeye. The News in Hues Poynter says Nexstar hopes to get its bid to buy Tegna (politically speaking) red-lit. It’s one more way the Redstream eats the Mainstream. Heavy Earth is two… Continue reading
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Had a couple visitors today
She’s a big mother. Here she is with her almost-grown child, in the corner of our side yard: I watched them through our back door (the first shot) and the balcony off my office (second shot), trying to see what the hell they were eating. They didn’t seem to be munching any leaves. Mostly, they… Continue reading
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Coming to Understandings, and Perhaps Actions
Looking for one reporter—just one—from Wired or any other major news organization, to dig into this. Michaela Neville's A Starter Guide to Protecting Your Data From Hackers and Corporations in Wired gives good advice, but neglects to visit the magazine's own participation in the vast personal data harvesting adtech fecosystem. Here's a PageXray of the river delta out… 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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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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New York lights
I had a bunch of errands to run today, but also a lot of calls. And, when I finally got up from my desk around 4pm with plans to head out in the car, I found five inches of snow already on the apartment deck. Another five would come after that. So driving was clearly… Continue reading
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We can do better than selling our data
If personal data is actually a commodity, can you buy some from another person, as if that person were a fruit stand? Would you want to? Not yet. Or maybe not really. Either way, that’s the idea behind the urge by some lately to claim personal data as personal property, and then to make money (in… Continue reading
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The real problem is Decoy News (and decoy content of all kinds)—and the platforms can’t fix it
The term “fake news” was a casual phrase until it became clear to news media that a flood of it had been deployed during last year’s presidential election in the U.S. Starting in November 2016, fake news was the subject of strong and well-researched coverage by NPR (here and here), Buzzfeed, CBS (here and here),… Continue reading