Category Archives: Nature

Heavy Weather

Most of California has just two seasons: rain and fire. Rain is another name for Winter, and it peaks in January. In most years, January in California isn’t any more wet than, say, New York, Miami or Chicago. But every few years … Continue reading

Posted in data, Nature, Santa Barbara, weather | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Geology, history, Nature, personal data, problems, Technology | Leave a comment

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 … Continue reading

Posted in infrastructure, Nature, new york, News, Travel | Tagged | Leave a comment

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 … Continue reading

Posted in adtech, advertising, Business, Customertech, history, Ideas, Internet, marketing, Nature, personal data, problems, publishing, Technology, VRM | 3 Comments

Geology answers for Montecito and Santa Barbara

Just before it started, the geology meeting at the Santa Barbara Central Library on Thursday looked like this from the front of the room (where I also tweeted the same pano): Our speakers were geology professor Ed Keller of UCSB and … Continue reading

Posted in Future, Geography, Geology, history, infrastructure, Nature, Photography, Places, Research, Santa Barbara, Science, ThomasFire, weather, wildfire | 17 Comments

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 … Continue reading

Posted in advertising, fire, Internet, Journalism, marketing, Nature, problems | Tagged , , | 3 Comments