Category Archives: Science

Clearing things up

Back in 2009 I shot the picture above from a plane flight on approach to SFO. On Flickr (at that link) the photo has had 16,524 views and has been faved 420 times as of now. Here’s the caption: These … Continue reading

Posted in Friends, infrastructure, Photography, Science | Tagged , , , , , , | 10 Comments

On fire

The white mess in the image above is the Bobcat Fire, spreading now in the San Gabriel Mountains, against which Los Angeles’ suburban sprawl (that’s it, on the right) reaches its limits of advance to the north. It makes no … Continue reading

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A rare sky treat

Across almost 73 laps around the Sun, I’ve seen six notable comets. The fifth was Hale-Bopp, which I blogged about here, along with details on the previous four, in 1997. The sixth is NEOWISE, and that’s it, above, shot with … Continue reading

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The universe is a start-up

“Pillars of Creation” is a live view of stars forming in a neighboring region of the Milky Way. (Inside the Eagle Nebula, 5,400 to 6,100 light years away.) The Solar System, formed 4.6 billion years ago. Earth became a planet .46 … 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 … Continue reading

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

Is ad blocking past 2 billion worldwide?

The answer is, we don’t know. Also, we may never know, because— It’s too hard to measure (especially if you’re talking about the entire Net). Too so much of the usage is in mobile devices of too many different kinds. … Continue reading

Posted in adtech, advertising, Business, Digital Life, Internet, Research, Science, Technology, VRM | Leave a comment

Venus, Moon, Jupiter and Mercury in the dawn’s early light

Walked out on the front deck this morning and grabbed a photo set of the Moon between conjunctions with Venus (that was yesterday), Jupiter (tonight and tomorrow) and then Mercury (Saturday), before passing next to the Sun as a new … Continue reading

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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

On cryptocurrencies, blockchain and all that

Take a look at this chart: CryptoCurrency Market Capitalizations As Neo said, Whoa. To help me get my head fully around all that’s going on behind that surge, or mania, or whatever it is, I’ve composed a lexicon-in-process that I’m … Continue reading

Posted in Blockchain, Business, Cryptocurrencies, Distributed Ledgers, education, history, infrastructure, Internet, Links, money, News, Research, Science, Technology | 5 Comments

Let’s give full credit to human ingenuity

In The American Dream, Quantified at Last, David Leonhardt in The New York Times makes a despairing case for a perfect Onion headline: American Dream Ends When Nation Wakes Up. Like so much else the Times correctly tries to do, … Continue reading

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