Travel
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Geology by plane
I’ve been looking gratefully and often, over the past few years, at Louis J. Maher, Jr.’s Geology by Lightplane. The shots themselves date from 1956-1966, and he put the page up in 2001; but their subjects are the sort that don’t change much over a span of time so short as the last thirty-five years.… Continue reading
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Solved Science Theater 2010
This morning, while freezing my way down 8th Avenue to Piccolo on 40th to pick up a couple of cappuccinos, I paused outside the New York Times building to admire its stark modern lobby as KNX radio delivered the latest storm news from Los Angeles through my phone’s earbuds. In the midst of reports of… Continue reading
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Name that car
The Kid has been scanning archival family photos and I’ve been uploading them to Flickr (where I have now passed 39,000 shots in that one site alone). Many of these photos are well over a hundred years old. Most are about eighty years old, give or take a decade or two. They’re from the collection… Continue reading
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The World Live Library
My great uncle Jack Dwyer worked in the shipping and steamship business through the first half of the last century. He also took a lot of pictures, including my favorite family photo of all time. (I’m the kid with the beer.) I was going through a bunch of these on Flickr yesterday, when I noticed… Continue reading
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A Cluetrain talk turns 10
Ten years ago this month, I gave the opening keynote for the International Retail Conference of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Instutut, in Lucerne, Switzerland. The venue was the amazing Culture and Congress Centre, which had opened just two years earlier. Designed by the architect Jean Nouvel and esteemed for its acoustics, it was the most flattering… Continue reading
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Bomb sights
Last week I flew back and forth from Boston to Reno by way of Phoenix. Both PHX-RNO legs took me past parts of Nevada I hadn’t had a good look at before. One item stood out: a dry lake that looked, literally, like a town had been built on it and blown up. In fact,… Continue reading
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Padding a category
This graphic, of Apple’s revenues per quarter, broken down by products, tells several stories at once. One is that the iPhone remains huge. (I was amazed by how many I saw in the UK and France.) Another is that the iPod may be getting a bit stale. But the big one is the sudden size… Continue reading
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The France Diet
From June 13 to July 21, I lived in France. This was the longest I had been out of the country, ever. And, while I loved just about everything about being there, what I’m liking best at the moment is what I failed to take back with me: about ten pounds of fat. I still… Continue reading
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Hey Jules, bring me another fifty skulls
While walking around Paris for the last month, I’ve became fascinated by the highly fossiliferous limestone that comprises so many of its iconic structures. At one point I thought, Hmm… The City of Light is built with materials of death. I had no idea how much farther that thought would take me. Without abundant death… Continue reading
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Paris in the rain
I don’t think I’ve ever loved Paris in the rain more than I do right now. It’s 6:40am, and I’ve been up since 5am, when I got tired of failing to sleep on sweat-soaked sheets. Last night was one more to endure in the heat wave that has been with us for nearly the whole… Continue reading
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Flying wide
I’m at CDG in Paris, about to depart for LHR in London, and the AirFrance plane I’ll be flying in is one of the new Airbus A380s. The plane was over-sold, so there are no windows — a low-percentage shot anyway with a plane that flies 550 or so people at a time. Got a… Continue reading
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Top speed, 3km/h
That headline is the posted speed limit where we are at the moment: relaxing on a canal in rural France. I bought two hours of slow Internet over wi-fi at a marina, and that will be about it for connectivity until next time, if there is one, on this trip, which we are enjoying totally. Continue reading
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Out and Over
Hitting the road, or actually the canal. Or a canal, somewhere east of Paris, in France. For a week. The plan was to have some kind of data connectivity either through our new Android Nexus One or our new iPad 3G. Alas, five days of trying have failed to get the Android to work as… Continue reading
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Love the knuckles but hold the bear
Typo du jour: I think what I ordered was the souris d’agneau à l’estragon (lamb testicles with estrogen). Continue reading
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Missing Polly Platt
When I got my first French consulting client in 1994, I found an indispensable guide in the book French or Foe, by Polly Platt. So I made sure we had hauled it east from my office bookshelf in Santa Barbara, and took it with us to Paris, where I began reading it again today, the… Continue reading
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Prepping for Paris
Tomorrow we fly to Paris, where I’ll be based for the next five weeks. To help myself prep, here are a few of my notes from conversations with friends and my own inadequate research… Offbeat Guildes. Already have ours. We can update it during the trip too. La Cantine. Co-working Via @slatteryz Paris – interactive… Continue reading
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Dig your Ordovican great-Xth granddaddy/mommy
Or let the paleontologists dig it for you. That’s what a team led by Yale researchers did last year in southeastern Morocco’s Lower and Upper Fezouata Formations. The result is covered by LiveScience in Oldest Soft-Bodied Marine Fossils Discovered . Specifically, “The animals represented by these newly discovered fossils, including sponges, annelid worms, mollusks, and… Continue reading
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Dissing Vulcan
Phoebe Kilgour, a Dickinson College junior, said the trip taught her about how a country prepares for a natural phenomenon. “I learned that something that seemed insignificant at the time, like a volcano erupting, can have a huge impact on local travel,” she said, “especially when you’re stuck on an island.” That’s the last paragraph… Continue reading
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Oil + Water
Four years and one day ago, we took a trip aboard a sailboat captained by our friend John Pfarr (who a few days later would later sail the same vessel to Hawaii, the South Seas and back — the dude is a serious sailor). Our modest destination was the string of oil platforms that rise… Continue reading