history
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Revisiting the last great comet
With Comet Ison on the horizon (but out of sight until it finishes looping around the Sun), I thought it might be fun to re-run what I wrote here in 1997 (in my blog-before-there-were-blogs), about the last great comet to grace Earth’s skies. — Doc Ordinary Miracles: Start Your Day With Comet Hale-Bopp Graphic by Dr. Dale… 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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Re-birthing Radio
Radio’s 1.x era is coming to an end. Signs and portents abound. The rise and decline of AM radio just ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, hometown paper for KDKA, the granddaddy of AM radio in the U.S. In AM/FM Radio Is Already Over, And No One Will Miss It, Adam Singer writes, Radio advertisements are… 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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The American Way of Privacy
My sister Jan — student of history, Navy vet and a Wise One — sent me an email a couple days ago that I thought would make a good guest post. She said yes to that suggestion and here it is… Is the new born-in-connectivity generation going to re-define privacy? They may try —… Continue reading
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The postal model of privacy
On February 25, 2008, the FCC held a hearing on network management practices in the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School, hosted by the Berkman Center. In that hearing David P. Reed, one of the Internet’s founding scientists, used a plain envelope to explain how the Internet worked, and why it is wrong for anybody other than intended recipients to look inside… Continue reading
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Thoughts on Privacy
In Here Is New York, E.B. White opens with this sentence: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” Sixty-four years have passed since White wrote that, and it still makes perfect sense to me, hunched behind a desk in the back room… Continue reading
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The Gospel According to ZZ Top
In mass this morning only two words the priest said during the homily stuck in my mind: it’s alright. Because they called ZZ Top to mind. Specifically, the song Legs. It begins, She’s got legs. She knows how to use them. Then the boys sing a bunch of other stuff over this repetitive throbbing riff that sounds like it’s… Continue reading
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A good word for a good cause
@BlakeHunskicer has a kickstarter project, Fleeing the War at Home: An interactive documentary introducing the crisis in Syria through the personal histories and dreams of Syrian refugees, with a few days and a few thousand dollars left to go. Blake is one of the graduate students I got to know this last year as a visiting… Continue reading
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Some perspectives in time and space
First, time. Earth became habitable for primitive life forms some 3.X billion years ago. It will cease to be habitable in another 1 billion years or less, given the rate at which the Sun continues to get hotter, which it has been doing for the duration. Species last, on average, a couple million years. Depending… Continue reading
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On cities and networks
I’m in Boston right now, and bummed that I can’t attend Start-up City: An Entrepreneurial Economy for Middle Class New York, which is happening today at New York Law School today. I learned about it via Dana Spiegel of NYC Wireless, who will be on a panel titled “Breakout Session III: Infrastructure for the 21st… Continue reading
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Why durable links matter
In How podcasting got its name, Dave nicely outlines the derivation of the terms podcast and podcasting. That last link goes to the Wikipedia page, because pretty much any other link I put in there has a greater risk of breaking. And that’s what’s at issue here. Dave was able to date usage in part because others,… Continue reading
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How the Web is being body-snatched
Yesterday, when Anil Dash (@AnilDash) spoke about The Web We Lost at Harvard, I took notes in my little outliner, in a browser. They follow. The top outline level is slide titles, or main points. The next level down are points made under the top level. Some of the outline is what Anil said, and some of… Continue reading
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Old skool influential software
I came late to personal computing, which was born with the MITS Altair in 1975. The first PC I ever met — and wanted desperately, in an instant — was an Apple II, in 1977. It sold in one of the first personal computer shops, in Durham, NC. Price: $2500. At the time I was… Continue reading
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An open letter on patents, 12 years later
I’m on a list where the subject of patents is being discussed. While thinking about how I might contribute to the conversation, I remembered that I once cared a lot about the subject and wrote some stuff about it. So I did some spelunking through the archives and found the following, now more than twelve… Continue reading
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The only issue that matters
Geologists have an informal name for the history of human influence on the Earth. They call it the Anthropocene. It makes sense. We have been raiding the earth for its contents, and polluting its atmosphere, land and oceans for as long as we’ve been here, and it shows. By any objective perspective other than our… Continue reading
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Table for two
The Web as we know it today was two years old in June 1997, when the page below went up. It lasted, according to Archive.org, until October 2010. When I ran across it back then, it blew my mind — especially the passage I have boldfaced in the long paragraph near the end. The Internet… Continue reading