I found myself marveling yesterday over some correspondence in which I am involved. An artist in Rome, having met a curmudgeon in Kansas via StumbleUpon, has entered into a conversation about religion and physics. All of this occurred in a very short time and has not required any stamps. I understand that there have been pen pals for a long … Continue reading
Generally speaking, changes in the English languages are good. I especially like the additions, many of which come from slang, and there are literally hundreds of these each year added to a dictionary near you. Lately we have been seeing a lot of inclusions from black street culture, enough that I knew a person a few years back who was … Continue reading
One hates to see NASA have the difficulties that they are currently experiencing. They have enough trouble with aging equipment and an embarrassing lack of budgetary support. Even the most fervent anti-NASA flat-earther would have to admit that we get a lot more out of the space program than we get out the wars that we are currently spending billions … Continue reading
It is once again the Halloween season, and scary images are beginning to appear everywhere. Ghouls and ghosts and vampires abound in print, on the tube, and in movies. I have no idea why anyone would think that Americans need a good scare. We already have the most frightening entities in the long and scary history of our country. We … Continue reading
Just like the hardware has to improve in order to bring us the types of service we expect of the Internet in the New Media age, the software upon which it runs will need to evolve. Linux has been one of the better evolutionary steps so far, in the critical area of Web servers, just as open-source and freely distributed … Continue reading
Writing on consecutive days about getting information from the new media and the Ron Paul campaign, a curmudgeon cannot help but reflect on how those things go together. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the (I think) questionable polling techniques of the Paul campaign, you have to admit that their grip on the Web as an instrument of … Continue reading
While Stumbling new pages during the last couple of days, I have run across several sites bemoaning the recent Google page-rank downgrading of a number of previously highly-rated sites . I even read one in which a blogger had decided to give up on Google entirely. There is much wringing of hands, rending of clothing, and self-loathing, with confusion and … Continue reading
Archeology is a tantalizing science, with anthropology close behind. It seems that every new find of human remains pushes the origins of relatively civilized human being farther back in time. Within the last few days, the remains of a seafood dinner and small stone tools in a cave on the coast of South Africa give evidence of a fairly complex … Continue reading
I am waiting, and watching, with almost unbounded curiosity, to see if the rich white people of Southern California are treated as badly as the poor black people of New Orleans in their time of crisis. We can even have the battle of the football stadiums, since the field where the San Diego Chargers play football has been opened up … Continue reading
I was fortunate enough to spend an afternoon with a very diverse group of people today. It did my heart good. After having spent twenty-five years in and around San Francisco, my return to Kansas meant a lot of things, and one of them was diversity withdrawal. To make matters worse, I started my Kansas return in Johnson County, the … Continue reading