When I watched the recent film Don’t Look Up — as a great deal of other Netflix subscribers appeared to– they mentioned the very real Planetary Defense Coordination Office which made me think instantly of Spaceguard, which isn’t an official overall terms, but dangit, I’m not alone in thinking of it. In fact, overall efforts appear to be inspired by that vision of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, visions that have born fruit over…
All of a sudden, it’s Groundhog Day… again. And in case you’re wondering why this is the case, Danny Lewis in the Smithsonian Magazine goes deep into the historical record. And in case you don’t want the Smithsonian, but still want something plausible, perhaps with a theater reference, well here ya go. And if you were reading Danny Lewis’ article above and were thinking “hmm, what about a horror film where the groundhogs in Groundhog…
So, for the past few Mondays (see 1/3, 1/10, and 1/24), I’ve done posts about New Year’s Resolutions and similar life goals on both the micro and macro goal. But what if you want something a bit more wonky? What if you want to track your progress in such a way that friends and family may recoil in horror as if you asked them to watch a paint-drying marathon on HGTV? Meredith Dietz over at…
As I’ve mentioned various times, my dad made sure we saw many of the classic and not so classic films from bygone ages. I mean, I’ve seen pre-Russian Revolution films using stop-action animation of insects for crying out loud! Now, besides such curiosities and rattling good stories, these films provided de facto period pieces: they were recording the here and now of an era long past –in human terms– with details quite unknown to me.…
So, a couple weeks ago, I posted a link to some deep thoughts: guideposts for how to live your life. It was all part of a series of posts I’ve been doing this January exploring the whole notion of New Year’s resolutions writ large. So why not continue? The article that piqued my interest in this case was an article by Christian Jarrett for the BBC. A TL;DR summary of the article might be “everyone…
Last Monday, I posted about lots of little things to add some joy or satisfaction to your day-to-day life. So from the micro to the macro, here’s a few overarching goals you might want to take on for this new year… or for the rest of your life in general. Bear in mind, this list from Maria Popova for The Marginalian gets pretty heavy, but if you’re in the headspace where you’re thinking about how…
Running contrary to the New Year’s notion of doing better for several years running is the McDonald’s Ice Cream machine, a notoriously finicky piece of equipment that has its own online dashboard of failure. And if the efficiency experts in your life don’t gnash their teeth at that, they likely will when they read Andy Greenberg’s article in Wired. It’s really infuriating to see miserable experiences be standardized, but to see the lengths to which…
Non-fungible tokens or NFTs have been a bit a media rage this past year, as a trend, a new investment opportunity, and possibly a silver bullet that contains your daily recommended dose of antioxidants. I keep thinking, they can’t be as stupid as they sound, can they? You can find out the answer to this and many other questions about NFTs in this excellent article by Vicky Osterweil which, spoiler alert, is called “Money for…
One of my favorite bits of acting training has been learning accents, not in the least because it dovetails nicely with some of the linguistic anthropology I studied back in the day. Really, it’s those times where deciding to study anthropology and theater really pay off. Despite such ardor, I couldn’t tell you when us treasonous colonials gave up our British accents, but Matt Soniak and the ever-intriguing site Mental Floss are here to fill…
It could be the parts of the web where I roam, but I’ve been reading a lot more about privacy, whether it’s Apple’s recent efforts to make their iOS more inherently private (see pieces in Bloomberg and The Verge) or the growing rumblings of government regulation (see pieces in CNBC and in Recode/Vox). By virtue of simply being online, all of us have been inducted into one or more Big Data Mining ecosystems whereby not…