Birds-eye speedwell and henbit deadnettle. They’re not ostentatious but they’re everywhere around here. And they have ludicrous names.
The Trugreen truck with its motto “Live Life Outside” never seems to be parked in front of a house where people actually do live life outside. In fact it’s more or less the opposite.
The original Game of Life, in 1860, included squares such as Ruin, Disgrace, and Suicide. I like it! Can we bring that back?
Is there a temperature at which “cold and raw” becomes “kinda muggy” or is it more like the border of a Mandelbrot set?
Follow-up: is it really a gust is it’s only 4 mph?
Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead
Instead of responding to the Aeon essay that’s going around (or to its responses) I pulled some notes out of storage and wrote this instead: Technology, Tao, and Taboo.
and that's all I have to say about AI
A few years ago I ran across this painting, _The Young Sabot Maker_ by Henry Owassa Turner, in an exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I spent a good half an hour studying it, weaving in and out of other people’s way, not just because I love Turner’s work (I do) but trying to suss out the tools and techniques of historical wooden shoe-making. Why? Well, because I am a nerd.
You can't have everything, part 4,365
Cory Doctorow on self-sorting online communities: If this subject was political rather than practical, we’d call this process “radicalization,” and we’d call the outcome – you sorting yourself into a narrow niche interest, to the exclusion of others – “polarization.” But if we confine our examples to things like literature, TV shows, flowers, or glassware, this phenomenon is viewed as benign. No one accuses an algorithm of brainwashing you into being obsessed with hashibame tongue-and-groove corners.
Every day, more
Soprano notes, golden petals.
Snowmelt spring escapes
As blackbirds from a shaken tree.
Last night I had two separate dreams involving pie. The pie was incidental to both—just a prop, which could have been anything; the dreams otherwise had nothing in common, literally or metaphorically. Do I need to bake a pie? Should I write a cookbook titled MacGuffin of My Dreams?