Words

Oct. 2, 2023

A Bad Opera - a Climate Change Allegory

Recently, I had an amusingly absurd dream - a common enough occurrence for me. I remembered just a snippet, and asked ChatGPT to re-write it in a way that would be engaging and somewhat coherent. My input: Experiment: I'm going to do my best to…

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April 5, 2022

Is "The Mayors" the single best story in Foundation?

(repost from 11/30/21 on reddit - inspired me to make a podcast. Bridle and Saddle was the original story that became The Mayors) "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." - Salvor Hardin Let's recap, shall we? The story begins with Hardin…

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March 25, 2022

Covid is still with us

  I just found out the hard way.  Every winter for the past twenty years or so I do a backcountry ski trip with a friend I've known since our college days at Penn State. We originally rented overnight huts but switched to snow camp…

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March 12, 2022

Why I'm crazy about the Long Now Foundation

For a long time I was a huge fan of TED talks, and would eagerly gobble up the latest talks as they came out, then dove into the regional TEDx talks as I used up the main series. I saw a lot of great talks in this time and really appreciated what TE…

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March 4, 2022

Quick one on this awful war

I'm going to try to keep this blog mostly related to the podcast, sci fi, etc., but I feel like I have to vent a little. Most listeners are unaware that my wife is from St Petersburg, Russia, and still has family there. I also have a lot of Russian …

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March 3, 2022

Kim Stanley Robinson and the Long Now

I've long been a fan of the mission of the Long Now Foundation, headed by the amazing Stewart Brand, long famous for his Whole Earth Catalog back in the seventies and many other imaginative and forward-looking projects. To say Long Now is forward-lo…

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