The experts are ruining the world. The technocrats we’ve counted on to run the machines, institutions and systems of our advanced civilization have not only failed to protect us from disasters, they now admit that they don’t have a clue as to why they failed. In just the past few weeks, we’ve seen top experts confess that they don’t know what they are doing. This lede taken from an article in MarketWatch has half the story right, but badly misses the most salient point. The news story driving the article is a set of exculpatory statements made recently by a… Read More
Continue ReadingJeremiah Without God in the Wings
Again I turn to James Carroll for the source of a blog post. Carroll recalls the prophet Jeremiah in his[ weekly op-ed](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/05/10/the_jeremiads_of_spring/) piece in the Boston Globe this week. Jeremiah railed at the Jews for breaking their covenant with God, warning them that great misfortunes would be the consequence. The destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians follows in the story. Carroll begins by referring to a recent book by Tony Judt that rails against the way we live today, not so much as disobeying God, but not paying attention to our own moral ends. In, [*Ill Fares the Land*](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/08/ill-fares-the-land/?pagination=false), Judt… Read More
Continue ReadingOpening Up Our Maine Cottage
It’s that time of year again. We celebrate the New Year three times. One is the opening up of our summer place in Brunswick early in May. It’s still too cold to enjoy fully, but the anticipation of the summer ahead makes up for any shivering. We will start staying in earnest towards the end of the month. In the meantime, I truly don’t know if I am coming or going . We are never sure what we will encounter after leaving it unattended all winter. Well, not entirely unattended. Some years, the mice and other critters make a winter… Read More
Continue ReadingComplexity (Again) Rears Its Ugly Head on Wall Street
This week we saw a huge swing in the stock markets. Being an investor rather than a trader (my livelihood in retirement depends on the assets I hold), I saw my future flash in front of me. And the future was not so good. How could the markets drop a thousand points in an instant? At first, it seemed that it might have been caused by a trader mistakenly typing a “b” instead of an “m” multiplying an order by a thousand fold. The ‘b” key is only two away from the “m” key of a QWERTY keyboard. Today the… Read More
Continue ReadingToo Much of a Good (?) Thing
Credit to the Washington Post with a hat tip to Treehugger. Informed consumers are a front line defense in the battle against unsustainability, but misinformed consumers are worse than random shoppers. At least with random choices you will get a smattering of both the better and the worse. The Washington Post reports on the 600 or so forms of environmental certifications that are now appearing on products from coffee to wood used in guitars. Some are issued by the industry; others by consultants. The criteria used in awarding the certifications are not obvious in most cases. And there is a… Read More
Continue ReadingWar of the Worlds: The Sequel
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Albert Einstein It was quite late last night when I finished the blog entry and I was getting a bit sleep deprived. I should have drilled down further into my search for the real Harrison Wyld. The whole story looks more and more like an extremely artful game, created by or for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, maybe the only real entity in the story. If Harrison Wyld does exist, there is no evidence of him beyond tidbits all connected to the new [virtual] reality game show I wrote about. I… Read More
Continue ReadingHarrison Wyld Is Real (Maybe), But is His Geo-engineering Project?
I came across a fascinating tale today. I am not sure whether it is a hoax, an programming experiment by an Australian television station, or a ominous foray into a private project to meddle with the Earth’s atmosphere. During my scan of today’s tidbits coming from cyberspace, I found one that begins with a story of a clandestine geo-engineering project, sponsored by an Australian billionaire, Harrison Wyld. Wyld does actually seem to exist, but little else about the story has the same ring of reality. But it may be and that’s the frightening part. I found two parts of a… Read More
Continue ReadingCreeping from Bullet Points to Bullets
Many of my recent posts have addressed the loss of context and meaning through the use of social media. The very last one worried about the impact on kids’ texting for what seems to me an excessive amount. Today, the same subject is on the griddle, but with a different focus: how PowerPoint stultifies grownup audiences. My Mondays are usually graced by the regular appearance of James Carroll’s weekly column in the Boston Globe. Today Carroll wrote about how the practice of using Powerpoint overheads to present critical stories limits the understanding of the audience. The setting is a bunch… Read More
Continue ReadingWhat’s a Friend Worth? (Continued)
Two of my favorite subjects pop up today, at a time when I wonder whether my periodic rants about the failings of social networking technology are getting stale and overworked. But when two separate articles show up simultaneously with high visibility in the New York Times and the Boston Globe, I sense this subject is far from ready to be retired. The themes of the two articles looked dissimilar at first glance, but both touched on a subject that has concerned me and about which I have written on numerous occasions. Is the huge traffic in text messaging among so-called… Read More
Continue ReadingWould You Ever Ask Your Dentist to Drill, Baby, Drill?
Most of the news about the blowout in the Gulf has turned to finger pointing. It’s taken only a few days to turn a technological and natural disaster into political fodder. Drilling for oil about a mile below the ocean’s surface is a technical tour de force and an accident waiting to happen at the same time. Although there have been many accidents associated with deep ocean drilling, blowouts this this one are very rare. The last one occurred in 1969 in the Santa Barbara channel. Most new wells are reaching deeper and deeper because the shallow reserves are largely… Read More
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