Part of me identifies with Donald Trump.  When a politician wants to get something controversial done, the media is as welcome as mosquitoes at a fishing hole. Sometimes journalists do a shoddy job of covering the issues.  Sometimes the headlines are out of cinque with the  story,

I am wary that nerds are swallowing too many algorithms when I read interviews like the one recently published in Wired.  (“The God Complex,” by Olivia Solon, Wired, March 2017, pgs. 18-19.)  Yuval Harari has written a new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, in which h

If I’m representative of the American state of mind, then the nation is suffering from fatigue.  Frankly, I’m unable to cope with technology’s rate of change.  News seems to travel at the speed of light. I learn about bombings in Paris faster than I do about what’s on the lu

Replacing Anton Scalia on the U. S. Supreme Court is going set off some sparks.  As a conservative, he dismissed the notion of a living constitution and believed that idea risked warping original intent.  (Click)  I understand the intellectual purity of his position but what has th

In a blog entitled A Polemic (1/20/17), I wrote about an artist’s duty to comment upon events of the time.  In a similar vein, the editors of Harper’s devoted their February edition to “A Resister’s Guide”: 11 writers stop to consider the impact of Donald Trump’s 2017 pre

Recently, a woman on Facebook admitted she received most of her news from social media.  If true, she is making a couple of mistakes.  First, she is  foreclosing on ideas outside her narrow group of like-minded friends.  Second, she’s vulnerable to fake news, much of it propagan

I opened the January issue of Wired hoping to  learn what magical algorithms were on the horizon for the coming year.  What I found was a publication stuffed with science fiction. The editor explained, “to get a greater sense of reality,” he’d turned to stories. (“The Power

A firehose isn’t the province of firefighters anymore.  A firehose is the gush of information people provide via the internet, particularly on social media like Twitter and Facebook.  Twitter makes a bonanza by selling access to its firehose to interested companies.  Recent repor

One of the advantages of being a troglodyte is a person has fewer worries than those who keep up with trends.  For example, traveling by horse and buggy, like the Amish, means the price of gasoline is unimportant.  I gain a similar advantage with my flip top cell phone.  This dinos

Hold on to your pacemaker.  Latest news is they can be hacked.  Worse news is that people are making stock bets on that vulnerability. Normally, security companies wouldn’t explore medical devices as an avenue for hacking.  One supposes decoding their encryption wouldn’t take h