Ramblings & ephemera
From Nicholas Carr’s “Sivilized” (Rough Type: 27 June 2009):
Michael Chabon, in an elegiac essay in the new edition of the New York Review of Books, rues the loss of the “Wilderness of Childhood” – the unparented, unfenced, only partially mapped territory that was once the scene of youth.
…
Huck Finn, now fully under the thumb [...]
Posted on July 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, history, language & literature, social software, technology | No Comments »
From “List of confidence tricks” (Wikipedia: 3 July 2009):
Get-rich-quick schemes
Get-rich-quick schemes are extremely varied. For example, fake franchises, real estate “sure things”, get-rich-quick books, wealth-building seminars, self-help gurus, sure-fire inventions, useless products, chain letters, fortune tellers, quack doctors, miracle pharmaceuticals, Nigerian money scams, charms and talismans are all used to separate the mark from his [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, science, security | No Comments »
photo credit: State Library of New South Wales collection
From Peter Stark’s “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow–First Chill–Then Stupor–Then the Letting Go” (Outside: January 1997):
There is no precise core temperature at which the human body perishes from cold. At Dachau’s cold-water immersion baths, Nazi doctors calculated death to arrive at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit. [...]
Posted on June 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, science | No Comments »
Back in 2004 or so, I was asked to write an outline for a college textbook that would be used in courses on Linux. I happily complied, producing the outline you can see on my website. The editor on the project loved the outline & showed it several professors to get their reactions, which were [...]
Posted on June 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: on writing, personal, security | No Comments »
From “Missing SFO Laptop With Sensitive Data Found” (CBS5: 5 August 2008):
The company that runs a fast-pass security prescreening program at San Francisco International Airport said Tuesday that it found a laptop containing the personal information of 33,000 people more than a week after it apparently went missing.
The Transportation Security Administration announced late Monday that [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE: A Talk with John Gottman (Edge: 14 April 2004):
So far, his surmise is that “respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Security in Ten Years” (Crypto-Gram: 15 December 2007):
Bruce Schneier: … The nature of the attacks will be different: the targets, tactics and results. Security is both a trade-off and an arms race, a balance between attacker and defender, and changes in technology upset that balance. Technology might make one particular tactic more [...]
Posted on February 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, law, security, technology | No Comments »
From Anna Gosline’s “Death special: How does it feel to die?” (New Scientist: 13 October 2007):
Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, people [...]
Posted on December 8th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, science, weird | No Comments »
From Vaughan Bell’s “Ghost Stories: Visits from the Deceased” (Scientific American: 2 December 2008):
The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement [...]
Posted on December 7th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: religion, science | No Comments »
From Paul Ingrassia’s “How Detroit Drove Into a Ditch” (The Wall Street Journal: 25 October 2008):
This situation doesn’t stem from the recent meltdown in banking and the markets. GM, Ford and Chrysler have been losing billions since 2005, when the U.S. economy was still healthy. The financial crisis does, however, greatly exacerbate Detroit’s woes. As [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Technology Review’s “The Fading Memory of the State“:
Tom Hawk, general manager for enterprise storage at IBM, says that in the next three years, humanity will generate more data–from websites to digital photos and video–than it generated in the previous 1,000 years. … In 1996, companies spent 11 percent of their IT budgets on storage, [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: politics, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
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