Yesterday’s Editorial Observer column of the New York Times carried an interesting and through-provoking piece by Verlyn Klinkenborg on “Some Thoughts on the Lost Art of Reading Aloud.” In it Klinkenborg compares the growing popularity of audio books with the … Continue reading
Category Archives: Tools and Ideas
A typical binocular spotting scope, soon to become a nifty telephoto lens. If you are visiting some open space district or county or state park where public telescopes like the one shown in the photo on the left. You might … Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran an opinion piece by Virginia Heffernan entitled “Let Them Eat Tweets: Why Twitter is a Trap“. This article was, in turn, a response to a presentation by author and idea … Continue reading
Amazon’s second generation Kindle, the D00511. Recent months have seen an increase of posts and news items on the coming eBook revolution. This way of delivering books has been a bit slower to catch on than proponents had hoped. The … Continue reading
As I slouch from middle age to full-on geezerdom I appreciate more and more the implied license one has to be a curmudgeon. It comes in especially handy if you aren’t by nature an “early adopter”. It took me until … Continue reading
In other venues, I’ve lamented the fact that learning how to play with electronics has been one of my intellectual white whales. There are many, many books and web sites out there that exist to help people like me, but … Continue reading
Here’s an interesting piece that was sent to me just one day after the last post (hat tip: Lee Erickson): “Major Discovery” From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution Thursday 31 July 2008 by: Anne Trafton, MIT News Scientists mimic … Continue reading
It is a commonly-held truism that technology is “neutral” and that it is the use we put it to that makes it good or bad. This ignores the reality that some technology is more accessible than others. Consider the printing … Continue reading
Some time ago I blogged on a system called PoIC, which stands for Piles of Index Cards, a system for creating a personal knowledge database by Hawk Sugano. You can read more about it in the earlier entry, but the … Continue reading
The San Francisco Bay Area is notorious for being full of people who have interesting ideas and, what’s more, are prone to act on them. Creativity is the lifeblood of the Bay Area not just in the sense that it … Continue reading