Blogfog
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OMG Look What They Found!
Darrell Huff wrote How to Lie with Statistics way back in 1954. It’s not just about lying with statistics; it’s about completely bungling your interpretation of what you think you’ve noticed. Some people even write books based on that kind of bungling. I haven’t read Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant, but… Continue reading
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Attention
A set of connected connections. “What, the internet requires less attention? Yes, because it demands so little of us intellectually and appeals so powerfully to our feelings.” “Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights.”… Continue reading
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You are not free
You are not free. At the very least, you’re nowhere near as free as you like to think you are. What it even means to be free isn’t really all that clear. The things you are free to do depend to some extent on where you live. In today’s world, you live in a “nation”… Continue reading
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Connections
It’s not documents (books, articles, stories, notes, posts) that are important, even when they encapsulate fantastically important, incisive ideas. It’s the connections among and between documents that are the most important. Browsing the web is valuable because of hypertext. Ted Nelson coined that word back in 1965, when there were only a handful of real-world… Continue reading
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Don’t (b)link
An updated retelling of It’s a Wonderful Life. The best(?) version of Carol of the Bells. Even pseudo-political figures are described as “brands” now. But the question remains, at least for me, why media-based branding works so damned well on so many people. Interesting but incomplete and not fully considered notes about, of all things,… Continue reading
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It’s a real dickens of a life
I live in a house, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of my deed has been signed by the clerk, the mortgage officer, and I signed it. My name is good for anything I choose to put it to. My house is where I live. In my house there… Continue reading
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Strong, stoic men with dirty faces
“Coal” in US politics is not a fossil fuel; it’s an ideology. Coal used to be a very important fuel that powered the engines of expansion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Mining coal back then was difficult, dangerous, and poorly paid, and the people who did it took pride in their barely-compensated… Continue reading
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AI strictly as a business
This is a really interesting analysis of the business of AI models. It’s a pretty convincing argument that it’s a pretty bad business, for some very thoughtful reasons. Continue reading
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Grade inflation
I’ve been noticing something for years, after (in order): What I’ve been noticing is that US education has been in decline for a long, long time. I managed to do well in school, but I’m not sure I could have been as successful in earlier decades because the material back then was more difficult and… Continue reading
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Theater of the Absurd
Just like the Republican presidential campaign, apparently everything is TV now: “…a 27-year-old social media huckster, beat a 58-year-old man with a long history of health problems, both physically and mentally, in a boxing ring late on Friday night.“ Meanwhile, Dave Winer observed a campaigning shift by the Repubs, who: “…didn’t worry what Jake Tapper… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!