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The best spot
When I enter a room I do a quick scan.Not by eye or by nose or by ear.I use a sixth sense that humans don’t haveto detect what soft cushions are here. I check each, compare,I tweak and I fettleto see which is softest and best.Then I know that I’ve foundThe most comfy aroundAnd that… Continue reading
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Popinjay
Calling someone a “popinjay” is slightly archaic, but still in use; the guy who was White House Communications Director for about a week a few years back, Anthony Scaramucci, was called a “popinjay” by several commentators. It appears to have been Felix Salmon’s idea, who started it all the way back in 2011, when he… Continue reading
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November 2
The second of November is a big day in computer security; it’s the anniversary of the first significant computer worm distributed over the Internet in 1988. It was the Morris Worm, created by Robert Morris, a graduate student at Cornell. His intentions weren’t malicious, and the worm wasn’t intended to cause any harm. During his… Continue reading
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Who was that?
In 1624, William Bedell published a book with the riveting title Copies Certaine Letters. In it he posed a question, which has echoed down the centuries ever since: “Who were these quidams that laid hands on Scory?” A couple of hundred years later, in 1832, the London Times pointed out that “If the doctrine of our English quidams be… Continue reading
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Edward Said
The situation in the Middle East seems like it’s going from bad to worse, and it’s seemed that way for a long time. Maybe public intellectuals like Edward Said could help — but unfortunately Said, who was born November 1, 1935, passed away in 2003. Said was a Palestinian-American academic, critic, and activist. He was… Continue reading
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Leaves
Humans put leavesIn big crunchy piles.They do it for me,And it gives me a smile. There’s always a somethingIn a pile to find.And the sniffs are a bonusOaked, mapled, and pined. When I see a leaf pileThen a run’s what I makeAnd a jump and a roll —Then the humans must rake. But I think… Continue reading
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November 1
The moon is nearly invisible at the moment (it’s a “new moon”) — it’s a nice contrast to Ansel Adams’ most famous photo, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, which he made on November 1, 1941. At the time, Adams said “I think of it as a rather normal photograph of a typical New Mexican landscape.” The… Continue reading
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October 31
As everybody in the US, at least, knows, today is Halloween. But that’s not the whole story. If you live in Cornwall, England, it’s Allantide. Allantide continues into the next day, and locally they quite reasonably identify the difference as Allan Night and Allan Day. Cornish mothers don’t raise any dopes, evidently. The Allan in… Continue reading
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Robert Stirling
An exercise in some high-shool physics classes is assembling and operating a Stirling engine. It’s a fairly simple device and can be surprising because it’s a “hot air engine.” All you need is a source of heat (a candle will do for a small engine) and the engine will operate. The Stirling engine was designed… Continue reading
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Arthur Scherbius
In World War II, Germany used a mechanical encryption system called an Enigma machine. The Allies mounted a huge effort to figure out how to decrypt messages encoded by the Enigma, and one offshoot from that effort was, in part, electronic digital computers. As for the Enigma itself, the Allies may not have realized that… 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!
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