Jan 14
So Google has bought Nest, the maker of smart home thermostats and smoke detectors. It doesn’t plan to stop there but to make all the mundane technologies in the home smarter and more pleasing. OK, folks, here’s your next project: synch the f**king clocks. In our home we have a digital clock in the microwave, …
Jan 13
This utopian idea has been gestating in my head for some time. Now it looks like the Zeitgeist is opening up for it to emerge. Item: an Oregon state legislator, Mitch Greenlick, has introduced a bill to make tobacco a prescription drug, and to criminalize off-prescription use. Greenlick is chair of the Oregon House Committee on …
Dec 24
Now that Putin has released Mikhail Khodorkovsky and members of Pussy Riot, maybe this spirit of showy clemency will waft over to Israel and move Netanyahu to let Mordechai Vanunu hop the next plane out. Vanunu, the whistleblower who in 1985 revealed that Israel had built nuclear weapons, has suffered for his actions like Job …
Dec 23
The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. So says a Pew Research poll done in late 2012. It finds that one out of five Americans of all ages today is religiously unaffiliated, up five per cent over the previous five years. In the under-30 …
Dec 20
The earth wobbles. Fortunately, it wobbles slowly and regularly. Tomorrow morning, December 21 2013, its axis stops tilting away from the sun and begins to tilt closer. Result: in the northern hemisphere, the days get a bit longer. In the southern hemisphere, the opposite. For folks on the equator, all the hoopla above and below …
Dec 19
Time magazine missed the boat when they put the Pope on the cover. The Pope is interesting but it’s too soon to say what effect his words will have on the real world. The man who really shook things up this year, worldwide, is Edward Snowden. Here’s my view of the cover that Time should …
Dec 16
On top of all its other problems, Gaza has been hit by the worst storm in decades. The United Nations Relief Work Agency (UNRWA) has declared all of Northern Gaza a disaster area. Whole neighborhoods are under six feet of water, and there is overflowing sewage, power outages, and all the other miseries of disaster. …
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