The Long Arm of the BBC
This morning BBC News reported the transit strike by BART, whose impact on the streets of San Francisco can be seen by looking out my window; it is nice to know that the BBC is more up on this local...
View ArticleOn the Death of Douglas Englebart
Last night Douglas Englebart died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 88. It is hard to think of any major aspect of how we now do our work with computing resources than cannot be traced back, one...
View ArticleOn Distancing Myself From Yahoo!
Last month I wrote about the fact that my decision to start using OS X Mail had led to my having fewer problems with Safari, which would often freeze up as a result of bad behavior from Yahoo! on one...
View ArticleDoes Google Know More Than Bing?
I have noticed that Bing has mounted an advertising blitz to get people to move away from Google. Since my Firefox makes it easy for me to choose either search engine, I figured it was time to see if...
View ArticleFailing the First Time is an Option
Continuing on the theme of unintended consequences that I was pursuing this past Wednesday, I have to say that I am beginning to feel that one of the main contributions to the general failure of...
View Article‘Living Presence’ No Longer
Readers of my San Francisco Examiner.com site know that I have been working my way through the second volume of Mercury Living Presence: The Collector’s Edition. I took on this rather massive task...
View Article‘The Uprising has been Made Possible By Funds From the United States Government’
Al Jazeera English reporter Emad Mekay seems to have been spending a lot of time at the Investigative Reporting Program based at the University of California at Berkeley. The result has been a rather...
View ArticleKeeping the Listener in Ignorance
Regardless of any questions about the quality of interpretation in the performances being collected for Mercury Living Presence: The Collector’s Edition, I have to voice one complaint on behalf of any...
View ArticleOn the Varieties of Experiencing Brutality
This morning, when I was writing about Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia on Examiner.com, I chose to consider the narrative as a cautionary tale about life under brutal authority. Within...
View ArticleHow Development Breeds Violence
In celebration of their 50th anniversary, The New York Review of Books has been reprinting excerpts from notable pieces (usually by equally notable authors) from past issues. The excerpt in the current...
View ArticleGetting Beyond Standard Terminology
I finally seem to have built up some momentum in my efforts to read Music, Language, and the Brain by Aniruddh D. Patel. I was drawn to it because the author wrote it while on a fellowship at The...
View ArticleThe Harmony Question
I realized that neither harmony nor counterpoint showed up explicitly in that list of “fundamental concepts” I was considering yesterday. The closest I got was that counterpoint arises from the...
View ArticleThe Sluggish Path to Pardon
Chris Matyszczyk used his Technically Incorrect column for CNET News this morning to observe that the House of Lords is likely to debate and then approve granting a pardon to Alan Turing for his...
View ArticleDoes It Really Make Sense to Talk About the ‘Syntax’ of Music?
Last week I started questioning the “standard terminology” we tend to use when talking about music, not only in the domain of music theory but also in the talk that arises in the course of trying to...
View ArticleThe Future of Writing
Those interested in fiction tend to also follow both reviews and news of prestigious awards. However, neither of these gives any indication of how a writing of fiction manages to make ends meet. I was...
View ArticleMyopic Reimagining
I just finished reading Mary Branscombe’s review of Business Reimagined: Why work isn’t working and what you can do about it, by Dave Coplin, which showed up on ZDNet early this morning. I have nothing...
View ArticleIs There a Place for Reality in the Draper U Curriculum?
Reading Kathleen Pender’s story in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle about Draper U, Tim Draper’s non-accredited short-term boarding school for aspiring entrepreneurs, left me feeling very queasy....
View ArticleTotal Freedom And Total Control
I was a bit surprised to discover that an Examiner.com article I wrote last week about a free improvisation gig received an impressive number of page views (at least according to Google Analytics)....
View ArticleAn Admirable Effort to Filter the Kool-Aid Out of Social Business
When I first read Dion Hinchcliffe’s promotional (I should probably say “self-promotional”) article about “social business” on ZDNet, I was really worried that the Kool-Aid had finally made it into the...
View ArticleA Fortuitous Coincidence
I hope I am not the only one enjoying how the current episodes of The Newsroom involving whistle-blowing and speaking the truth to and about the rich and mighty should be overlapping so conveniently...
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