Frailty
“Flight 704 from Chicago to Los Angeles will be cancelled unless there is a passenger who can provide the flight crew with a rubber band” — Urban myth announcement at Chicago O’Hare *** I had not thought too deeply about…
Month February 2022
The Newspaper
My first paying job was with the Montreal Gazette; my brother and I worked together as paper boys. We each took a side of the street and delivered the morning paper, usually throwing them from the sidewalk to the door.…
Now is the Winter …
“Now is the winter of our discontent…” William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act-I, Scene-I, Line 1 This scourge has carried on for two years, through what feels like a never-ending cycle of lockdowns and isolation, through information wars spawned from within…
Isolation
In an earlier post, I assembled a selection of dots connecting an increase in social isolation and certain trends in technology adoption propelled by our tendency to privilege left-brain thinking. Some have noted this trend towards isolation began with the…
Automation and Instrumentation
In his book on history and technology, Connections, author James Burke quipped “If the Normans didn’t have stirrups we’d all be speaking Anglo-Saxon”. His point was how the introduction of technology influences the outcome of events, which in turn triggers a…