As we entered the third decade of the third millennium, many of the science and tech words and phrases in popular circulation had lost all meaning. “AI”, “machine learning” and their newer synonym, “cognitive technology”, for example, had joined the pantheon of synonyms for “snake oil“. Or at least they were becoming placeholders for anything […]
Technology
Sometime in the 1920s, somewhere in France. A young girl from an influential middle-class French family had been found in a field, stabbed to death. There was no obvious perpetrator. The police rounded up the usual suspects – which is to say, immigrants – and found a Jewish door-to-door salesman who had been in the […]
“Twitter is a sewer,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens last week in one of the many skirmishes that have now coalesced into the phenomenon known as Bedbug-gate. The ongoing saga is quite beyond the remit of this blog (though we do a brisk trade in actual bedbugs). But I’ll take Stephens’ sewer […]
A poem composed entirely of excerpts from press releases for CBD products More than 20 years of experience at the pulse of the global health and wellness industry– My two passions: spreading the word about CBD and caring for my beloved dogs. We put our products into service by integrating bodywork, esthetics, yoga and other […]
It started with a voice mail. I figured it was a wrong number, and didn’t think anything more of it, until I got another call from a guy asking me if this was Orkin Pest Control. I told him it wasn’t and by the way, how did you get this number? “It was the second […]
Apologies in advance, but I’m a person who quit Twitter for a month and now you’re going to have to endure the lessons I learned from my time away. Don’t worry: this post contains 0 percent yoga. And I’m still on Twitter. Look, you may not care about Twitter, but I had a problem. I’m […]
When a society uses a suite of technologies that a single adult can master in his or her lifetime—building a house from scratch, farming, spinning cotton, making medicines, having babies, hunting, fishing, singing and dancing—then it is possible to attain a high level of competency in nearly every major task an adult may be called […]
Google saved my life so many times last month, as I trudged through Europe alone. Without Maps, I would never have made it to my meetings, train connections, flights, meals, or anything. Google sent alerts to remind me when to leave; it translated my questions, so I could bleat them in a pathetic form of […]