Several years ago, on a brisk spring day in the wild reaches of northeastern Arizona, I was helping an elderly grandmother scrape kernels off a bushel’s worth of dried corn cobs. She spoke no English and I knew little Navajo, so we worked in silence, sitting on a blanket, side by side. The last ear […]
Month: April 2016
April 4 – 8, 2016 “I must have caught this from that coughing bastard on the plane.” “Obviously, my husband’s little cold mutated into this nasty flu.” You feel like hell, you look around for something to blame. Christie reduxes a post about why you’re wrong. Xenotopias are those weird places that aren’t anything else, […]
Corvids are a wonderful genre of beast. I was reminded of this fact not long ago when, biking back home across southeast Portland from the waterfront, a veritable river of crows began streaming overhead. Thousands of them blurred and bobbed and circled each other in a stuttering current from east to west. This current eddied […]
This is a bit unusual, but I’ll start by asking you to watch this video. It’s not long, but I should warn you that it might upset you. It did me, which is why I am writing about it. It’s from a traffic cam trained on an intersection in Shandong Province, Eastern China. Here’s what it shows, […]
We live with machines. And our machines are getting smarter. They’re still very dumb, they do what we tell them to, and often not really all that well. But we’re teaching them. And I do mean “we.” When you tag your friends on Facebook, you’re teaching its facial recognition system what to look for in […]
This post first ran on March 22, 2013. We run it again here because it does seem like half the world is sniffling, hacking, sneezing, and looking for who to blame. We recommend this view over the medieval one. The storytelling begins the morning you wake up with a slight scratch in your throat. Oh, this […]
This week the Last Word on Nothing, usually riffing on the theme of science, marked a week where we talked about anything but. Guest Judith Lewis Mernit traces Easter traditions to their odd combination of origins in a dead man risen and a fertility goddess. Rose spends her leisure hours in vicarious bladesmithing competitions. Followed […]
Last Tuesday, I finally finished sorting out two years’ worth of tax returns, stubbornly eschewing the accounting industry even as my receipts and special forms multiplied to fill the desk. I sealed the envelope then turned and opened up the Number 9 door on my Quentin Blake advent calendar. The main illustration itself, adorned with […]