We are recently back from 2 weeks in Europe, where we toured around Italy (Rome, Siena, Florence, Bologna, Venice, Como), Switzerland (Engelberg, Lucerne), and France (Paris). We planned the trip back in February and had been looking forward to it ever since. It is hard to believe it is over now. It was our kids’…
Sometimes when sitting on the deck or out on my morning walk, I wonder what this place would have sounded like 100 years ago. Our house backs up to a park and it is fairly quiet, but we are also near a major artery and the dim sound of traffic is as constant in the…
I In the beginning, there was the Franklin Township Library that my parents took me to when I was just learning to read. The bookshelves looked so tall and they were so full of books. Even then I knew I wanted to read all of them. I settled on one: The Nine Planets by Franklyn…
I I played my first Wordle game one year ago. This morning, I played my 365th consecutive game. It was a rare lucky day for me. I guessed the word on my second try, only the 14th time I’ve ever done that. What’s more, I had only one letter in my first try so it…
I The pleasure of fiction, for me, is the total immersion in the story. That immersion is powerful and delicate. It is a bubble of thin film that keeps reality temporarily at bay and while it exists, I live in another world. But it is a bubble that is easily broken. It is this delicate…
I Flipping through the contents of various magazines and essay collections, certain titles strike me. Here is an essay on cosmology by Isaac Asimov, “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.” Here is a piece on baseball history by Stephen Jay Gould, “The Creation Myth of Cooperstown.” Here is one from John McPhee, “Reading the River.”…
I In the spring of 2019 I read The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner and was captivated by the descriptions of what it was like to work there. Here was a place set aside specifically for creativity and invention. People roamed around long intersecting hallways bouncing…
I I first heard of Will Durant, author of the 11-volume Story of Civilization, reading Isaac Asimov’s memoirs in the 1990s. In 2000, I read Durant’s The Life of Greece, the second volume of that series. I hadn’t read much history up to that point. Three things surprised me about the book. First, was the…
I When I was 8 or 9 years old, my dad took a ground school course as a precursor to flying lessons. Those flying lessons never materialized, but I grew fascinated by the book used in the course, The Student Pilot’s Flight Manual by William K. Kershner. I combed through the book, memorizing it, absorbing…
For months now, I have been thinking about features that I think should be part of a modern operating system. Some of these features are included in application software today, but for a variety of reasons, would be much more powerful if present at the operating system level. Here are 3 of them. 1. Document…