The conventional wisdom is that if Twitter declines, some other âmicrobloggingâ platform will come along to gobble up its user base. But Twitter was never particularly successful as a business model.
I think thereâs a very real need for a status / microblogging platform and have since the early wonderful days of twttr in 2006 (40404). Tumblr was also in play at the same time and served a very different function than something like a WordPress blog here.
Twitter started its decline in my mind back when it disabled Track and then in 2010 or so when it killed the API that made it so glorious. So whether itâs via federation or something else, there needs to be a âreal timeâ status protocol (which I thought Twitter would become similar to IMAP).
Apple renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America on its maps Tuesday after an order by President Donald Trump was made official by the U.S. Geographic Names Information System.
The very first childrenâs books in English were instruction manuals for good behaviour. One of the earliest, The Babees Book, from around 1475, is a list of instructions: âYour nose, your teeth, your nails, from picking keep.â Itâs striking how many of the early childrenâs conduct manuals focused on nose-picking.
Iâve been thinking a lot about this question from my context as an AP Physics and Physical Science teacher for close to 20 years previous to hopping in to my PhD studies in Ecology and Religion where Iâm focusing on questions of consciousness and intentionality.Â
Electrons are just plain weird. I always thought it fascinating that we discovered them before protons and neutrons.Â
Philosophers donât just philsophize⊠they help science move ahead by realizing that materialist reductionist viewponts donât always point to where the data or truth is trying to lead us…
I have argued strongly in my book and on this blog that calling electrons âparticlesâ is misleading, and one needs to remember this if one wants to understand them. One might instead consider calling them âwaviclesâ, a term itself from the 1920s that I find appropriate. You may not like this term, and I donât insist that you adopt it. Whatâs important is that you understand the conceptual point that the term is intended to convey.
The Beatles arrived in NYC for the first time 61 years ago. I’ve been a big fan since I was a young person in rural South Carolina, intent on making my southern accent disappear by listening to too much of their music (along with David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, and Tom Petty’s Florida / California twang). I miss that accent now and wonder what I would sound like had I not tried to match McCartney’s pitch or Lennon’s subtle phrases all those hours in my bedroom with a ceiling that I painted black (thanks to the Stones).
It’s also the re-release of Wilco’s album a ghost is born. I was 25 (almost 26) when the album was released in 2004. The songs sound much different now than they did in my hazy memories of 25. Now, as the dad of five young people and after a 20 or so year stint in the classroom as a Middle and High School Teacher scattered with some adjunct university teaching, there’s an earnestness of trying to preserve something that comes through. Tweedy called the album an “ark” (in the Noah or Utnapishtim or Atrahasis sense) of such as he was in a bad spot at the time and thought it might be his goodbye. He wanted to preserve some of his better parts for his children. There are panthers, hummingbirds, a muzzle of bees, spiders, a fly (and he re-explores Noah’s ark in his future as well),
I didn’t pick up on that as a 25 or 26 year old. I get it now as a 46 year old.
I like to stand outside with a black walnut tree on the property we share and reflect on things after getting the little ones off to school. I’m thinking of ark moments this morning and wondering what the black walnut will take with it after our human family here has moved along down the paths of life and death. I wonder why or when it had a few of its limbs chopped off to afford a powerline that runs adjacent to our property. I wonder if any other children have ever climbed the walnut or hung a tire swing on its limbs before. I wonder what it thought of Helene or if it even did.
All of these ark moments that we hold dear ebb and flow with time and yet we say that our souls remain.
My amazing 17-year-old daughter Mary-Hudson is running the Chicago Marathon this year and raising money for By The Hands with her efforts⊠this is something she is really passionate about and a really wonderful cause if you have a few dollars to spare!
Iâve always believed that every child deserves the opportunity to succeedâno matter where they come from. Thatâs why Iâm making my miles more meaningful by fundraising for By The Hand Club For Kids, an incredible after-school program that helps children in under-resourced neighborhoods build brighter futures.
I like to think every time I open up Marcus Aureliusâ Meditations that Iâm peering into something I shouldnât be privy to⊠as I would always tell my students, he didnât write those words for me, but only for himself. Yet, here we are.Â
I gave away little composition notebooks to my students that we called âTiny Notebooks.â Iâd like to think some of them still are tempted to use them!
I very much hope these notebooks I see in stationery stores, card shops, and bookstores are serving similar purposes. Just think, if you preserve them, your grandchildren will be able to read your jewels of wisdom fifty years from now, which may prove exceedingly difficult, should you decide to confine them solely to a smart phone you purchased yesterday.
Iâm speaking a bit on this situation with monarchs at a conference at UC Santa Barbara this Spring. Thereâs no mystery as to why the insect is seeing such diminished numbers (a 95% drop since the 1980s in California), but there is a mystery as to why we continue to allow pesticides to harm pollinating species (as well as humans).Â
Insect species numbers are known to ebb and flow, but this sort of trend line is not good.
âWe know pesticides are a key driver of monarch and other pollinator declines. Yet there are glaring gaps in the EPAâs oversight of pesticides: the vast majority of pesticides have never been tested for their impacts on butterflies,â said Rosemary Malfi, director of conservation policy at the Xerces Society, in a statement. âHow can we protect these essential species if weâre missing the basic information needed to make better decisions?â
Aristotle’s Metaphysics as well as The Categories are two of my favorite books to pick up when I need to scratch my head or be humbled in my knowledge of ancient Greek. I find Plato more sensible, but there’s something about these two books (especially Metaphysics) that keeps bringing me back in my own work and research on religion and ecology and consciousness.
Fun quote here (and good read if you’re looking for a long-form first take on Metaphysics).
The Metaphysics inevitably looks like an attack on Plato just because Platoâs books are so much better than anything left by Thales, Empedocles or anyone else.
There’s so much more I’ll say about this in the future.
Also, here’s an amazing thread you should review if you’re interested in reading more philosophy (and theology) in the new year instead of doom scrolling on social media.
