Life
481 posts
As we going into this Thanksgiving travel season, I would remind all Americans that, according to the Constitution of the United States, The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall […]
While storms swept through the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex yesterday, today they created a new and dangerous line far east of the area. On our walk tonight, Jodi and I looked west and saw nothing but clear blue skies. East of us, however, we saw a wall of yellow-gray storm clouds. […]
The term “social network” is ironic, because it largely applies to systems on the internet that are themselves anti-social. For instance, Facebook and Twitter don’t really talk directly to each other. If I have one group of friends on Twitter and another on Facebook, I have to use a third-party […]
In his collection of essays, Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clark famously penned three “laws of prediction.” The third of these is the most widely quoted, and simply states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” [1] While in Fry’s tonight, Jodi and I happened by some […]
A few weeks ago, I was lying on the couch browsing RSS news feed headlines on my open-source “TiVO” (called STiVO – I’ve mentioned it before…), when I saw on the linux.org news feed that a letter-writing campaign was in gear. The Free Software Foundation, whose work I deeply appreciate […]
On the main quad of SMU appears about 3000 tiny American flags, and a sign asking us to never forget. We won’t. But rather that just worrying about not forgetting, I find it a more valuable personal exercise to ask also what we value, and how those values are influenced […]
Well . . . sort of. I took a long vacation from personal things this summer to work in Geneva, Switzerland, at the CERN laboratory. I posted lots of things in the SMU CERN blog [1] and mirrored those posts in my own professional blog [2]. If you missed those […]
Apparently, each year the SMU Provost hands out a book for the faculty to read. Last year, that book was Timothy Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time,” a collection of stories (including diary entries) about surviving the worst environmental disaster in American history: the dust bowl. The dust bowl was an […]
Ever since moving to Texas, we’ve had a lawn. I had spent months looking forward to the opportunity to take care of the lawn, even though we’re renting the house. Lawncare seems silly – a caricature of suburban American life. It’s important to me for two reasons. The first is […]
The new textbook standards being pursued by the Texas state board of education are still in motion, despite the rejection of some of the nuttier board members in recent elections. This was expected. The work that has gone on for so long has too much momentum to just be reversed. […]