In 1972, while rushing what was to become my college fraternity (a.k.a. a place to live for the next two years in a college town short on student housing), I got picked up by a fraternity brother who drove a Chevy Impala that looked, even by standards of the day, like a boat on wheels. This guy, named Steven Kantrowitz, was, like most people at Cornell, a smart guy, but also brash and unorthodox to…
My brain is going back to 9th grade earth science with this one…Astronomical autumn begins with the autumnal equinox on September 22 in the U.S. I will be in Manhattan for that. Meteorological autumn, which meteorologists use for record-keeping, started September 1 and runs through November 30. I was in Amsterdam for that. Meteorological seasons are built for convenience, while astronomical seasons follow Earth’s orbit. Meteorological seasons simply group whole calendar months into three-month blocks:…
There are several specific things on my mind this morning regarding authoritarianism. Let’s start with a proper definition. Authoritarianism is a system of government in which power is concentrated in a single leader or small elite that isn’t meaningfully accountable to the public. It typically limits political freedoms, suppresses opposition, and restricts independent institutions like the press and courts, while often still allowing some private economic and social life. It differs from totalitarianism, which goes…
I don’t very often get asked to do a full Buddy watch. Kim and I have an unwritten rule that I’m OK spending the evening with Buddy or several hours in the day with Buddy while Kim goes off to do whatever she has to do, but I very rarely am here at home all alone with him, being his one and only caregiver. There is nothing so very hard about it all, but its…
I am home again this morning after two and half weeks of traveling to five countries and what I would call eight cities (one Dutch, one German, one French, four Swiss and one American). It’s good to be home and back on my sofa this morning typing away on my iPad, which is one of my favorite plantar to be…smiling across at Kim (busy doing her games and reading) and Buddy frolicking at my feat…
One of the advantages of traveling internationally is the fact that I get to reconnect with CNN, which is the new source of choice in hotels around the world. This morning I am watching an analysis of the disaster in Nepal and it’s all taking on an interesting new angle. The foreign minister of Nepal was just interviewed by Anderson Cooper and the point he was making was that the billions of dollars needed by…
Today is my Chicago day. I have free time and have decided to take the Chicago Architecture Center (CAC) River Cruise aboard the First Lady cruise ship. Seems like a fitting end to a river cruise vacation (as in Rhine River cruise). It’s widely considered the best of these tours since it’s the only one run with CAC-trained docents rather than generic tour guides. I really did get a good overview of the city history…
As I prepare to leave Switzerland, I was listening to CNN as they interviewed a Swedish academic on his explanation of the political rebalancing underway in Sweden. It became a discussion of what the Swedes care about as they consider the issues most relevant to themselves. In many ways. Sweden ranks near the top of most global prosperity measures. According to the Legatum Prosperity Index, Sweden was ranked 2nd globally in 2023 with a prosperity…
The big topic on CNN this morning is an essay by Dario Amodei of Anthropic. On Saturday (Sept 12), Dario published an essay called “We Must Pace the Frontier,” where he argued the industry must slow the pace at which it improves AI model capabilities. This doesn’t mean stopping development altogether, but regulating it with high priority. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s approach has been consistently deregulatory and “pro-industry”, favoring a light-touch, federally uniform framework over state-level…
I first went to Europe in 1968 at the age of 14. I arrived in Naples with my family on the Italian liner Michelangelo after a seven day crossing from New York City. We were moving as a family to Rome as my mother took a job as a director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN. I’m not sure I had spent much time thinking about Europe before that having grown…