Burning Man is an annual experimental community and arts event held in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, which is in the remote northwestern part of the state. It has evolved from a small beach gathering into one of the world’s most distinctive cultural phenomena. Burning Man began in 1986, when Larry Harvey and Jerry James spontaneously built and burned an 8-foot wooden man on Baker Beach in San Francisco. The event was inspired by Harvey processing…
Back in 1989 I was given responsibility in my business brief for my bank’s business in Canada. At the time, that consisted of one office in Toronto that took the form of what was called a Schedule B bank, which was basically a small banking office that performed all the basic functions of a bank. The operative word in that description is small. Canada was approximately 10-11 times smaller than the U.S. economy. The United…
Inspector Gadget was a bumbling, cyborg detective and the main character of the animated TV series “Inspector Gadget” that premiered in 1983. He was a clumsy, well-meaning but incompetent detective with a body full of gadgets (hence the name). He worked for a law enforcement agency that constantly battled the evil organization M.A.D. (Mean And Dirty). He was completely oblivious to danger (in the Maxwell Smart tradition), and he accidentally and regularly solved crimes while…
From my perch in my living room, if I look out to the west I have to look through floor-to-ceiling glass windows out to my deck and then through a 42” high plate glass railing out to the distant vista beyond. It’s a tad misty this morning, but as I look out in that direction, what I see is an end-to-end array of rolling hills that populate the dozen or so miles from this hilltop…
With the AWS cloud storage outage that occurred yesterday, we are probably all wondering if we should be paying more attention to the AI and data center buildout issues that are being written about every day. I am also seeing more articles about how the data center demands on both power grids AND water supplies are starting to impact communities. Data centers use staggering amounts of both electricity and water and both are starting to…
Every time I get asked on some form or other about my employment status, I am forced to wonder whether I am really retired or not. When I moved out to this hilltop at age 65, I was technically still the CEO of a small venture-backed company for about another year. Then I stepped down and also started taking my Social Security payments at 67. I was also teaching and doing my expert witness work.…
During the movie Tora! Tora! Tora!, the 1970 epic war film which depicted the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 from both the American and Japanese perspectives (considered one of the more historically accurate Pearl Harbor films, co-directed by American and Japanese filmmakers), the Japanese pilots never actually say, “Bansai!” They do say “Tora! Tora! Tora!” That phrase (which means “Tiger, Tiger, Tiger” in Japanese) became famous not just historically, but culturally (mostly thanks to…
Several years ago why trying to build a megastructure on New York Harbor, the New York Wheel, I spent some time studying the whys and wherefore of megastructures in the history of mankind. People don’t “have to” build megastructures, but throughout history they’ve chosen to for several noteworthy reasons. The biggest of these is for demonstrating power and authority. Massive structures like pyramids show “we have the resources, organization, and power to do this.” They’re…
Georgie Porgie is a classic English nursery rhyme that goes like this: Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie, Kissed the girls and made them cry. When the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgie ran away. The origins of the rhyme are a bit murky, but it’s been around since at least the 19th century. There are various theories about who “Georgie Porgie” might have been based on. Some suggest it referred to King George I.…
I’m feeling good this morning for many reasons, but particularly because my daily weigh-in has me down 9 pounds since I started this odyssey 11 days ago. This is not my first weight loss rodeo, so I know that there is often an initial burst of weight loss on most programs, but this time it feels different (don’t it always?). I am totally bought into this game right now and hope to remain so. I…