Mike O’Dell once quipped that "nobody’s armchair is a good predicter of the future." Nonetheless, we do try to predict it, from the comfort of our armchairs. So much of what we now take for granted on today’s personal computers and laptops was simply unavailable when I wrote this. I’ve …
The greatest tragedy of the commons of all time is not, as some used to think, the "commons" fields in England, from whose overgrazing by livestock the term originated.
No, the greatest "tragedy of the commons" of all time is the world around us. It’s in the way we have allowed …
December 6, 2017 - At 9:04 AM, 100 years ago today, the largest non-nuclear, man-made explosion in history went off, one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The S.S. Mont-Blanc, carrying nearly three thousand tons of explosive materials (three kilotons in nuke-speak) for "the …
You just have to read this BBC News entry.
None of this is to disparage the truly massive harm done (and still being done!) to persons of color, especially in the United States of America, which are well known and well documented. But just to point that violence against ethnic groups is not limited to whites.
Strange but true - estimates …
In the early 1980's I worked at the University of Toronto Computing Service, a typical university mainframe shop. My boss at one point was Terry J. Wood, a very forward-looking individual and a great mentor to me at the time. We were very aware of the potential impact of micro-computers, having …
I've put up a bibliography of my online works which may be of historical (or even hysterical) interest to some.
I dusted off my old Tribute to Yuri Rubinsky, a sometimes-overlooked pioneer who helped drive the adoption of SGML and HTML, and thereby their offspring XML.