moon traveller herald

The biggest thing that ever happened on the Moon from my point of view happened some time ago – I was a lad – when Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, and then others, walked upon it. Looking up at that thing in the sky – whew – made you forget the problems at your feet. We as a culture aint goin back any time soon – unless the Chinese or Indians really surprise – and there is not much news about our nearby satellite of love.  So it is nice to pick up this week's Science Times, and find an nice little omnibus about recent Moon stuff. Some of the science that is being done today around the moon is discussed. The story goes sideways at first with some guff about the Super Moo n-  rare instances when the orb appears 10 or so % larger (happened 3 times this year) – but then it gets to its work which is to show that lunar studies are really abuzz. A lot of this is based on studies/research that considers the moon's origins. The consensus there is that these origins are cataclys...

News has been called the first take of history. But what about when the first take does a double take? When the news guys regurgitate history? "A War Is Long Over But Many Still Seek To Learn Its Lessons" in Tuesday's Times (9-9-2014) does a bit of such regurgitation - discussing the 100th anniversary World War I and the general torpor that finds many thinking people today finding similarities between the global Risk game today and then. Figuring in the story is Margaret MacMillan, author of "The War That Ended Peace". She comments that were now living in a much more complicated world than that of the predecessor Cold War period "with low-level conflicts that never seem to conclude and the sense of things ending somehow, of a great period of transition." Like Linus discussing the great pumpkin, this newsreader screams "THAT'S IT" To me this feeling of conclusion, transition and sconflict is a big part of the essential concoction t...

I was at the Plaza Hotel in a suite waiting to interview Bob Miller who then headed MIPS Computers. Late 1980s, I guess. It was a big press event, with follow up one-on-ones. It seems funny today but, at the time, the MIPS chip was a potential power house semiconductor world changer. This was its release. It was built on architecture of the great John "RISC" Hennessy, and a seeming challenge to Intel.  Microsoft was porting Windows/NT to it. Big time stuff.  It's inapt for me to say Miller had class, but as I saw it, he had it. He could be jovial. He'd been at Data General, and was a figure in "the Soul of A New Machine" which was myth in that day.  He's at the Plaza, relaxes a bit after the formal public event.. There's a Wall Street Journal. The guys are passing it around. One was Chet Silvestri, the guy I wanted to talk with, a major microprocessor designer. The WSJ lead was a story on John Towers, a former senator who'd been as powerf...

I just read a white paper on "influence". "The Influence Landscape" is not a bad digest of the trend that sees some big changes underway in the machinery of publicity, most due to the increasingly dominant channel of communication called 'The World Wide Web."Something's insightful here – something's banal. Something's here reasonable – some not. Some I agree with – some not.  Kind of par for the course. But the baseline is: Media is about influence. And the channels of influence are shifting. Digital media provide the mechanism for better measure, maybe, of what influence is. The new media certainly has allowed new experts to arise, many of whom the very people that the conventional press previously relied on, who have created new nexi (plural of nexus) for influential communities to arise around. How much does a hot shot rocket star developer care today about being quoted in a magazine? Some, but less than in the past.  Why? Because they have ...