The Offline Report

Not well. For the last month I've been following the techniques in a how-to-write book from the mid-1930s written for writers who are blocked and striving to focus amid "all the new distractions in our modern world." It has helped. It cost me $.99. I'm logging back off now. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah. --------------------------------- Further Reading: "Becoming a Writer remains evergreen decades after it was first written."    amazon.com This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Maybe our lousy power grid unites us. If too many people run their own standalone rooftop solar plus home battery system, the grid infrastructure may fray from neglect : Solar advocates are worried other utilities will follow SMUD’s lead, in part because the utility industry has traditionally been hostile to rooftop solar power . Public utilities such as SMUD, which is governed by an elected board, don’t have a profit motive. But like their privately owned counterparts, they’ve long argued rooftop solar creates an unfair “cost shift” from customers who can afford rooftop systems to customers who can’t. The more homes go solar, the argument goes, the more rates will have to rise for everyone else to pay the costs of running the grid — a notion disputed by the solar industry, which says rooftop solar lowers grid costs. Why did so much of the media declare California unlivable this year when fewer people died in fires than in previous years? Maybe because PG&E preemptively brought

  Every time a home or any fire fuel burns, CO2 is released into the atmosphere. The culture is slowly catching onto the counter-intuitive fact that tiny fire embers coupled with small twigs start more fires than do large old-growth trees. This was illustrated for the slacker general public in 2003 via the infamous tie-breaking challenge from "Survivor: Cook Islands": A later, more serious 60 Minutes segment from 2017 called "In the Path of Fire" reported the specific small measures that made an enormous difference determining which homes withstood fires unscathed . It took well over a year to distribute the information through the confusion silo that is Facebook before "embers" were reported on more widely in mainstream media. We Californians and other fire-prone state residents need to repeatedly spread this information. The L.A. Times this week reported the state legislature just stripped a program that funded loans to fire-proof homes : Meanwhile, t

I've been tutoring high school AP English students and notice they all fear writing a sentence in front of me. I'm trying to internally time-travel back to the age I was when I first cleared the fear-hurdle of committing something to a paper that could be handed in to a despotic teacher. The writer George Orwell said totalitarianism was deadly to literature . "Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer.” I had the scariest teachers in sixth grade who criticized what we handed in as not what was assigned. They would rant in front of the entire class. I was criticized for an assignment my parents had actually helped me write, probably the only time they helped me with my homework. The above pullquote is from Masha Gessen's New Yorker arti

This weekend, the late Christopher Hitchens cured my writer's block. For various reasons I won't explain in this post, I've been binging on Hitchens print and video media lately. In his essay on becoming an American citizen , Hitchens includes this passage: "As soon as I got my green card, immigration officers started saying 'welcome home' when I passed through. Moreover, as one who is incompetent to do anything save writing and speaking, I stood under the great roof of the First Amendment and did not have to think (as I once had to think) of the libel laws and the other grand and petty restraints that oppress my craft in the country of my birth. " I'd been suddenly concerned about libel laws after viewing Carol Cadwalladr's riveting TED talk on her blockbuster report for The Guardian on information that already was common knowledge or available, that of Cambridge Analytica downloading, even selling user data after Facebook had promised to

Part of the reason humans go so crazy for cats is their perceived dignity and elegance. But humans love birds. Will these collars catch on ? This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

The late Edmund Morris' new biography on Thomas Edison is electrifying, no pun intended. I finished a fifth of it before I reached the cash register it was so hard to put down. Particularly interesting is his early home-schooled education in civil engineering, among a set of very well-balanced cross section of subjects. Here is a comment Morris made on C-Span as he was researching the biography, marveling at Edison's imaginativeness : "So, this guy was talking to Edison about this subject and Edison said, if this theory is correct and we are indeed all composed - all matter consists of atoms. He said, I suppose it be possible for me to take a few atoms of myself and transfer those atoms to a rose. And then I could retrieve those atoms and put them back into myself and thereby acquire some of the sensibility of a rose." -------------------------------- Further Reading: An Inventor’s Life That Was Incandescent Any Way You Look at It:     nytimes.com This w

Saturday, Nov 30, 2019 Oct 14, 2019: Tesla’s Autopilot Could Save the Lives of Millions, But It Will Kill Some People First | The complicated ethics of Elon Musk’s grand autonomous vehicle experiment.    bloomberg.com Oct 20, 2019: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam | Blame Silicon Valley hype—and the limits of AI:     economist.com Oct 20, 2019: How to hide a billion dollars - A guide for kleptocrats worried by foreign prosecutors:     economist.com Wednesday, Nov 27, 2019 "This limitation also reminds Alphaville of something that has been bugging us over the past decade or so — the lack of discussion of what we’ve lost from the transition of owning content, to streaming it."    ftalphaville.com “'Not only can you not fire Mark Zuckerberg, you can’t fire his kids or his kid’s kids.'”    nytimes.com "t has become evident over the last few years that the wealthiest individuals in Europe and America, who we’re used to thinking of as anti-state libert

Just three years ago, in this era of nonexistant current events caching, a firefighter died Christmas day fighting a weeks-long wildfire and hardly anyone noticed. That was before people had quit Facebook kaleidoscope and re-joined the real world. Since that time, Californians have adapted somewhat, ironing out alert techniques, running practice evacuations in towns with narrow roads, and clearing brush to create a defensible space within 100 feet of homes and buildings. This frees up firefighters from the duty of saving people to actually dousing flames or cutting fire breaks. It's only November 2nd, though, and we're holding our breath in the back of our minds as we breath through the day, dutifully carrying on business as usual so as not to abet panic contagion. This year because our statewide power company PG&E decided to preemptively prevent fire with planned power grid blackouts, the drama is amplified. Also, thanks to uber-environmentalist and 360.org founder Bill M

I'm now a Maddow convert even though we don't get MSNBC in this apartment. I'd resisted her for years, yet last week she finally penetrated my thick boundaries through the fragmented media scrum , and kept my attention long enough to hook me . Now I seek out her show's fragments via youtube. Also earning my browser's **news home** designations lately are Om Malik , The Daily Beast , and the L.A. Times . These are sites I reach for as I try to wean from twitter. I'm also really loving the podcast Gaslit Nation, whose hosts take punk rock angle at synthesizing news of worlwide corruption. My microsoft edge browser's default homepage is set to thedailybeast.com . The Beast presents today's horrifying news in a way that synthesizes it, and informs me of reality while lifting my hopes and spirits with variegated stories on life outside of, well alongside, the horror. To wit: a reporter whose name I don't recognize reviewed a random new little-known sho

It's 2019, the last year in a breakneck decade that saw advances in digital technology that disrupted everything in its path, with little time to close open loops and cauterize frayed systems, leaving many humans in a primitive state. Last December, Californians discovered when the power goes out, so do their backup analog landline communication lines , which was not the case in 2009. This October, we're discovering both a landline phone and a fully charged cell phone are useless during a power outage : When Stephanie Yamkovenko woke up in the Santa Cruz Mountains on Oct. 10, her power was out — and so was her cell phone service. It was in the midst of PG&E’s unprecedented power outages that cut electricity to millions of customers across Northern California. When her husband left for the office, she was alone at home ,where she sometimes works and couldn’t reach him. Her neighbor, who has an AT&T landline, couldn’t connect either. Neither could other neighbors with

Wednesday Oct 30, 2019 James Wolcott's beautifully written review of the Susan Sontag biography, blended with his own memory of her.    lrb.co.uk "I worked at an engineering-heavy university for the past 15 years. Year after year, the freshman class is more and more social app-savvy, and less and less tech-savvy."    reddit.com A reporter who accidentally uncovered a nationwide scam run by fake hosts on AirBnB still didn't leave said hosts a negative review, for fear of receiving downrates herself.    vice.com “Most of us have been taught to ignore that,” she says, and to favor our “saboteur” or “fear self.” The fear self manifests in several ways: “There are the toos,” Hellerer tells me. “ ‘I’m too old,’ ‘I’m too young.’ ” There are the enoughs: “ ‘I won’t make enough money.’ ” And the shoulds: “Mine was ‘No one should go to Stanford and become a career coach.’ ”    thecut.com Startups looking to suck CO2 from the air are suddenly luring big bucks.    tec

Tuesday Oct 8, 2019 The daughter of Eric Schmidt, who proclaimed there is no privacy in 2010, invoked European privacy laws to get herself scrubbed from the Guardian newspaper expose on Cambridge Analytica.    thedailybeast.com Beware of Automated Hiring: It won’t end employment discrimination. In fact, it could make it worse.     nytimes.com My op-ed was published in the NYTimes this morning. You can find the papers I cite here: Automated Employment Discrimination: https://t.co/NgFwiWXkA5 …… Paradox of Automation: https://t.co/AVO3pQHdqG …… I'm hoping to place the first paper with a law review journal soon #AHPs — Ifeoma Ajunwa JD/PhD (@iajunwa) October 8, 2019 This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

In 1988 then-unknown Sheryl Crow, after striking out getting signed on her own with the big record labels, auditioned for and was hired to be a backup singer on Michael Jackson's "Bad" concert tour. She described in 2013 the tour to the New York Times' Jon Perales in a TimesTalk as "an amazing training ground." She said she witnessed there the coinciding traits of high-octane performances, like those given by Jackson on the tour, and "fragility." She calls the quality that performers who clear that threshold, the quality those performers embody, she described as their "divinity." She was careful to say pain and divinity are not the same thing. "You can go on youtube you can see the greatest artists in the world Eric Clapton playing um George Harrison you can go back and see old films of Ella and um Billy Holiday, and you can see these people in their pain in their divinity um not that the two are the same. It's that fragile sp

Paper books are seen in greater frequency on public transit these days. I have to write more about this another time, but the Washington Post ran a story on a conglomerate's plans to find $250 to $300 million in savings by cutting "duplicate" jobs such as local sportswriters . Cutting a local sportswriter is not cutting the fat out of a news operation, instead cutting a local sportswriter is cutting the bone and removing part of the heart. Another way they plan to save money is to cut into the print costs. Yikes. It turns out, according to one commenter , a newspaper chain in Arkansas is handing iPads out to customers so they can eliminate their paper editions: "Here’s another approach that’s being pursued by a family-owned newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazzette. The paper has been shutting down its print editions across the state and is giving all its subscribers a free iPad so they can use a digital subscription. If they don't know how to use an iPad the p

For at least ten years I've taken every day either Adrenal Complex or Licorice Root Extract capsules for sufficient strength. In direct and less direct ways I'm boosting my adrenal system with unregulated steroids, and this worries me. It's possible I will never be able to quit these things. I've tried to taper back and currently take just a half capsule of one or the other every day. At one time I was taking two capsules per day and exercising A LOT. (I looked quite "hot" for a finite interval. It was unintentionally a reverse experiment of those performed by famous models and starlets, when they don fat suits and report back what life is like for other people.) After the honeymoon phase resulting from unregulated health food store capsules boosting my strength, a strange "locking" in the digestive tract occurs especially on days when I take just the Licorice Root Extract. By "locking" I mean digestion gets stuck, "oxidation" h

Friday Sep 20, 2019 A climate protest sign I vehemently disagree with: Hands down best sign #ClimateStrike pic.twitter.com/rsNdhhZjCY — Nathalie Gordon (@awlilnatty) September 20, 2019 Thursday Sep 19, 2019 Not surprising, but very disappointing. This is a field with JOBS for students. Same with cybersecurity. https://t.co/ximUdX1O6x — Jeff Kosseff (@jkosseff) September 19, 2019 Monday Aug 19, 2019 “There’s rarely a printed — and therefore hard-to-change — version to refer back to,” he said.    nytimes.com This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Below is a 30-minute film that won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1987. It's set to a famous short story set in France in the 1910's through 1947. But given what we now know about planting trees rejuvenating nearby springs, which we've seen happen in places like North Africa, this story must be based on a true character. It's counter-intuitive that planting trees eventually gets dried springs to flow with water. But in many cases that's what happens. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Paper media is terrestrially social. No smartphone backside shows to fellow commuters what its owner is reading. But May 2019 was a mixed turning point in the Paper Media Poll. The debut of spring showed a nadir of paper periodicals seen "in the wild" by the Paper Pollster team, tallying just one copy of The Economist for the entire month. With heavy hearts we pressed on. Belatedly, only in hindsight, our team noticed an undeniable climb of paper books seen in the hands of public transit commuters and coffee shop denizens, which included many a GenZ pedestrian. But that same sad month for periodicals that was May showed something else we weren't looking for: UC Berkeley students' posture straightened considerably from mere weeks before when, en masse, they walked hunched over their phones through the end of April. Now they stand straight, look where they're walking and make eye contact. What happened? A late GenZ/early Millenial eastbound commuter spotted rea