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Just Shelley

Boys with Toys

Along with others, I also read Clay Shirky’s Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. However, unlike most others, my reaction to Clay’s newest gem was to go, “What a load of hooie”. Don’t get me wrong, I think Clay’s sharp as a tack and smart as a whip. (Do I need any other weapon-like metaphors to make […]

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Writing

Can’t spill coffee on a digital book

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. One very nice perk of being an O’Reilly author is getting full membership in O’Reilly’s online digital book library, Safari. I think about the 34 boxes of books I have stored back in San Francisco and can’t help but feel that digital is really the way of the future. At least […]

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Just Shelley

Get Used to Disappointment

A friend told me last week that disappointment is part of any friendship. I have to agree with him because any relationship between people that is something more than the barest superficial association is going to have times when one, or both, is disappointed in each other. The same has to hold with our friendships […]

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History Just Shelley

Once we believe in ourselves…

Another e.e. cummings poem has been coming to mind lately, spurred on by the discussions about the ‘proper’ amount of sorrow we should feel at the loss of the Columbia crew. Proper sorrow. What is that? I do not know what proper sorrow is. cummings once said: We do not believe in ourselves until someone […]

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Writing

Curving Space with cummings

Summary:   I seldom write about poets, preferring to leave this genre to others better suited. But the talk yesterday about the shuttles and Hubble and Chandra, and of stars and black holes and other aspects of astrophysics, brought to mind one of my favorite poems, Space being(don’t forget to remember)Curved, by e.e. Cummings I seldom […]