December 2022 – Journal

EoY 2022 Reflections & Looking Ahead

Saturday, 31 December 2022

Though I usually will casually reflect back on what happened over the year, and will also usually write out some goals for the coming year, this year I’ve tried being more structured.

Scribe, and Stamps: A Look Back

Tuesday, 27 December 2022

Today I was interviewed by Colin Ware of “This Does Not Compute.” CW does retro-computing, which involves resurrecting ancient digital technology. He wanted to talk to me about the Scribe project, which is the subject of a forthcoming video on his YouTube channel.

I was involved in Scribe in the early 1990’s while I worked at Apple. Scribe was, initially at least, an attempt to develop a design for a specialized notebook computer — I think of it now as sort of the great uncle of the iPad. It lacked a keyboard and mouse, and used touch and a stylus as input, and was built on the Mac duo platform (an early mac laptop line). It looked a little like an iPad, except that it was a couple inches thick, five pounds in weight, and ugly.

Essay Project Status: 250

Friday, 23 December 2022

During the most recent ‘essay chat’ with CT, the question came up of how many essays we’ve read.

Snow Crenellations

Saturday, 17 December 2022

I observed a curious phenomenon on my run today. I have been unable to find an authoritative account or name for it, so I will call them snow crenellations.

Algorithmic Untruths

Tuesday, 6 December 2022

“Tom, you’re on a roll with your career!” Thus reads the subject line of the latest email of the day.

This is fantastic news! Not “fantastic” in its most common sense, but rather in its alternative sense of “fanciful; remote from reality.” After all, I am well into my fourth year of retirement, and it is at least two years since my last paper was published, my last patents granted, and my last appearance at a professional conference. While it would be fun to believe that the cumulative mass of my accomplishments has somehow reached a critical point, tipped, and is now barreling along on its own like an ever-growing cartoon snowball, it is not so.

Haecity: The Architecture of ‘Thisness’

This note is under construction…

Haecity has to do with the distinct and specific identity of a particular time-place. I encountered the term in Stan Robinson’s Mars triology, and was intrigued by the way it was used to fuse a sort of mystical view of the world as a deeply interconnected whole with the quest for rigorous and systematic understanding that drives scientific inquiry.