Doc Searls's Blog, page 5

Tuesday, 8 July, 2025

Good business. I've only heard good things about H-E-B, a grocery store chain I have never met. Here's the latest from David Armano. Nice bonus item: Young Steve Jobs forecasting AI.

Monday, 7 July 2025

Every cloud in this photo (shot from a hill in Santa Barbara) is a contrail or what’s left of a contrail after it smears across the stratosphere and becomes altostratus clouds, altocumulus, or both. The effects of contrails on climate and weather are a matter of debate, but they are a fact of life with aviation. “Chemtrails” are paranoid bullshit. Just saying.

Entrails. This vs. this. Bonus link.

Earth is a tiny blue exception to it. Here is why space matters.

Bargains. Amazon currently has the Airpods 4 for $89 and the Airpods Pro 2 for $149. They are [$179 and $249 at Apple](Amazon currently has the Airpods 4 for $89 and the Airpods Pro 2 for $149. They are $179 and $249 at Apple.).

Crumbled Cookies. I have a “news only” subscription to the NY Times through my university. I also have a subscription to The Athletic that predates my Times subscription. But now every time I go to The Athletic, the Times‘ subscription gatekeeper yells EXPAND YOUR SUBSCRIPTION at me. I can still see The Athletic on my phone. I have a login saved in my password manager, but it doesn’t work. So I have The Athletic send me a link to log in (my only choice, there is no password fix that I can find). The email comes from the NY Times, and works—in a different browser. It’s a hack, but also confuzzing.

Among other relevant topics. I hadn’t heard of the Alpha School until I read this by Zvi Mowshowitz. It’s a long post about a much longer one by a parent of a student there. Here is a short take on X that Zvi finds mostly agreeable. I have thoughts on the whole topic, of course, especially around the admissions requirements for the Alpha School, which start with an IQ test. Here is what I think about those.

Naturally, it was over Texas. The best photo ever taken of gigantic jet lightning (aka upper-atmospheric lightning, ionospheric lightning, and transient luminous events, or TLEs) was shot on Saturday from the International Space Station. SpaceWeather has the story. The photographer was astronaut Nichole “Vapor” Ayers, aka @Astro_Ayers on X.  Here is her tweet of the photo. The thread below is also informative.

Saturday, 5 July 2025

Examples abound. I like Nicolas Gruen's conversation with a silicon friend. A pull quote, and part of Nicolas' argument (as reflected by silicon): "institutions blend power and purpose." Think of how new power today is trashing old purposes.

As if a panel full of unwanted designs in PowerPoint wasn't annoying enough. Ted Gioia shares my irritation at seeing Microsoft's Copilot provided as unwanted help for everything I do with one of its products. 

I was tempted to say 1776. Just went to Meta AI, which I've used before, and it stopped me with this: "Providing your birthday helps make sure you get the right experience for your age." The answer field only wanted a year. I see the reason for asking that, if you're protecting children from porn or something. What if it asked what your race or gender was before answering a question?

Friday, July 4th, 2025

A big value-substract for higher ed. Among the crowning distinctions of Indiana University are its international scope and many supported disciplines. (An example.) Now, reports Inside Higher Ed, "Indiana’s public higher education institutions plan to eliminate or consolidate over 400 programs, equaling roughly one-fifth of their degree offerings statewide, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education said Monday." Thank the Republican state legislature. More here.

Now overhear this. Katherine Druckman and I are back with a new Reality 2.0 podcast episode.

Prophesy. What I said about radio and cars five years ago is playing out today.

Study* Shows New Terms of Use and Privacy Policy By The Onion Suck Just Like Every Other Website That Relies on Surveillance. *It's obvious. However, if you need assistance, here's a PageXray.

Thursday, 3 July 2025

How about borrowing Subweb? I was about to share a Medium post, but just saw it's "Members only." So I won't share it. I'm doing more of that now. Even though I subscribe to Medium, the NYTimes, the LATimes, and the WSJ, I'm avoiding linking to them, unless there's an easy way to pull the piece out from behind the paywall. Doing this is an exercise on PITA reduction for readers. I also see a subscribers-only layer now formed on the Web. You can link to stuff on it, but only subscribers can see it. Does it have a name yet?

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

And if insurers aren't buying, hospitals close. Time has a good piece making clear that the socialized part of the U.S. health care system—Medicare and Medicaid—are socialist gravy on a vast B2B insurance business operating inside a captured regulatorium. Patient problems are products bought and sold.

Also that it has more than four million views. This mechanism shrinks when pulled, is interesting.

Tuesday, 1 July, 2025

I was overheard to have said… Doc Searls on Reloading the Intention Economy: Your Data, Your AI, Your Terms, by Nico Fara, of The Immergence podcast.

Just some perspective. I just removed this from a post I’ve been writing: Walt Whitman put the profundity of human life in a kind of perspective when he said, “and I know the amplitude of time”—which is far more immense than most scientists imagined in Whitman’s lifetime, which lasted five years less than mine so far. Today we know the Universe is only a startup: about a dozen billion years old, with trillions of years more to go. One life is a tiny dot on a line of near infinite length. Seems worth keeping somewhere.

So, on behalf of other radio freaks, I hope he’s okay and returns soon, or hands off the work to other capable hands. To those of us for whom the sciences of broadcasting remain important, Radio TimeTraveler’s US Medium Wave Pattern References, with day and night patterns for North American AM stations, is a very handy resource. While all the links in the last sentence still work, links to maps of station coverage for every channel at the last two links no longer do. Click on a channel (say, 570 AM), and a map will start to show, then disappear, replaced by “Oops! Something went wrong. This page didn’t load Google Maps correctly. See the JavaScript console for technical details.” The nameless author, who hasn’t posted on his blog since February, and whose bio there says “My ham call is WE7W, licensed since 1963,” is at an age (as am I) when the risk of one’s wheels falling off is high.

Monday, June 30, 2025

Has stuff that's too important for news stories. Even if you disagree with it. Heather Cox Richardson interviews Barack Obama.

Are we in one now? On a call right now where the topic of verifiable community is being discussed.

We experienced it yesterday. Anyone know the significance of 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29?

Sunday, June 29, 2025

EmanciPay. When subscription fatigue becomes unbearable, the answer is one ProjectVRM has had since the aughts.

A Solid move. The Solid Project is now at The ODI. Explanation.

A question for readers in Vijayawada. Why are statues of Avatar characters gone from Avatar Park?

Saturday, June 28, 2025

Dots to connect. First, AI Is Breaking The Internet. Can Bill Gross Fix It?, by John Battelle. Bill's invention is prorata.ai. Hard to explain in brief, so read John's piece. Second, Om Malik's Here comes the Internet of "tolls". Third,  Ezra Klein's podcast with Chris Hayes, titled Mamdani, Trump and the End of the Old Politics. Fourth, Kyla Scanlon's Trump, Mamdani, and Cluely. Read and listen to what Ezra, Chris and Kyla say about attention. Kyla especially. Fifth, dig Creative Commons' Signals kickoff. As a hint to where I'm going with these, consider the possibility that there are better ways to grow markets, to make and spend money, and to invest our interests and attention, than we will ever get from fixing advertising, charging tolls, or signaling the need to respect our money and our work—though all the ideas above might be good. Stay tuned for more.

Salience is salient. Though the latter may have peaked in 2016. I hear both used all the time on thinky podcasts. It's a thinky thing.

I've been to all 50. Nate Silver hasn't been to Oklahoma and three other states.

It can still be done. Five years ago, I wrote on Quora how cars saved radio when TV got huge in the 1950s. I just learned, from one comment under it, posted four hours ago, that AM (aka MW) radio is just fine in New Zealand. Then I found a nice list of stations there (as of 2021), and noticed that the ground conductivity, which helps or hurts AM station coverage, isn't bad around Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch, while it kinda sucks for the rest of the country—at least according to the Figure 40 map in the World Atlas of Ground Conductivities, created in the 1990s. And I did all of that research without AI.