David Weinberger's Blog, page 6

Sunflowers are early risers

Planted four days ago.

From Aordle to Zorrodle: Wordle Variants to Come

There’s Wordle for Jews: Jewdle. There’s Wordle for Star Wars enthusiasts: SWordle. And lord knows how many variants are now online or are being developed by anyone who knows how to edit a word list. So let’s just get it over with. Here are upcoming versions, some of which probably already exist but I am […]

Meaning at the joints

Notes for a post: Plato said (Phaedrus, 265e) that we should “carve nature at its joints,” which assumes of course that nature has joints, i.e., that it comes divided in natural and (for the Greeks) rational ways. (“Rational” here means something like in ways that we can discover, and that divide up the things neatly, […]

Google Pixel 3 vs Pixel 6 Pro: Photos

The photos from the Google Pixel 3 looked better than those from the Pixel G Pro when viewed on the phone displays. But on a laptop screen it was a different story.

Chris Locke, RIP

Thoughts about Chris Locke on his passing.

My rules for saying “Merry Christmas”

As a non-observant Jew embedded in a Modern Orthodox family, here are my rules for when I say "Merry Christmas."

When your Chromebook colors get trippy

Our 3 year old was randomly typing on my wife’s Chromebook and somehow made all of the images go wonky. This includes all images displayed in the browser, the system’s wallpaper, and even the icons. I could not find any mention of this problem anywhere on the Internet, apparently because I insisted on using the […]

Dust Rising: Machine learning and the ontology of the real

Aeon.co has posted an article I worked on for a couple of years. It’s only 2,200 words, but they were hard words to find because the ideas were, and are, hard for me. I have little sense of whether I got either the words or the ideas right. The article argues, roughly, that the sorts […]

Agnostic Belief, Believer’s Experience

Although I am an agnostic, I used to think of myself as a functional atheist: I saw no compelling reason to believe in God (and thus am an agnostic), but I lived my life as if there is certainly no God. Now I see that I got that backwards. I firmly remain an agnostic, but it turns out there […]

The Shopping Cart Imperative

A long-time friend and, I’ve learned, a former grocery worker, today on a mailing list posted a brief rant calling people who do not return their grocery carts to the cart corral “moral cretins.” He made exceptions for people parked in handicapped parking spots, but not those who say they cannot leave their children unattended […]