Who doesn’t have a favorite cereal? A cornerstone of so many childhood breakfasts, cereal has had quite a history: = c
Category: history
Is it over yet?
Nope, a few more days of this : = c
Fey as Palin
As the PFD checks were delivered to Alaskans [$3300 this year] Saturday Night Live parodied Palin, played by Tina Fey. The resemblance is uncanny : = c
Farewell, Mr. Carlin – Thanks for the Balance
Surely, there are many people who strongly disagreed with his views. More conservative folks especially would rather he hadn’t reached the levels of success he did. He made a career out of stirring the pot and providing balance to the hard right and its overwhelming amount of political correctness and closed-mindedness about the world. Known…
Back on!
Power is flowing from the Snettisham hydro dam once again! Returning to the renewable energy source means Juneau folks no longer face the temporary increased cost of living [53 cents per kilowatt hour versus 11]. Since the avalanche in mid-April, Alaska Electric Light & Power has been supplying the entire city with electricity from diesel…
Farewell, Doctor
Albert Hofmann, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD whose medical discovery inspired millions and caused controversy in others in the 1960s, has died. The good doctor died Tuesday at his home in Burg im Leimental in the village near Basel where he moved following his retirement in 1971. For decades after LSD was banned…
Coming off a bender
Clay Shirky presented this at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week : I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. The transformation from rural…
Needs vs. Desires
Edward Louis Bernays (November 22, 1891 – March 9, 1995) is considered one of the fathers of the field of public relations along with Ivy Lee. Combining the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays was one of the first to…
Buckley : Legacy
I just finished watching Tim Buckley : My Fleeting House, produced by my friend, Rick Fuller, a superb documentary about a true and fearless artist who resisted industry sensibilities and even Western culture at large and who remains a testament to the creative gifts that have influenced music. His son, Jeff Buckley, inherited these gifts…
Farewell to a Giant
His visions of space travel and computing sparked the imagination of an entire race. Without him, the world would be a very different place today. For example, he started the buzz about geostationary orbit in a paper entitled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays  Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?“, published in Wireless World in 1945. In…
The De-Evolution of Culture
Larry Lessig says what no one else has the cojones to in this clip. Larry gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of three stories and an argument. The Net’s most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the “ASCAP cartel” to build a case for creative…
why Frank Black is a god among men
“Where is My Mind” Oh – stop With your feet in the air and your head on the ground Try this trick and spin it, yeah Your head will collapse But there’s nothing in it And you’ll ask yourself Where is my mind [3x] Way out in the water See it swimmin’ I was swimmin’…
Another Eureka Moment!
If you had to wear a knee brace every day you’d definitely want to wear one of these. Funny how these simply wonderful ideas elude us for so long : By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Talk about a knee-jerk reaction. Scientists in the United States and Canada said on Thursday they have developed a…
Throwback to ANSI Art
For those of us that remember things like connecting at 33 baud and acronyms like BBS, here’s a current tribute to the art of that era : = c
Legos turn 50
It’s the fiftieth anniversary of LEGO Group founder Ole Kirk Christiansen’s patenting of the now-iconic brick. This year is also the 30th anniversary of the minifig and 10th anniversary of LEGO MINDSTORMS. (The company has actually been putting out toys since the ’40s but only settled on the perfect brick architecture in 1958.) Who can…
another kind of tag
It would be an interesting first day on the job : sign the paperwork, W-2 and whatever else, and then roll up your sleeve for a microchip injection. Sounds like sci-fi, but it’s happened, and now a handful of states are making sure their citizens will never be forced to have a microchip implanted under…
don’t forget : spore is coming soon
From the mind of Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, comes SPOREâ„¢, an epic journey that takes you from the origin and evolution of life through the development of civilization and technology and eventually all the way into the deepest reaches of outer space. Tide Pool Phase Fight with other creatures and consume them…
if you give a mouse a cookie…
hiyas… some changes have been made to waxieus.net! since i moved all my shtuff to a new host, i figured might as well perform some upgrades as the site had been running quite well since this last incarnation but that was a long time ago. 2 years! that led to making some accurate backups, which…
StoryCorps : Listening is an Act of Love
Some cultures rely heavily on their oral traditions. Native Alaskan cultures, for example, rely solely on the spoken word to pass stories and lessons down through the generations. They do this because they had no alphabets or formal methods to write them down until the immigration of white culture into Alaska. There are certainly pros…
tradition
traditions are sticky wickets. they always seem to have the best intentions, yet, too many bad ones lead to trouble and dissent in the ranks. well, potentially. except maybe here in the States. take, for instance, now. many folks have had it with politics and the decisions world leaders make. this is, itself, a tradition….