This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.
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Personal Note, January 1 2026: I have a new job: Executive Director of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation . Here's what I wrote for PG's January Newsletter. Greetings from the new Executive Director Happy Public Domain Day! You might hear people say that books published in 1930 have "fallen" into the US Public Domain, or, that they have lost copyright "protection". This is not quite…
In seventh grade, Miss Phillips had me memorize "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. So I did. After finishing " Jabberwocky " to start off the year of run naming, it seemed obvious what my next effort would be. I calculated that I could arrange to end it on the day of the Boston Marathon, thus neatly tying the verse with the running. And to top it off, the "18th of April" cited in…
There's a war going on on the Internet. AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet. And the technologists defending against this broad-based attack are doing everything they can to preserve their outlets…
The internet gives us new ways to express ourselves. One of the more strenuously esoteric forms of artistic expression is Strava art , in which people do runs that, when mapped, draw pictures. None of my strava art was particularly good, but my running club friends in Stockholm regularly run " elefanten ". I spent a year attempting "Found Strava Art", where you just run a new route and give the…
fresh off the bus It was 11:15AM in the pink D corral of the fifth wave, and surrounding me were runners of all shapes and sizes, from around the world, all of us waiting for our race to start in 15 minutes. We had waited through the morning (five hours for me) as our faster friends drifted away excitedly and cannons sounded the starts of earlier waves. There was a determined silence as each of us…
Content Warning: AI My Uncle Henry was a Professor of Chemistry at NYU. He lived, for the most part, in his sister-in-law Barbara's 7-story townhouse on East 67th street in Manhattan. He acted as the caretaker of this mansion when Barbara went off living her socialite life in Paris or wherever. My family would stay in the townhouse whenever we came to New York to visit my favorite uncle. This is…
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon.) For a long time, it's been a goal of mine to live and work someplace where the language is something other than English. I've studied French in school and I've studied a bit of Mandarin and Japanese. And Swedish. But I'd never had the opportunity to live in another language, to get comfortable enough to have casual conversations and say the…
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. ) At the end of 2020, Strava told me I had run 1362 miles over 12 months. "I hope I never do that again!" I told a running friend. It seemed appropriate that my very last running song from shuffle was Fountains of Wayne's "Stacy's Mom"; founding member Adam Schlesinger had died of Covid. For months of that pandemic year, there wasn't much to…
The Internet's big lie is "we respect your privacy". Thanks to cookie banners and such things, the Internet tells us this so many times a day that we ignore all the evidence to the contrary. Sure, there are a lot of people who care about our privacy, but they're often letting others violate our privacy without even knowing it. Sometimes this just means that they are trying to be careful with our…
(I'm blogging my journey to the 2024 New York Marathon. ) Steve Jobs gave me back my music. Thanks Steve! I got my first iPod a bit more than 20 years ago. It was a 3rd generation iPod, the first version with an all-touch control. I loved that I could play my Bruce, my Courtney, my Heads and my Alanis at an appropriate volume without bothering any of my classical-music-only family. Looking back on…
