I bought a Kindle Fire to replace my aging Kindle (1st Model). For me it will make a fine book reader, (especially for reading in the dark) with some enhanced functions. Overall, it feels like a prototype - everything works, almost, but not very smoothly. It is based on a fork of Google's Android, but oddly enough, does not have a native Google Maps app - it has Mapquest instead.
Screen scrolling is jerky. I like the size - great for books, not so great for magazines.
It feels heavy - but I expect my muscles will develop with use :-)
For a full review - read any of the reviews popping up all over the web.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
I received my Kindle Fire
Thursday, November 03, 2011
Havana Staircase 2009
My latest watercolor painting. I was struck by this staircase in Havana, Cuba, on my visit in 2009.
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| Havana Staircase 2009 |
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Shouting in the crowd - A quick guide to social media
Tweeting is like standing in a large square packed with people, all shouting loudly and hoping that someone will reply to them, or at least hear their message and pass it on. Some of the shouting is advertising.
Blogging is like standing in a large square populated by speakers on soapboxes and shouting your story, hoping to attract a crowd, possibly from a nearby blogger. You make deals with some of your fellow speakers to send some of your crowd over to them. Some of the soapboxes are plastered with ads, for which the speaker gets paid.
Google+ is like much like blogging, but the speakers cluster closer together so that they can hear and respond to each other, and their crowds overlap and chat with each other. The speakers do not get paid for any advertising.
Facebook is like sitting in your living room chatting with friends and family. Most people present are not really interested in what the others say, but listen politely and occasionally respond. You are not sure who some of the people in the room are, or why they are there. You may think the conversations are private, but your friends can take notes and tell their friends. Oddly enough, your walls are plastered with ads, for which you do not get paid.
Email is like leaving a notes in your friends' mailboxes mailboxes. You feel offended if they do not respond.
Texting is like attaching a note to a rock and throwing at your friend's house
Monday, October 17, 2011
Moving on...
Technology has moved on. Thus, so have I. From now on, you can find what I would have blogged here on Google+, at
this address: gplus.to/chmoss
If this does not work for me, I will be back here soon :-)
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Senator Shelby - an Economics illiterate - feels that Nobel Prize winners don't understand Economics.
Is it not time we stopped electing demagogues?
From The New York Times....The leading opponent to my appointment, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the committee, has questioned the relevance of my expertise. “Does Dr. Diamond have any experience in conducting monetary policy? No,” he said in March. “His academic work has been on pensions and labor market theory.”...To the public, the Washington debate is often about more versus less — in both spending and regulation. There is too little public awareness of the real consequences of some of these decisions. In reality, we need more spending on some programs and less spending on others, and we need more good regulations and fewer bad ones.Analytical expertise is needed to accomplish this, to make government more effective and efficient. Skilled analytical thinking should not be drowned out by mistaken, ideologically driven views that more is always better or less is always better. I had hoped to bring some of my own expertise and experience to the Fed. Now I hope someone else can.Peter A. Diamond is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Monday, June 06, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Is this Blog obsolete?
New social media seem to be making personal blogs and websites obsolete. For quick thought that one wants to share with the world, Twitter feels more appropriate. It gets pushed to friends, and broadcast to the world for anyone following a specific subject to see. For more private thoughts for friends only, Facebook is the place. For photographs - Flickr, Smugmug, Facebook, or any of dozens of photo sharing sites are more convenient.
Fragmentation across media is a problem - but it is being addressed by platforms like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and the like.
So - why would anyone (including me) other than business or organizations continue to maintain a blog and a website?
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Thursday, April 07, 2011
View from the cheap seats
Friday, February 25, 2011
Friday, February 11, 2011
History of revolutions is not encouraging
While everyone is cheering the fall of Mubarak, one should consider that many earlier revolutions have had disastrous near term results. The mother of all revolutions - the French Revolution (triggered by the Age of Enlightenment) - resulted in the reign of terror and decades of warfare and revolution in Europe. The Russian Revolution resulted in about a hundred years of oppression of the Russian and other people. The Iranian Revolution has resulted in ongoing oppression of the Iranian people. The liberation of African and South American colonies mostly resulted in African Democracy - One Man, One Vote, One Time. Some successes, to be sure, but mostly failures. The American Revolution worked for the people of the original 13 Colonies - maybe the only example that worked for the people concerned. The outcome of the likely wave of revolutions in Muslim North Africa and the Near and Middle East is uncertain. I hope that they will be more peaceful and Democratic than their predecessors in Europe, Africa, and South America. I am not optimistic. ---
Clive - on my iPhone - pardon autocorrect induced typos.
Clive - on my iPhone - pardon autocorrect induced typos.
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Wednesday, February 02, 2011
The Laundry Room
Thursday, January 27, 2011
The first Spaghetti Western at Chicago Lyric Opera?
See the full review at chicagotheaterblog.com
Was this the first Spaghetti Western? We saw it Wednesday afternoon. Not Puccini's best, but entertaining.
Monday, January 24, 2011
I have to get to one of the the coasts!
via congress.org
Green = no health care unless you don't need it! Red = help those who need help. The insurance companies win this round of posturing - but thankfully it will go nowhere.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Friday, January 14, 2011
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Beware Bipartisan Anything
Beware Bipartisan School Reform
If everybody on the Hill is happy, Americans probably shouldn't be.
Katherine Mangu-Ward | January 7, 2011
As an example of what happens when Democrats and Republicans agree, consider the Reagan-era dismantling of the mental-health system. The conservatives wanted smaller government, the liberals did not want anyone locked up against their will -- and now we have lunatics like Jared Lee Loughner with no ability to stop them until they have wreaked their havoc. He was identified as mentally ill ( http://tinyurl.com/2acg968 ) but nothing could be done until it was too late!
Friday, January 07, 2011
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Watch Joel Meyerowitz, in “Everybody Street”
Interesting interview with a great street photographer.
Joel Meyerowitz, in “Everybody Street”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2011/01/video-joel-meyerowitz.html
Joel Meyerowitz, in “Everybody Street”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2011/01/video-joel-meyerowitz.html
Monday, January 03, 2011
An thought-provoking take on Shabbos observance from DovBear
When you think about it, camping is an odd little ritual. You exert energy pitching a tent and setting up camp, then subsist for the duration on food that is tasty, but hardly gourmet. Real camping enthusiasts drive miles into the woods and do without the conveniences of store bought wood, and indoor plumbing, but even amateur dabblers like me deliberately put ourselves into a situation that, on the face of it, seems uncomfortable. What's the appeal of uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, the pervasive smell of smoke, and limited access to modern conveniences like air conditioning and WiFi?
see the rest of the story at dovbear.blogspot.com
Also applies to Conservative Judaism - or any other ritualistic observance.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
Just testing to see how Posterous treats image files when posting by email.
Posterous is an interesting service that enables easy uploading of many media types to multiple social sites like Twitter, Flickr, blogs, etc. If you are not interested in seeing if Posterous worked, move on, nothing much of interest here.
This is a test post to see what it does to images sizes directed at several destinations. The original attached image size (the flower) is 3209 × 2848 pixels and 1.5 MB.
I am not sure where the text ends up on the various services, and how it will be formatted.
It is also a test of formatting.
This email should post it once, and only once, to each of Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Flickr, as well as a Posterous blog which I don't really want but it insists on using, as far as I can tell. It could be useful if you don't already have a blog.
My sites can be found at
http://clivemoss.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/chmoss
http://www.facebook.com/clive.moss
http://chmoss.tumblr.com/
http://chmoss.posterous.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chmoss/
Actually, I am on other places as well, but Posterous can not get to them.
I have no good reasons for so many sites, only excuses
- My most credible excuse is that I have been doing this sort of thing for many years and as the world changes, I move on, carrying the detritus of a long life in technology and photography
- My other excuse is that I am a geek and I enjoy finding out how this stuff works and wondering why anybody in their right mind would want to do it
Oddly enough, Posterous can be found at www.posterous.com
If a rather unexceptional picture of a flower (which is being sent as an attachment) does not appear, then the test was a partial failure.
In addition, I am embedding, rather than attaching, a 2888x2475 pixel 1.7 MB page of images from our last trip to Turkey, to check if Posterous cares how the image is sent from the Gmail client.
The Right knows they are right. The Left gets left behind.
There seems to be a certain temperamental difference between conservatives and Republicans on the one hand and liberals and the Democrats on the other. In broad strokes, Republicans, especially of the tea-party stripe, are typically proud, at least unapologetic, and sometimes belligerent about their beliefs. Democrats, in contrast, seem to adopt the defensive position by default. ...
Why are Democrats more anemic? One thought comes from the liberal journalist Thomas Frank. Writing in Harper's, Mr Frank argues that while Republicans respond to their base, Democrats have a misbegotten faith in a "Magic Middle" of centrist ideas that are tolerable, at least, to most Americans:
Democrats, for their part, tend to do the opposite, dreaming of bipartisanship and states neither red nor blue and of some reasonably-arrived-at consensus future in which the culture wars cease and everyone plays nicely forevermore under the smiling, benificent sun of free trade and the knowledge industries.
read the full article at economist.com
The Economist often has an interesting take on American politics.
Saturday, January 01, 2011
I always wonder why people sing songs ...
... With no clue at all about what they are saying.
The combination of Google Reader and Posterous included the post below when I shared it with no attribution. I did not write it. It is from the excellent blog "Language Log"
Google Reader and Posterous omitted the heading and credit below. I include it here, with apologies to the original authors.
From the auldies but guidies file
(This post first appeared on 12/30/2004 under the heading "And a Right Guid Willie Waught to You, Too, Pal.")
We like the incantations we recite on ritual occasions to be linguistically opaque, from the unparsable "Star-Spangled Banner" (not many people can tell you what the object of watch is in the first verse) to the Pledge of Allegiance, with its orotund diction and its vague (and historically misanalyzed) "under God." But for sheer unfathomability, "Auld Lang Syne" is in a class by itself. Not that anybody can sing any of it beyond the first verse and the chorus, before the lyrics descend inscrutably into gowans, pint-stowps, willie-waughts and other items that would already have sounded pretty retro to Burns's contemporaries.
But it's my guess that most people take the first two clauses of the song as the protases of a conditional, rather than as rhetorical questions. True, most versions of the lyrics end the lines with question marks (this is the most familiar version, a little different from Burns's):
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days o' auld lang syne?
But a lot of people leave out the question marks (for example here, here, and here), which suggests that the interrogative force isn't obvious. It may make no sense that way — "if old friends should be forgotten, we'll drink to bygone days anyway." But incomprehensibility only adds to the sense of immemorial tradition, even this happens to be a borrowed one, grafted onto American culture in 1929 by a Canadian of Italian ancestry.
As Eric Hobsbawm has observed, after all, the point of invented traditions like the kilt or the Pledge is to provide "emotionally charged signs of club membership rather than the statutes and objects of the club." And what could be more evocative than a New Year's song that's sodden with quaintly impenetrable phraseology? "Is not the Scotch phrase Auld Lang syne exceedingly expressive?" Burns wrote to a friend in 1793. Well, it works for me, anyway. Have a happy one.
The combination of Google Reader and Posterous included the post below when I shared it with no attribution. I did not write it. It is from the excellent blog "Language Log"
Google Reader and Posterous omitted the heading and credit below. I include it here, with apologies to the original authors.
From the auldies but guidies file
(This post first appeared on 12/30/2004 under the heading "And a Right Guid Willie Waught to You, Too, Pal.")
We like the incantations we recite on ritual occasions to be linguistically opaque, from the unparsable "Star-Spangled Banner" (not many people can tell you what the object of watch is in the first verse) to the Pledge of Allegiance, with its orotund diction and its vague (and historically misanalyzed) "under God." But for sheer unfathomability, "Auld Lang Syne" is in a class by itself. Not that anybody can sing any of it beyond the first verse and the chorus, before the lyrics descend inscrutably into gowans, pint-stowps, willie-waughts and other items that would already have sounded pretty retro to Burns's contemporaries.
But it's my guess that most people take the first two clauses of the song as the protases of a conditional, rather than as rhetorical questions. True, most versions of the lyrics end the lines with question marks (this is the most familiar version, a little different from Burns's):
Should auld acquaintance be forgotAnd never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days o' auld lang syne?
But a lot of people leave out the question marks (for example here, here, and here), which suggests that the interrogative force isn't obvious. It may make no sense that way — "if old friends should be forgotten, we'll drink to bygone days anyway." But incomprehensibility only adds to the sense of immemorial tradition, even this happens to be a borrowed one, grafted onto American culture in 1929 by a Canadian of Italian ancestry.
As Eric Hobsbawm has observed, after all, the point of invented traditions like the kilt or the Pledge is to provide "emotionally charged signs of club membership rather than the statutes and objects of the club." And what could be more evocative than a New Year's song that's sodden with quaintly impenetrable phraseology? "Is not the Scotch phrase Auld Lang syne exceedingly expressive?" Burns wrote to a friend in 1793. Well, it works for me, anyway. Have a happy one.
Sent with MobileRSS for iPhone
Making life easy (for me)
I am switching to Posterous for all posts to social apps. This post is a test to see what happens. It may result in dual posts somewhere. Sorry. A picture of nothing in particular is attached to see what happens. A boring video for the same reason.
Here goes.
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