Before Burning Man, there was the Grateful Dead parking lot scene. The show was usually at night but we would still try to get there as early in the morning as possible, for a full day of hanging out and partying. Here are the photos from one such show, March 17, 1991, at the Capital Centre, outside Washington D.C. Click to Read More...

Sometime ago, somehow,, we were implicitly taught that capitalism would solve all our problems, that we could rely on the free market economy to supply whatever we need. Personal responsibility is not required as long as you kept your checkbook open. But I am driving down the road with a bag of Taco Bell grub and I am eating a taco but I am not tasting the taco at all. Like there is nothing appealing about this food whatsoever, but I was hungry and I had money, and Taco Bell could sell me a bag of food. Taste, or even nutrition, has little to do with it. I am eating capitalism. The message of naturalist Wendell Berry, collected in his lifelong book essays, is that this trust in capitalism has led us astray, estranged from the land that is our collective home. Click to Read More...

It was those who were the most ruthless, with the least scruples, who survived the German concentration camps of World War II. Others gave up, sunk into apathy, and slid into disrepair and inevitable death. Those who chose to find meaning -- any meaning -- found will to go on day-by-day. Suffering is inevitable. It is how you choose to respond to external hardships that make you who you are, argued Viktor Frankl, in his account of being a WWII prisoner in Auschwitz. Click to Read More...

One of the highlights of visiting the Corona, Queens home of jazz great Louis Armstrong was to get a glimpse of his reel-to-reel recording setup, in his cozy second-floor front-room den. He had long made it a habit to record everything he could on reel-to-reel tape, even while on the road. What I had found fascinating was his indexing system. Sitting at his expansive desk, Armstrong would write on a piece of loose-leaf paper a short description of every recorded snippet he made. The tapes could hold multiple segments, and he filled each one up as he had time, writing a short description alongside the start time, segmented by minute. Click to Read More...

Google search has trained us all into formulating questions in a round-about way: What are the best sushi restaurants in Brooklyn? What if instead you could request, from some agent, for the best California sushi roll in the neighborhood. Using a model of your own evaluative criteria, the assistant would make a selection on your behalf. Such a product, running on a large language model, could, some say, replace the search engine altogether. Just say what you want, and let the AI engine to do all the work. As a content creator or sorts, I can see the profound changes that such models will have on how we write, and who, or what, we write for. Click to Read More...

The barriers between the different professions that use statistical modeling are breaking down. Today, we have much more compute power and a lot more data to play with, so different groups of researchers have been developing strategies to create their own, far more nuanced, models of the world. Statistical modeling is entering into an ecumenical era. Click to Read More...

NumPy is a Python library for applying functions to multi-dimensional arrays.The package includes operators for mathematical, statistical, logical, shape manipulation, and for sorting, selecting, and random simulation. NumPy processes arrays fast thanks to the vectorization, which is running a single action across large arrays for data. Click to Read More...

When you wake in the morning, reflect on the day ahead. Know that you will meet people who will be busybodies, ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, selfish, wrote Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. Needy people zap your energy. Social media zap your energy. Stop doing things that do not have a clear purpose, he advised. Click to Read More...

Civilization arose when humankind moved beyond food collection into food production.Up until the Neolithic era, starting at about 3,200 B.C. man mostly hunted for food. Every day would be devoted to finding the next meal, be it hunting or foraging. Only when people started cultivating the soil for crops did they produce enough food to free up the days for other activities. And it was the invention of the plow that saved us from early extinction. Click to Read More...

A photojournal of diners alongside I-81 and I-78, including stops in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia. There is the Blue Mountain Diner, with the Turkey and Dutch filling; The Clinton Hill Diner with the huge slices of banana cream pies; the breakfast-only Midway Diner, with the sausage and gravy (cheese and onions extra); and more. Click to Read More...

After Nashville, I jumped off the Highway to take State 50 south and west, backroading my way to New Orleans. I did not check the weather and soon was stuck in a torrential downpour. The rain falls to Biblical proportions in this part of the south. There was an ice cream shop that also sold salads. I ducked in and ordered one, then stood there, because I was the only customer. The teenager behind the counter asked me what my favorite Tyler Childers song was. Click to Read More...

Bushwick is like purgatory. You can have as much fun as you want, but you can not leave until you learn something important about yourself. I planted myself there as a tax dodge, when my new job would not let me use Maryland as a permanent address. But my first Brooklyn Airbnb host, Ginger, taught me the Airbnb racket so well (check those ratings!) that, in the decade that followed, I ended up making friends with people who stayed at my place from the world over. And one afternoon at Pearls, I randomly met Tania, who taught me how to love NYC, and all the mad people there. What a weird decade that was. Click to Read More...

In their brevity and terseness, the short stories of Raymond Carver suggest a darkness inarticulated, a state of perpetual unease that mapped very well into those last few years before the Internet, when answers did not arrive instantly through text or Google. This post will (eventually) summarize each one of the 37 short stories in his last collection, published in 1989. I will not comment on the stories here, but just try to capture, by plot summation, the mysterious precision of Carver, at least at a surface level. Click to Read More...

I love the Python programming language. It is the most intuitive of all the languages, I feel. After you use it awhile, you can pretty much guess the proper syntax for an operation, and you would probably be right. Still I need a handy reference guide from time to time. So here is a collection of basic Python operations, presented not so much as a form of instruction, but as a guide for quick consultation. I also cover the creation of lists and dictionaries, functions and file input and output. Click to Read More...

The first thing you notice is the anxiety, the growing frustration of small things not fitting together like they should, an unease that the things taught to you are not entirely true. Things are pretty well laid-out these days. But once there was a time when everything was possible, with different people trying out wildly different things. Over time, however, they converged on what is now known as The Way. For us here today, it is really just working out all the messy little details and edge cases around supporting The Way, with specialists talking to other specialists. But then someone discovers something. Click to Read More...

Millions of years from now, after humans eradicated themselves from the planet, alien creatures will wonder about the meaning of the large concrete blocks lined up across a Chihuahuan Desert plateau, created by Donald Judd. Arranged into small stand-alone clusters, each set of boxes is a unique and mysterious configuration. A Stonehenge of our own. Click to Read More...

Just south of Nashville, the Tennessee Agriculture Museum is housed, understandably enough, in a barn. The main level is well-stocked with AgTech wonders from years gone by: mills, mechanical harvesters, a covered wagon and even a sheep treadmill. But like any barn, the upper level is the place for the best rummaging. Here, they stashed the gear they have not gotten around to fully displaying or even figuring out what to do yet, a bric-a-brac of primitive, discarded agricultural technology. The showcases of plows and cultivators alone are worth the climb. Click to Read More...

The Lynyrd Skynyrd Memorial, Gillsburg, Mississippi: These are the woods where the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane went down in the late evening of Oct 20, 1977, just short of a field where it could have more-or-less landed safely. The pilot hoped to make it to a nearby airfield but when the engine finally sputtered out, the plane slowly and silently glided over the deep Mississippi woods before descending into the trees with a large crash... Click to Read More...

Just north of New Orleans, in Abita Springs, Louisiana, The Abita Mystery House is a museum of sorts, a fascinating collection of southern folk art housed on a compound fronted by a vintage gas station. It is the creation of artist John Preble. Here is where you will find the 32 foot alligator, a spaceship and a robot, miniature cityscapes of old sordid New Orleans, dysfunctional arcade games and a friendly cat, who accompanied me from building to building. Perhaps most fascinating were the dioramas: One depicted a tornado ripping through a trailer park. Another portrayed the death of the dinosaurs. A third depicted dancing skeletons. Click to Read More...

Here are some photos from the Oxford Mississippi home of William Faulkner. He purchased this 1848 primitive Greek revival house in 1930, right before writing Light in August, a Southern Gothic novel that cemented his reputation as a literary writer. He named the home Rowan Oak, after the rowan tree, long a symbol of security and peace, and this place definitely has a calming feel about it. Click to Read More...

On stage, country music legend Patsy Cline often wore beautiful and uniquely-designed dresses sewed together by her mother, Hilda Hensley. The family grew up poor, in Winchester, Virginia, and her mom was a seamstress for the rich and elite of Winchester. So when Patsy started performing, it was natural for Hilda to assemble these dresses, often from designs by Patti herself, which were rich in fringes and rhinestones. Click to Read More...

At the age of 13, Wilson was the first person to discover the presence of invasive fire ants within the U.S., by surveying a vacant lot near his home in Mobile Alabama. The pesky creatures had come, via cargo ship, from Brazil by the way of Argentina. In short, he was a naturalist, someone who observes the natural world, watching for all the changes there. So when Wilson first came to Harvard, it was as an outsider, a specimen-collecting prodigy who still needed education in some basics of biology. He arrived just in time to counter a revolution. Click to Read More...

Rode out a snowstorm last weekend to see this band and it was so worth it. The Philadelphia-based Low Cut Connie has my vote for best Rock n Roll band in America, a rightful heir to the gritty likes of the Iron City Houserockers or the J. Geils Band. Front man Adam Weiner is a hyperactive force of nature, a barroom Elton John and a friend to no piano. Click to Read More...

No microphone stands, no drum riser, no video montages, no amp stacks: The American Utopia show from David Byrne is a very high tech and beautifully staged show that totally rethinks how live music should be presented. Everything had been stripped away from the stage except the necessary performers themselves, who had the room to physically express their music. At times, this percussive-heavy roving assemblage resembled a fractal marching band Click to Read More...

I shook the hand of rockabilly legend Robert Gordon, after he played the Jesse Malin Christmas Show in the Bowery Ballroom in the Lower East Side, New York. Despite being well into his 70s, he still had a powerful grip, the grip of a farmer. I would not want to get into a ballroom brawl with him, even in his sunset years. Click to Read More...

Science wins out, if barely, and only because it actually works. By the 1500s, most people knew of the stars, if only because they were the basis of time-keeping and the calendar. They lost interest when the astronomy turned to the talk of numbers and formula. But this did not dim their view of what the movement of the stars could foretell, in their minds. And as long as the astrologers kept predicting dire outcomes, they would be proven right often enough in those turbulent times. Click to Read More...

One limitation of using MySQL for home use is the lack of an undo button. One sloppy MySQL statement can wipe out an entire column of data, or so I found recently. And while MySQL has a variety of backup and restore mechanisms, they do not work if you do not actually use them. Fortunately, if you are using DigitalOcean droplets, I found that you can still restore a corrupted database, by this crude but nonetheless effective hack. Here is how. Click to Read More...

The 15th century humanists, as they came to be known, were obsessed with restoring, editing and evaluating ancient Greek texts. They rebelled against medieval schooling, which hammered on logic and theology, and instead sought the more exalted thinking of the Ancients. This work proved to be groundbreaking, for it led to serious contemplation of what Aristotle, Hippocrates and Ptolemy were actually saying, and how much of it was true. In effect, these evaluations were the seeds of original thought. Click to Read More...