How Google and Apple's digital mapping is mapping us
Digital maps on smartphones are brilliantly useful tools, but what sort of information do they gather about us - and how do they shape the way we look at the world?Oliver Burkeman ( Read more... )

Getting back to school this week was a joy. I was still pretty easily tired just from class, but other than that minor distraction, it was pretty much pure pleasure to get back to the work. My MW Catholicism course didn't meet on Monday because of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, so my one meeting with those three sections was both ( Read more... )

It's been a busy week, with the semester really getting going after the interruption Friday through Monday/Labor Day of Tropical Storm Lee. My MWF Catholicism classes in particular had had their rhythms quite disrupted, so it's felt good to start to get back into some kind of groove the last few days. One of our fabulous majors, a guy named Chris ( Read more... )

I received an email from Dina the other day that was largely talking about the creation of a new song of hers. I was excited to discover that her Shipwrecked: From Birmingham to Jericho With No Prozac CD project with Nadina's Cube had finally come out, although I had missed that news. So my copy is in the mail. But the thing that really ( Read more... )

The retreat this year was as timely as could be. Wiped out all summer from the antibiotics I'd been on to treat this infection, I had been nausea-free for a week when my departure date arrived, with me sort of waiting day by day to see if I would make it, or if this nausea would rise up again. I headed out to Kansas City without incident, though ( Read more... )

Suckiness. Or "Suckage," as Tom Gerencher called it. That's been the theme of the last few days, as I've dealt with a mild fever in June. Still, I got some salvaged moments of less suckage ( Read more... )

I had the coolest conversation with Grace the other day on her birthday, when she turned nine. Phone conversations have tended to be on the more "miss" side of "hit or miss" with the girls in recent months, as it's long been hard to capture their interest over the telephone, especially since the novelty of telephone conversations have worn off for ( Read more... )

Seriously? It's already been another week since I last wrote in my journal? Another brief litany of current distraction:

• I finally became finished-finished with my administrative nightmares from the end of the spring semester. That alone would justify a lost week. I am so glad to be done with it all.

• Dived into some research reading Kevin ( Read more... )

On Friday, ten years of nerdy glee come to a conclusion with the series finale of Smallville. Ten years is obviously a great run for a television series, and as I noted in an earlier entry, this makes Smallville the longest-running sci-fi or fantasy series in North American television history. Personally, it's the sort of thing that resonated on ( Read more... )

The down side of moving to New Orleans has just revealed itself to me. I was full of joy that cooler weather arrived the other week, breaking us out of the constant 90s and 80-100% humidity, with friede telling me that this was at last the weather and time of year that made living in the South worthwhile. Now, however, I'm finding that I have already ( Read more... )