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Book review: Little Blue Dot

The first time I recall using a map was in boy scouts. Travel in unfamiliar places on foot, bike or car required maps for me for decades. The first time I saw GPS in action was when my brother and I were on Ride the Rockies. We were invited to dinner by a friend in Aspen. After being dropped off in town by a bus, he navigated to our host’s condo with his GPS. A couple years later, I borrowed an old car of his to drive across Colorado for a meeting. The speedometer on the car was broken, so he clamped a GPS receiver to the dashboard that gave a read-out of the speed. Now, any trip I take out of town requires Siri. It has become essential for us as newcomers in New England. I barely recall what it was like before GPS. Little Blue Dot, by Katherine Dunn, is a history of GPS. It begins in England during the Blitz, when the Royal Air Force figured out how German bombers were using ratio signals to guide Luftwaffe aircraft for nighttime bombing raids. This led to efforts to jam or spoof thos...
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Quote of the day

Big personnel news out of the White House yesterday: Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving the administration. Leavitt, who had her second child in May and returned from maternity leave last month, wrote in a post that “I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary.” She will remain, she said, a top outside White House adviser. Leavitt, who had already richly earned a reputation as a virtuosic, remorseless spin artist and dissembler on the president’s behalf, now gets a second one as an icon of work-life balance. Trump will find it difficult to track down a replacement with her same combination of easy, cheerful dishonesty and panache. ~Andrew Egger
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AI: Manhattan Project or Jurassic Park?

Let’s hand the microphone to Garrett Graff: “ Most people think of  Jurassic Park  as a cautionary tale for science, when really it’s a cautionary tale for corporate trust and safety teams, board oversight, and regulatory compliance. The dinosaurs’ entirely predictable rampage should really be seen as a failure of the security teams and the fence builders. The mistakes we’re seeing from these frontier AI companies are similarly the failures of the fence builders. *snip* “The battle between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind is something like if Leo Szilard, Arthur Holly Compton, and Edward Teller had each led their own competing private effort to develop an atomic bomb and thermonuclear bomb — with no government assistance or coordination, all backed instead by private equity money — simultaneously building their own competing Los Alamos-style labs and negotiating with the military about how (and if) the military could use their own proprietary individual nuclear weapons."...
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Quote of the day

And in the age of cheap drones, you can't really defend against it.  As we are seeing, it doesn't take long to deplete any missile defenses you have, and no one has missile defenses covering everything anyway.   Maybe most of these attacks won't amount to much, but sometimes... We are ruled by people who have spent their lives saying, "Mommy, he hit me back!" yet are still surprised when it happens.   ~Duncan Black  
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Trump publicizes the vaccine-ASD fable

From Medpage Today: “Speaking about the order at the Oval Office on Monday, Trump repeatedly suggested the number or timing of vaccines could play a role in rising rates of autism spectrum disorder . . .”   Uh, no. What’s been rising is the rate of ASD *diagnoses,” due to changes in classification criteria and increased awareness. There’s no evidence that the incidence of ASD is increasing and there’s no evidence that vaccines have anything to do with ASD. The rates of childhood vaccination in the US have not increased. https://www.medpagetoday.com/pediatrics/vaccines/122557?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2026-08-10&mh=eb71348a5ff6ae370cc6759bc5dc3300&zdee=gAAAAABm4u1YoCP4y5SBTJUyUyqo9KxZhft26L1xeGdP0BzzQQN1Pb_ifR6vFqhFh-3U6Q_nU7DbA-EawzzXKxSRhMOwjrOGuOKbf7OE641eN0HfnK6eObE%3D&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Headlines%20Evening%20-%20Randomized%202026-08-10&utm_term=NL_Daily_DHE_dual-gmail-definition
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Quote of the day

Real threats do not require social influencers, since they are obvious to all. No one had to convince Americans after Pearl Harbor that the danger was great and sacrifice imperative. They saw it clearly and acted. When a modern cable news anchor reports with a smirk that the opposition is destroying this once great republic, cuts to commercial, and then returns with yet another ”crisis,” one can safely assume that, although the issue may or may not be serious, it is not existential. ~Thomas Madden
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Why I take pictures

Most days I go on walks of 4-6 miles in the nearby woods. I bring my camera. I tell people that it gives me something to do with my hands. But it’s more than that. I learned the basics of photography in high school. I used many of those skills as a postdoc and well into my career as a scientist. Digital photography freed me from the darkroom.  Through all those decades, my life was dominated by the future and how to control it. Photography was a means to an end. Revisiting photography after retirement has not just taught me new skills, it’s taught me to live in the moment at a time in my life when the amount of “future” I have left is shrinking. As the professional wildlife photographer Simon d’Entremont says: “Photography doesn’t just change the pictures you make, it changes the person who makes them. Photography is a way of participating in the world instead of consuming it.” In the video link at the end, d’Entrement enumerates six ways that photography is transformative in the w...
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