Listening to lots of Dr John today.  So much good stuff out there.  A good one from The City That Care Forgot.

Catching up on my magazines.  Interesting one pager in IEEE Spectrum.  Was surprised that cars are about the same as airplanes, energy wise on a per person, per mile basis. Also surprised that modern high speed trains beat both by 10x.

Fast Trains Are Energy Efficient (And Fast)

Cars and planes make sense for short and long distances, but for intercity travel, they don’t even come close to fast trains

A sad week for New Orleans.  First the loss of Leah Chase, now Dr. John.  I saw him live in the early 1990s at First Avenue, Prince’s club.  Going Back to New Orleans is one of my favorite albums, and his post-Katrina album The City That Care Forgot is an an underappreciated classic.  The definitive artistic statement on Hurricane Katrina and it’s aftermath.  The man had a colorful life.  Going to have to pick up his biography, Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Night Tripper.  His obit from Nola.com:

Dr. John, a true New Orleans music legend, dies at age 77

Updated 5:41 PM; Today 5:07 PM

I’m always liked the idea of Wafer Scale Integration (WSI).  Looks like some people are having another go at it using GPUs.  From the Next Platform.  A few months old (catching up on some reading today)

GIVING WAFERSCALE PROCESSORS ANOTHER SHOT

February 11, 2019 Michael Feldman

Just stuff from the last week.  My son’s high school graduation, my new shoe rack, bees across the street and cats in bowls.

I never could figure out Uber. I always said they were just running an illegal taxi business.  It is probably worse than I thought.  A longish article, but worth a read.  From American Affairs Journal:

Uber’s Path of Destruction

by Hubert Horan

 

Yesterday my daughter’s iPhone Gmail started acting up.  Then my wife’s iPad.  I figured it was an Apple thing.  Then my Linux box started acting funny.  Lots of IMAP retries.  Turned out it was a Google outage.  Seems to be network congestion on the east coast.  I predict we will be seeing more of this in the future as these systems get larger and more complex.

Leah Chase was an old friend of the family.  My dad was a photographer and took pictures in both black and white schools during segregation.  He would take his black clients to Dooky Chase for lunch.  I suppose he was one of the only white people who frequented the place in those days.

In later years I would go there with my father for lunch.  Mrs. Chase would always come out and chat. I remember going there once in the mid-1990s with my new digital camera (an early Kodak 600) and taking her picture.  Like everyone at the time (digital cameras were brand new) she was fascinated to see the picture immediately on the LCD display on the back of the camera.

I mentioned that I would post it to the internet (I had a personal web site at the time).  She drew the line at this.  “Nah Ah. I don’t want to be on the internet.  Somebody told me I was on the internet and I told them to take me off!”.  I should have realized that like many of the old institutions in New Orleans, change came only very gradually to Dooky Chase.