It was July 1869, and astronomers were making frantic preparations. A total solar eclipse was coming to the United States, and new, fundamental knowledge was going to be there for the taking, by whoever got there first. Scientific expeditions were planned to travel into the path of totality to peer at the Sun, and the rare sight of its ghostly, pale outer atmosphere.

On a hot August afternoon in France, 1901, Miss Elizabeth Morison and Miss Frances Lamont, on holiday from England, took a trip to visit the Palace of Versailles, a former royal residence some twelve miles west of Paris. “We went by train,” they would later recall, “and walked through the rooms and galleries of the Palace with interest.” But it was not to be the pleasant day out that the ladies had anticipated.

Interesting stuff!

This speech was delivered as the keynote address for the May 17, 2012 commencement ceremony at The University of the Arts.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1554099

It used to be a user friendly lightweight browser.

Now it’s hardly recognizable from its launch. It’s heavy bloated and slurps up user data into invasive user profiles.

Those individual user profiles are rolled up into buckets of collective thoughts ripe for analysis and manipulation.

Can I get this group of people to buy my product? To read my book? To vote the way I want them to? To pay attention to this national issue? To ignore that one?

John Bull - One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone.