Orel Family

Bruce Springsteen and Max Weinberg, earlier this evening at Madison Square Garden as seen on periscope. People using the mobile app can add comments and hearts. It's Wednesday night and I'm sitting at home in Michigan and I'm watching Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performing live in Madison Square Garden. Oh, it's not on TV, and it's not "official." The picture is somewhat awful, but the sound is pretty good through my computer speakers. Anyway, what can we expect from a cell phone? This day has been coming for many years. The day when an event like this would be fearlessly broadcast, live, from inside the event venue to anywhere in the outside world. Periscope , acquired by twitter in 2015 before it was even released to the public, was hardly the first app to enable broadcasts from smartphones, but so far it sure seems to be the best. Their slogan is, "Explore the world through someone else's eyes." A week ago, when Bru...

Graph 1: Ascending: The global temperatures of my life. (data source: GISS) January 9, 2016:  Last January, I posted a piece I titled, "Just a Little Bit Warmer," just after NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) released the final piece of data for 2014 global temperatures. As expected, the data showed that 2014 was the hottest year since the beginning of record keeping in 1980, albeit by a very small margin. In a few days, GISS will publish the final data for 2015. Once again, it'll be a new record. This time, by a wide margin. The data will be at  http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt . In October, the Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index crossed 1 full degree celsius above normal, for the first time ever. November became the 2nd month in a row above that mark, and December may well make it 3 consecutive. 2015 will also mark the 4th consecutive year of rising global temperatures; the last time that happened was 100 ...