Sunday, March 23, 2008
They're calling again
Another piece on California's least charismatic -- yet still eminently watchable -- pinnipeds. This time, it's on Smithsonian's website complete with pics.
Labels: ano nuevo, california, elephant seals, Smithsonian
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Call of the Tubby
Slipping a little science into Britain's Spectator this week, I wrote about the elephant seals of California's Año Nuevo for the magazine's travel section. If you've never been -- and are in the San Francisco Bay area between December and March -- I highly recommend a trip to the beach, where you can get pretty damn close to seals that can weigh up to 4,500 pounds.
Labels: ano nuevo, bay area, elephant seals, spectator, travel
Saturday, March 01, 2008
On the Media
One more interview about the Stasi story I wrote for Wired, this time on "On the Media," a show I used to listen to regularly back in the U.S. At left is a picture I took of the warehouse in Magdeburg where the BStU, or Federal Ministry for the Stasi Files, keeps the 16,000 bags of paper they hope to eventually reconstruct.
I recorded the interview out at the RBB studios in west Berlin, which was sort of cool -- I got the feeling the studio hadn't changed much since the era of West Berlin with a capital "W," and the nice woman who helped me record my end of the session had been working there since shortly after I was born.
One of the things I've been reflecting on since writing this piece is how much our definitions of surveillance have changed. The Stasi had to work really, really hard to gather information that most people today gladly put on their Facebook pages -- religion, political views, the names of their friends, their whereabouts on a day-to-day basis. And while this project is interesting because it's physically tangible, compared to the volume of electronic data about us -- our purchases, our bank balances, our movements and the things we look for on line -- stored in computers as a matter of course the millions of pages in the Stasi archives is actually kind of paltry.
Just a thought. And an explanation, in case you wonder why my Facebook and Linkedin profiles are a bit skimpy. No need to feed the beast, you know?
Labels: interview, on the media, stasi, wired
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