Dear Elon Musk,
Nearly every civilization and culture has had a different story for the stars of the Milky Way to shine upon us from the vast ocean of contemplation above.
The stars are the first signs we receive as children that we live our lives, so powerful and yet fragile, enduring over great unknowns and yet fleeting, as members of a group that has persisted for eons and yet are contained here by what magical forces separate us from the immense infinities of the universe.
We live our lives under this umbrella of recognization, a blank open canvas to…
“How are we going to pay for it,” I imagine FDR asking, to his aides.
“Sir?”
“They are going to figure it out.”
“Sir.”
“They are going to figure it out; and I am going to be running for re-election.”
“For your fourth term.”
“I… I just have a premonition about it.”
“Would you like us to look into it, Sir?”
“…”
My father, who grew up entangled in the debates of the Vietnam war draft before volunteering to serve for the 101st Airborne, often described the Government to me like this: they don’t build things, Dave, they don’t make…
David Bernat, February 7th, 2021
Starlight will be building and introducing a new feature on the information it sources from news and other text based documents. We will be deploying this feature for natural disaster prevention operations with an initial sector use in wildfires. We will start with reputation based veracity confirmation of text documents in the news domain, but quickly scale up efforts to begin what will become cross-modal geospatial data confirmation of a distributed platform.
We have a small internal service for education called WritersBloc which allows teams to program one or more personalized-information bots to search Twitter on their behalf to collect…
My friend Thomas Fletcher and I tried to enjoy Big Bang Theory one afternoon in his Pasadena apartment. He was two years out of Caltech with a law degree and a fiancée and offer at a prodigious D.C. law firm. I was waiting for my gap year to end between my two years watching Goldman Sachs and waiting for my graduate career at Cornell University to begin. He was nostalgic for his years of intense Chemistry and the uncomfortable discover that out in the rest of the world nobody knew or particularly cared about smart people.
With me watching from…
Taylor Swift has gotten me through a lot of hard times. I remember the early days of my life in California, when my relationships from back home in New York City had fallen apart, and driving windows-down through the western Redwood forests, rain drenching the wildfire prone regions, listening to her Shake It Off as I handled the curves. The smell of fresh, wet redwood mixing with open California landscapes still feels like personal romantic freedom.
When Taylor Swift sings she feels intimate and personal to me, as though she is singing as the quintessential cultural American womanness I have…
The greatest insight of western law is that the oppression of the individual must be fractionated down to the individual, so sovereignty of the individual means the individual has the intrinsic meaning. This meaning transcends the rights of the State, leading to the consequences: innocent until proven guilty.
Intersectionality is a branch of modern sociology that transcends former well systematized theories of Normativity, most notably in psychology. These theories break apart the engine of western thinking that a singular structure ought rule all of social behaviorism. …
Eastwood. Clint Eastwood. The moment is a morality tale on not needing to defend his masculinity with tough guy machismo and violence. Marty McFly and Doc Brown are time-travelers on a hurry to get back to their own futures. Full of resolve and bravado the scientist-genius is cheered on by the barroom patrons for one last shot of whiskey: “To the future!” Doc Brown passes out.
I went looking up American and international rates of alcoholism to write this article and I rarely have been so floored. …
Starlight. Making better satellite analytics possible.