When I was thirteen years old, a very literate friend of my parents was chatting with me one day about what I was reading. When she learned that I was an avid reader of books in the Tom Swift Jr. science fiction series (Tom Swift and His Jetmarine, Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship, Tom Swift and His Giant Robot), she said, “I think we can do better than that,” . . .
Author: Paul Knight
Streaming Services
We’ve all read about the “cable cutters” who have dropped their expensive cable TV subscriptions in favor of an ala carte collection of streaming services that gives them access to the programs they want without paying for stuff they don’t.
Jennifer and I find ourselves in the more expensive category of having signed up for various streaming services while retaining our cable subscription. . . .
Hearing Aids – Part 2
I wrote yesterday about my decision at the beginning of this year to get hearing aids. When I was trying them out before ordering them, my audiologist, Ryan Matoon, said that he had configured the hearing aids to provide only an 80% correction of my hearing loss because most people found that experiencing a full correction right away was hard to take. Fully hearing all the sounds one hasn’t previously been hearing can be distracting if not overwhelming. . . .
Hearing Aids – Part 1
In January I became one of the approximately 5 million people in the U.S. who wear hearing aids. For at least 15 years prior to that I was one of about 24 million Americans who the NIH says would benefit from hearing aids but don’t have them.
Both of my parents and my brother developed significant hearing loss years ago, and the first evidence that I also had a hearing problem came when I started having trouble understanding two people in my life. . . .
President Trump’s Most Impressive Accomplishment
As I dipped in and out of the coverage of this week’s Democratic National Convention, I kept being struck by how Donald Trump has done more to unite the Democratic Party than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The Future of the Republican Party
I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine who closely follows the political scene and is an avid student of history. The topic was how much influence Donald Trump will have on the Republican Party after January, assuming he loses to Joe Biden in the November election. . . .
Making People Wrong
Ever since I wrote about Kevin Kelly’s “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice,” I’ve been musing about what I would include if I were to assemble my own list of advice to young people. What lessons have I learned over the course of my life that not everyone might yet have learned? I blogged last month about the first thing I came up with. Here’s number two: . . .
What If Trump Tries to Subvert the Election?
I never imagined it would come to this, but Jennifer and I have started talking about how we may need to be prepared to go to Washington, D.C., on short notice to join protests there if Donald Trump attempts to undermine the presidential election. That was even before we read this OpEd piece in today’s New York Times about the work being done by the Transition Integrity Project to prepare for such an eventuality…
Writing Back to Spammers
My brother-in-law Tom sent me a link to a delightful TED talk about one man’s response to an email scam. As Tom noted, it provides some much-needed quarantine amusement.
Humankind, by Rutger Bregman
I blogged in June about an interview with Rutger Bregman that I’d heard on the public radio program “On the Media.” Bregman had just published a book entitled Humankind: A Hopeful History. I was so intrigued by what he had to say that I immediately ordered the book. I finished reading it yesterday…