donutage (Bill Cole)Happy birthday, John McPhee (b. 3/8/1931 in Princeton, NJ)!
Author of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘉𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘴 (1968) among many other works of creative nonfiction.
☮ ♥ ♬ 🧑💻“Over a single weekend, entirely from scratch and heavily “#VibeCoded”, I created by some distance the best #WordProcessor I have ever used. I’ve named it #vibedit. I’m writing in it right now. If there is an actually #productive task for #GenerativeAI, it is as a creator of #bespoke #tools like this. …
… far from removing me from my #work, this #AI experience forced me to think carefully about how I work, and how to craft a fitting tool. I was also confronted as any #craftsperson should be by the minutiae of my #tools”
#WhiteCollar / #ZeroHourWork / #JohnMcPhee / #KEdit <https://archive.md/trxGO> / <https://ft.com/content/071b2770-5106-4530-a290-2a5eba06c8b2>
💧🌏 Greg CocksJohn McPhee’s Short Essay About A 1972 Rockefeller Civil Service Award Winner - Dr. Luna Leopold, The First Chief Hydrologist At The USGS
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https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/rockefeller-public-service-awards-washington-dc-19580430 <--JFK's 1958 speech at the Rockerfeller Civil Service Awards
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https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/lessons-learned-a-legend-luna-leopolds-view-river <-- shared details of Dr. Luna Leopold from the USGS
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https://fiddlrts.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-patch-by-john-mcphee.html <-- shared details of The Patch, by John McPhee
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https://eos.org/opinions/luna-b-leopold-geoscience-pioneer <--shared EOS retrospective of Dr Leopold
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I was reading - with a mug of tea - The Patch (link above) by John McPhee, a decades-old favourite author of mine - and came across this short essay amongst many fine others…
#spatial #datalover #measurements #metrics #hydrology #water #fedservice #fedscience #LunaLeopold #hydrologist #crossdiscipline #RockefellerCivilServiceAward #USGS #JohnMcPhee #writing #readingforpleasure #mission #opendata #mapping #waterresources #watersecurity #wateruse #watermanagement
@USGS
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https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/rockefeller-public-service-awards-washington-dc-19580430 <--JFK's 1958 speech at the Rockerfeller Civil Service Awards
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https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/lessons-learned-a-legend-luna-leopolds-view-river <-- shared details of Dr. Luna Leopold from the USGS
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https://fiddlrts.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-patch-by-john-mcphee.html <-- shared details of The Patch, by John McPhee
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https://eos.org/opinions/luna-b-leopold-geoscience-pioneer <--shared EOS retrospective of Dr Leopold
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I was reading - with a mug of tea - The Patch (link above) by John McPhee, a decades-old favourite author of mine - and came across this short essay amongst many fine others…
#spatial #datalover #measurements #metrics #hydrology #water #fedservice #fedscience #LunaLeopold #hydrologist #crossdiscipline #RockefellerCivilServiceAward #USGS #JohnMcPhee #writing #readingforpleasure #mission #opendata #mapping #waterresources #watersecurity #wateruse #watermanagement
@USGS
I have been digging out my old copies of John McPhee's #books, dipping in, remembering what it was like to be a new #geologist, and how it has carried across into #spatial #data, #geomorphology, #geomorphometry, #hydrology, #landcover, #engineeringgeology, #environmentalscience, #landuse, #massmovement and so much more......
This one paragraph reminded me so strongly of that time,, although I cannot of course write as eloquently:
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"I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes. Geology was called a descriptive science, and with its pitted outwash plains and drowned rivers, its hanging tributaries and starved coastlines, it was nothing if not descriptive. It was a fountain of metaphor—of isostatic adjustments and degraded channels, of angular unconformities and shifting divides, of rootless mountains and bitter lakes..."
#GIS #JohnMcPhee #science #scientificwriting #readingforpleasure #geology #water #landforms #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal
This one paragraph reminded me so strongly of that time,, although I cannot of course write as eloquently:
--
"I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes. Geology was called a descriptive science, and with its pitted outwash plains and drowned rivers, its hanging tributaries and starved coastlines, it was nothing if not descriptive. It was a fountain of metaphor—of isostatic adjustments and degraded channels, of angular unconformities and shifting divides, of rootless mountains and bitter lakes..."
#GIS #JohnMcPhee #science #scientificwriting #readingforpleasure #geology #water #landforms #spatialanalysis #spatiotemporal
Chris AldrichReplied to #ENG818 by Kathleen Fitzgerald (kfitz)
I’m a huge advice writing nerd.
One of my favorite but secreted and very subtle bits of writing advice can be found in James Somers’ blogpost “You’re probably using the wrong dictionary“, which gains advantage by prudent counsel from John McPhee’s “Draft No. 4” (The New Yorker, April 29, 2013) along with some useful technology hacks.
Cassandra House of PriamI finally got to one of my dream #Bookshops #LondonReview and walked out with #AnnieErnaux #JohnMcPhee and #CeliaPaul
Vicky Veritas“When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”
~ John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Mt. Everest is 29,032 feet tall)
