Desolation Row – Los Angeles, 1973

I don’t know if I could ever find this place again, and it surely can’t look like it did in late 1973.  My friend, a small-time real-estate speculator, took me to this no man’s land of a short stretch of beach hillside in the LAX airport flyover zone.  He pointed out that this was beachfront property at wildly bargain prices.  The day of our visit was accompanied by stifling heat and smog and Santa Ana winds that only punctuated the bleakness of the mostly-unlandscaped and barely populated area.  Every few seconds a jet would blast away our conversation.  Where was this?  Perhaps just west of El Segundo, or maybe a bit north of that?  Google Maps?

The Human Face of Big Data

As a kind of postscript to the recent post, “Big Data and Disease “, if you can see the 2014 film, “The Human Face of Big Data”, or read the 2012 book of the same name, you will still find it to be timely.  Recently aired on PBS in its entirety, it should be available in book and DVD form from Amazon and the usual suspects.  Try your local library.  Here is a trailer: