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Author Archives: jlredford
Plug For “Let’s See This Work – An Engineer At the Movies”
I’ve started a new blog that’s specific to movies, looking at them with a technical eye: Let’s See This Work . It’s not so much about the technical construction of movies, but rather notes from a technical person on what … Continue reading
How Did Wind Get So Cheap?
Rather surprisingly, wind power is now the cheapest form of electricity in the US: This comes from the tree-hugging socialists at Lazard Asset Management. Unsubsidized wind comes in at $32 to $62 per MWh, depending on the site. Natural gas … Continue reading
The Auto Industry Does Its Bit
I recently leased a 2017 Chevy Volt. It’s a nice mid-range car with good interior space, a lot of zip, and is really quiet. It’s even rather stylish: And it gets 75 miles per gallon in terms of CO2 emissions, … Continue reading
When Modeling Goes Bad – “Weapons of Math Destruction”
The political modeling that I talked about in the last post now affects most decisions that institutions make with respect to individuals. This is nicely described in in the recent book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. She has … Continue reading
Weaponized Psychology Helped Elect Trump
The US has just elected a president who is an outright criminal – a man who cheats contractors, steals from investors, and assaults women. What on earth happened? Everyone has a theory, but let me add one more – his … Continue reading
The Winningest SF Authors Are Women
The New Yorker recently published a charming interview by Julie Phillips of Ursula K. Le Guin. It described her upbringing in a house full of myth and story headed by her father the great anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, her difficult relationship … Continue reading
Assange is Winning
A colleague pointed me to a good New York Times article last week, Why Samsung Abandoned Its Galaxy Note 7 Flagship Phone, on the epic disaster of its exploding phones: After the initial reports that the lithium-ion batteries were catching … Continue reading
Best Demos Ever
Just this week a chip that I’ve been working on for the last couple of years finally came alive. My colleagues put it on a board, loaded up the software, and it ran! This was what the scene looked like: … Continue reading
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Airborne LIDAR: Cool or Creepy?
The Guardian recently published a fascinating story, Revealed: Cambodia’s vast medieval cities hidden beneath the jungle, about the discovery of huge city complexes near Angkor Wat. The temples of Angkor are built of stone, but these structures are roadways or … Continue reading
How Space Science Might Have Gone
But for an accident of history, this is how space science would have been done: This is the launch a few days ago of the Compton Spectrometer and Imager, a soft gamma-ray (0.2 to 10 MeV) telescope designed to look … Continue reading
