Persistent
Top Posts
-
Recent Posts
- Jiahu: An Actual High-Tech Atlantis
- Actually Made in America
- Give ’em a Short, Sharp Shock and They Will Totally Do It Again
- Little Free Libraries – Boon or Blessing?
- From Creepy DARPA Concept to Useful Widget – A Long But Typical Engineering Journey
- The Odd Longevity of Pink Floyd
- MIT Under Attack
- “Whoosh” – Autonomous Gondolas vs Robo-taxis
- The Most Exciting Day in the History of Arlington MA
- Tesla-Free At Last
-
Join 33 other subscribers
Meta
Archives
Tag Cloud
- american-history
- american-revolution
- avatar-ish
- best-lists
- big-tech
- Big Dig
- book-review
- darpa
- electric-cars
- energy-ish
- evolution
- history
- homo-sapiens
- hypatia
- infrastructure
- inventing
- Libraries
- mad-science
- mit-ish
- movie-ish
- movie-ish political-ish
- obscure-creators-of-the-world
- people-and-numbers
- philosophy
- pink-floyd
- political-ish
- revolutionary-war
- samantha-harvey
- science
- sf-ish
- smart-dust
- solar inverters
- space
- space-balloons
- space-ish
- tech-culture
- tech-culture political-ish
- tech-history
- tech-life
- Tech life in New England
- transit
- travel
- wbms
Author Archives: jlredford
Steampunk vs Apple-ism
I had no idea how big steampunk has gotten. There was a gathering of them in Waltham this last weekend at the Watch City Festival, and 17,000 people showed up. I took the kids there on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, … Continue reading
The Persistence of Beautiful Things
The Cambridge Science Festival was held last week in Cambridge MA, and the kids and I got to go to two of its events. The first was Rocket Day in Danehy Park, where they got to tape fins onto two-liter … Continue reading
A Prank That Looks Too Natural
So I was at a rather dull seminar at MIT when I happened to gaze out the 8th floor window of the Stata building: Yes, that’s a Dalek triumphantly shaking its blasters at the MIT sky line. The silver column … Continue reading
Why Was Heinlein So Wrong?
The eclectic blog Lists of Note recently published a list of predictions that the SF writer Robert Heinlein made in 1952 for what the year 2000 would be like. Here they are, with my comments in red for wrong and … Continue reading
Robotics for Profit and Fun
Last week Kiva Systems, a maker of robots for distribution warehouses, was bought by Amazon for $775M in cash. It’s the biggest deal ever in robotics. They were founded in 2003, and last year had sales of about $100M. Their … Continue reading
Unsuspended Disbelief in “Hunger Games”
In the Oath of the Slan that every trufan must secretly swear, there’s a clause that says you must go and see any movie that’s even vaguely science fiction. You don’t have to do the sequels – one Transformers is … Continue reading
Keurig Dumps Inventor, Builds Millions of Junk Coffee Makers
Keurig single-cup coffee makers are the most unreliable appliances I’ve ever owned. My most recent machine failed after only three weeks, and thus this rant. I’ve owned several of them, and used many more at work, but they never seem … Continue reading
Political Inventors
There’s a great deal of talk in the political world these days about improving STEM education – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. I’m not sure how Technology is different from Engineering, but it does improve the acronym. The US apparently … Continue reading
Every Thing Can Be Improved
Well, maybe not everything can be improved, but every thing can be. “Surely not,” you think. “Some things are so old and worked over that nothing more can be done with them.” Well, how about a garbage can? Is there … Continue reading
What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up
Well, this isn’t literally what I wanted to be, since I wasn’t reading magazines like this in 1959, or at all, actually. But this sense of the mysterious and awesome work that was happening right now in labs all over … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
2 Comments
A Niche in the Library of Babel 