Author Archives: jlredford

Every Thing Can Be Improved

Posted on February 1, 2012 by jlredford

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 →

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What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up

Posted on January 21, 2012 by jlredford

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 →

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A Catastrophic Failure of Verification

Posted on January 15, 2012 by jlredford

So your competitor has come out with a new product.  It beats yours hands down.  You’ve been working away on a similar thing, but your engineers are arrogant and uninterested in the ideas of others.  You’re now hopelessly behind.  You … Continue reading →

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A Small Eco-Doom

Posted on January 4, 2012 by jlredford

So your family has been farming a particular spot of North Dakota for the last 130 years. When you were a kid, there was a lake off in the distance, Devil’s Lake, that was good for perch fishing, but horrible … Continue reading →

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The Oldest Active Computer

Posted on December 29, 2011 by jlredford

Digital computers are a fairly old technology at this point.  The first ones date from the mid-1940s, which makes them older than nuclear reactors, integrated circuits, polypropylene, and orbital satellites. What they aren’t is a durable technology.  Computers age fast, … Continue reading →

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The Farewell Dossier and CIA Cyber-Sabotage

Posted on December 17, 2011 by jlredford

I recently came across an extraordinary story of Soviet industrial espionage and subsequent CIA wrong-doing – the Farewell Dossier.    I heard about it through the French movie “Farewell” (2009), which is a fictionalized version of it.  “Farewell” is a rather … Continue reading →

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The Moon Is Dull

Posted on December 1, 2011 by jlredford

Last summer there were two movies partially set on the Moon: “Transformers: the Dark of the Moon” and “Apollo 18”.  In the first, the Apollo program has a secret agenda to explore alien robots that are discovered there.  In the … Continue reading →

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Beautiful Inventors

Posted on November 23, 2011 by jlredford

So I see that Richard Rhodes is coming out with a new book about Hedy Lamarr and the invention of spread spectrum communications: Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.  … Continue reading →

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Boston Power becomes Beijing Power

Posted on October 20, 2011 by jlredford

Well here’s a depressing story – a local lithium-ion battery startup, Boston Power, has recently been bought out by Chinese investors and the Chinese government, and will be moving most of its R&D operations to Beijing.  The American execs are … Continue reading →

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Auto Automobiles

Posted on October 14, 2011 by jlredford

The consistently interesting Brian Hayes has a column in the latest issue of American Scientist speculating on the consequences of true self-driving automobiles.  He makes a number of valuable points: For liability reasons, they’ll only be present in large numbers … Continue reading →

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