Author Archives: jlredford

The Last Factory

Posted on September 11, 2011 by jlredford

My town of Arlington Massachusetts was first settled in 1635.  Its first factory was a water-powered grist mill built just two years later by a Captain George Cooke.  Its last factory, an ice cream plant, is just being torn down … Continue reading →

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Rural High Tech

Posted on September 6, 2011 by jlredford

I’ve been vacationing with the family at a camp in western Maine owned by some friends of ours.  It’s in the foothills of the White Mountains and is fairly rugged, with deep forests and lots of pretty lakes.  It’s scenic, … Continue reading →

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Reading Criminal Authors

Posted on August 8, 2011 by jlredford

So I was in a bookstore browsing the new non-fiction when I came across “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley.  The cover blurb was intriguing: For two hundred years the pessimists have dominated public discourse, insisting that things will soon … Continue reading →

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The Robot Population of Deep Space

Posted on August 3, 2011 by jlredford

In 1978 I heard Carl Sagan speak at MIT.   The two most important space probes ever, Voyager 1 and 2, had just launched the year before, and  Sagan had been deeply involved with them.  It was his idea to do … Continue reading →

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Another Front in the IP Wars

Posted on July 19, 2011 by jlredford

So here’s a juicy story: a company in Florida, VisionTech Components, was charged last September with selling counterfeit Chinese chips to US military suppliers.    It doesn’t get more politically fraught than that.  The CEO of the company, Shannon Wren, was … Continue reading →

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The End of the Shuttle and the Start of Nothing

Posted on July 11, 2011 by jlredford

So last Friday I watched the liftoff of the last Space Shuttle on the NASA feed in my office.  I saw it for real once in 1992, when I went down to Florida just for the show.  I had just … Continue reading →

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Print Your House

Posted on June 19, 2011 by jlredford

One of the other talks at MIT’s Technology Day was by Lawrence Sass, an associate professor of architecture at MIT.   He’s been looking at how to get computers directly involved with constructing buildings.   As a test case, he built a … Continue reading →

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“The oceans are dissolved information”

Posted on June 5, 2011 by jlredford

Said the MIT professor Sallie Chisholm as she spoke to an audience of alumni at MIT’s Technology Day last Saturday.  She was not talking about a nanotech infestation that was turning the seas into computronium. Well, actually, she was.   It … Continue reading →

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The Big Dig Is Ugly

Posted on June 3, 2011 by jlredford

“It doesn’t matter how much it costs, so long as it looks cheap,” goes the old line about government contracts.  So what does the most expensive civil engineering project in US history look like? Randomly patched pavement.  Fluorescent light fixtures … Continue reading →

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You’ll Never Fly, But Your Robot Can

Posted on May 24, 2011 by jlredford

Werner Herzog’s terrific new movie about the Grotte Chauvet, the “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, has a striking opening shot. You’re looking at rows of grape vines in a vineyard in France, and start to walk down one of its aisles.  … Continue reading →

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