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Author Archives: jlredford
SF Writers At War
In 1942 three of the country’s leading SF writers – Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague De Camp – all started working together at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The US had just entered WW II, and everyone wanted to … Continue reading
“MIT Seeks to Flatter Wealthy Businessmen”
… is what the headline should have read on this Boston Globe article, “Stars of invention – Walk of Fame in Kendall Square celebrates technology and the entrepreneurial spirit”. Apparently MIT and the city of Cambridge have set up a … Continue reading
The Last Factory
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
Rural High Tech
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
Reading Criminal Authors
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
The Robot Population of Deep Space
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
Another Front in the IP Wars
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
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
Print Your House
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
“The oceans are dissolved information”
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
