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Author Archives: jlredford
When People Were Proud of Their Government
If you happened to be driving around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir in Boston and saw this building, what would you imagine it to be? A town hall? A library? Those are certainly the kinds of buildings that got this Richardsonian … Continue reading
How Cool is Your City?
If you’re not familiar with the crowd-sourced art-funding site Kickstarter.com, go and have a look. This is a wonderful idea. People submit proposals for various kinds of cool projects to the site, which then posts them. The submitters say they’ll … Continue reading
People Hate Being Outside
Spring is here in New England, so we’re finally getting out and about voluntarily, instead of being forced to go outside in order to shovel snow or wade through the drifts to our cars. The trees are budding, the daffs … Continue reading
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Maniacal Energy Storage Schemes
A common complaint about renewable energy is that it’s intermittent – the sun isn’t always shining and the wind isn’t always blowing. One rarely hears the opposite charge against nuclear power – it’s generating electricity even when no one wants … Continue reading
Electric Vans Already Win
Update 5/13/11 – Smith will soon start using A123 batteries. See bottom. I wrote here about how electric cars were just better pieces of machinery than gas-powered ones, since they were quieter, handled better, and were more reliable. This article, … Continue reading
The Research Organizations of the World as seen at ISSCC
As described in the last entry, the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) is the largest and most important electronics conference in the world. That entry listed which countries and US states contributed the most papers to it. How about … Continue reading
The Technical Progress of the World, as seen at ISSCC
The world’s largest, oldest, and most important electronics technical conference is the International Solid State Circuits Conference, ISSCC. It’s been held every year since 1954, about as long as there have been solid state circuits, i.e. transistors. It was originally … Continue reading
The Long View
At a time when the US Congress is divided on whether climate change even exists, the Massachusetts Audubon Society is making plans on how to adapt to it. Their problem is that climate change emperils their nature sanctuaries. They own … Continue reading
Edward Tufte – Guru of the Information Class
I recently had the pleasure of taking one of Edward Tufte‘s seminars, “Presenting Data and Information”. He’s a professor emeritus of statistics, political science, and computer science at Yale, and the author of an important set of books on charting: … Continue reading
Anti-Romantic Lighting
If you’re ever taken out to dinner to a restaurant with fluorescent lighting, you can be pretty sure that your date is an idiot. That’s the least flattering kind of light known. Well, maybe it’s not as bad as yellow … Continue reading
A Niche in the Library of Babel 