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Author Archives: jlredford
Toys As a Leading Wedge for World Domination
So I was with the kids in the toy aisle of a drugstore when I saw something that made my blood run cold: This Kung Zhu toy makes squeaky little Ai-ee karate noises, and runs around on a table avoiding … Continue reading
Seeing Your Work
On my first job out of school, I was told to design an instruction decoder for a microprocessor. It was a complex block for the early 80s, taking all of 30,000 transistors, and it occupied one whole corner of the … Continue reading
The Education of Billionaires
Or rather, the lack thereof. The recent movie about Facebook, “The Social Network”, claimed that those guys became billionaires by abandoning their schooling and being as jerk-ish as possible. Two of the four billionaires created by Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and … Continue reading
Where Science and Religion Actually Do Mix
I wrote a while back about how the science-oriented movies “Creation” and “Agora” appear to have failed in the United States because of animosity from Christianists. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to find a scientific institution that is entirely … Continue reading
How Nice To Have a President Who Can Speak
So even when he’s had a pretty serious political defeat, even when he looks really depressed, Obama still has the presence of mind to use an obscure term like “shellacking” in his post-midterm-election press conference. You know this is something … Continue reading
Lovecraft news
So Guillermo Del Toro is going to do a film version of H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”. There’s been a steady stream of awful Lovecraft adaptations, but this will be the biggest version yet. I’ve long been … Continue reading
Made in MA, Bought by CA (E.g. “Get Lamp”)
One of the depressing things about the Massachusetts economy is how many startups here get bought up by firms from other states, particularly California. Lots of good ideas start here, but move elsewhere before they scale up to significant size, … Continue reading
Russians Get It Done
The Sep 2010 issue of IEEE Spectrum has a nice example of how determination beats technology. The article is “A Digital Soyuz” by James Oberg, and discusses how the Russians have upgraded their main manned spacecraft. They’ve replaced the main … Continue reading
More Making, Less Financeering
There’s a nice profile (abstract here) of the British inventor James Dyson in the Sep 20, ’10 issue of the New Yorker. His eponymous vacuum cleaner has made him vastly wealthy (~$1.5B) for a refreshing reason – it’s a better … Continue reading
Asimov Called It
So I happened to be leafing through Fact and Fancy, a collection of Isaac Asimov’s science columns from 1958 to 1961, when I came across one called “No More Ice Ages?”. With his usual brio he elucidates an arcane subject … Continue reading
A Niche in the Library of Babel 