Persistent
Top Posts
-
Recent Posts
- Give ’em a Short, Sharp Shock and They Will Totally Do It Again
- Little Free Libraries – Boon or Blessing?
- From Creepy DARPA Concept to Useful Widget – A Long But Typical Engineering Journey
- The Odd Longevity of Pink Floyd
- MIT Under Attack
- “Whoosh” – Autonomous Gondolas vs Robo-taxis
- The Most Exciting Day in the History of Arlington MA
- Tesla-Free At Last
- Cool Space Stuff: VLEO and Electric Jets, Rocket Planes
- “Sapiens” and the Fifth Order of Being
-
Join 33 other subscribers
Meta
Archives
Tag Cloud
- american-history
- american-revolution
- avatar-ish
- best-lists
- big-tech
- Big Dig
- book-review
- darpa
- electric-cars
- energy-ish
- evolution
- history
- homo-sapiens
- hypatia
- infrastructure
- inventing
- Libraries
- mad-science
- mit-ish
- movie-ish
- movie-ish political-ish
- obscure-creators-of-the-world
- people-and-numbers
- philosophy
- pink-floyd
- political-ish
- revolutionary-war
- samantha-harvey
- science
- sf-ish
- smart-dust
- solar inverters
- space
- space-balloons
- space-ish
- tech-culture
- tech-culture political-ish
- tech-history
- tech-life
- Tech life in New England
- transit
- travel
- wbms
Tag Archives: big-tech
“Whoosh” – Autonomous Gondolas vs Robo-taxis
A New Zealand-based company, Whoosh Solutions, is building a new kind of urban transit system – a network of overhead fixed cables that are used by self-driving battery-powered gondolas to go from point to point. They can switch from one … Continue reading
Serious Tech Tourism – the Niagara Parks Power Station
My wife and I recently went to the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake Ontario. This has been presenting plays by George Barnard Shaw and other 20th century playwrights every summer for the last 60 years. It’s held in a perfect little … Continue reading
A Golden Age for Chemists – MIT on Climate Change
The physicists used to have all the fun, what with building species-ending weapons and ominously declaring that I Am Become Death. Yet nukes turned out to be useless for actual military purposes, as Putin has discovered to his dismay, and … Continue reading
Innovations of the Big Dig 3 – Scheme-Z => Zakim Bridge, Conclusion
Here’s the last of the major innovations described in the WGBH podcast, The Big Dig, along with my take on how it all turned out. Along with the straight construction challenges of the Dig, described in the previous posts, Fred … Continue reading
Innovations of the Big Dig 2 – Slurry, Jacking, Freezing
Let me again recommend the WGBH podcast, The Big Dig, which was the inspiration for these posts. It’s full of great stories, but I’d like to concentrate on the innovations that made this vast project possible. Last time I talked about a … Continue reading
“Oppenheimer” and the Limits of Scientific Influence
One of the favorite tropes of SF is the mad scientist. He (always he) represents the disruptive power of modern science to old beliefs, and of modern technology to old ways of life. He becomes crazed with this power, and … Continue reading
When Will Scotland Sell More Wind Than Whisky?
Here’s something unexpected – there is actually an advantage to living on a storm-swept rock in the North Atlantic: Scotland now has more wind power per person than any other country! They’re now up to 1900 W/person of capacity for … Continue reading
The Netherlands Would Be a Pretty Nice Future
The Washington Post today has a fascinating article about what would seem to be a dull topic: Netherlands Agriculture Technology. It notes that tiny little Holland, with the land area of Maryland and only 17M people, is the second largest … Continue reading
Ukraine v Russia Is a Tech War Like Union v Confederacy
In the 1860s the Europeans watched the American Civil War in horrified fascination. It had been almost 50 years since the Napoleonic Wars, when they had been in a real war with matched combatants. They had been mainly fighting colonial … Continue reading
Launching US Rockets From Soviet Bombers
In the last post I complained about how ugly the Soviet ekranoplans were. I’m glad I can now pass along a story about one of their really beautiful planes – the TU-160 supersonic bomber. It almost got used for doing … Continue reading
A Niche in the Library of Babel 