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
The Engineering of Biology at MIT
One of the big reunion activities at MIT is Technology Day, a series of lectures from faculty done shortly after commencement. This year the theme was Synthetic Life, and the talks were just as creepy and interesting as you might … Continue reading
How Did Wind Get So Cheap?
Rather surprisingly, wind power is now the cheapest form of electricity in the US: This comes from the tree-hugging socialists at Lazard Asset Management. Unsubsidized wind comes in at $32 to $62 per MWh, depending on the site. Natural gas … Continue reading
When Modeling Goes Bad – “Weapons of Math Destruction”
The political modeling that I talked about in the last post now affects most decisions that institutions make with respect to individuals. This is nicely described in in the recent book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil. She has … Continue reading
Weaponized Psychology Helped Elect Trump
The US has just elected a president who is an outright criminal – a man who cheats contractors, steals from investors, and assaults women. What on earth happened? Everyone has a theory, but let me add one more – his … Continue reading
Airborne LIDAR: Cool or Creepy?
The Guardian recently published a fascinating story, Revealed: Cambodia’s vast medieval cities hidden beneath the jungle, about the discovery of huge city complexes near Angkor Wat. The temples of Angkor are built of stone, but these structures are roadways or … Continue reading
How Space Science Might Have Gone
But for an accident of history, this is how space science would have been done: This is the launch a few days ago of the Compton Spectrometer and Imager, a soft gamma-ray (0.2 to 10 MeV) telescope designed to look … Continue reading
The Human Population of Space
… is currently about six. That is, if one adds up all the person-years spent in space by various crews, it comes to about six for recent years. In a previous post from 2010, “The Population of Space”, I had … Continue reading
Adding Glitz to NASA: the Interstellar Probe
Hmm, what should NASA do next after the spectacular Curiosity mission? A solar observer? Seen that. A lunar orbiter? Like the ones China and India already did? A Mars orbiter? Like the several that are already there? Even I … Continue reading
Peak Nuclear Has Passed…
… for both weapons and power. Nuclear weapons have been the great looming threat for most of my life. These were devices built to end civilization. So it’s startling to see how fast they have been declining: Source: “Global Nuclear … Continue reading
Big Data Comes to Politics
The January 2013 issue of MIT’s Technology Review has an interesting article on the Big Data techniques used by the Obama and Romney campaigns in the US 2012 election: “A More Perfect Union” by Sasha Issenberg. No, this is not … Continue reading
A Niche in the Library of Babel 