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Tag Archives: tech-history
Has Growth Stalled in Spite of Third Industrial Revolution Tech?
Paul Krugman and Business Week have recently referred to a grim new paper – “Is US Economic Growth Over?” by Robert Gordon. He’s an economics professor at Northwestern University, and notes that real growth peaked in the 1960s, and has … Continue reading
Building Good Stuff for the Wrong Reason
Two years ago I was asked to look at the assets of a failed startup. All its equipment and intellectual property were about to be sold for a pittance, so I was supposed to see what could be saved. The … Continue reading
The Persistence of Beautiful Things
The Cambridge Science Festival was held last week in Cambridge MA, and the kids and I got to go to two of its events. The first was Rocket Day in Danehy Park, where they got to tape fins onto two-liter … Continue reading
Political Inventors
There’s a great deal of talk in the political world these days about improving STEM education – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. I’m not sure how Technology is different from Engineering, but it does improve the acronym. The US apparently … 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
An Incandescence of Invention – “Edison’s Electric Light”
When a light bulb appears above someone’s head in a cartoon, that’s the visual shorthand for inspiration. How nice, then, to find out that the actual story of its invention is as extraordinary as it appears to be on the … 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
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
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 