A quick post for a quick part of the Ditch Day process: the Theme of the Stack. At some point in its evolution from ‘yeah, you’re never getting into my room, no matter how hard you try’ to ‘I’m going to distract you from getting into my room with an... [Read More]

While standing inside the Ames 80x120 (dimensions, in feet, of the cross section) wind tunnel today, it was pretty hard not to just keep looking up in awe and thinking ‘man, you could fit my house in here…twice.’ However, when I did glance down, I saw this awesome setup: Yes.... [Read More]

A sobering thought that occurred to me as I walked through the Computer Science Museum: Behind each innovation on display, behind each unappreciated advance that made them possible, behind each one of the thousands of failures from which the successes emerged were the blood, sweat, and tears of dozens, hundreds... [Read More]

Continuing yesterday’s theme, another unappreciated aspect in the history of technology is the nonlinearity of progress. Many steps in a seemingly straightforward progression are made possible through advances in other, wildly disparate fields. Take, for example, the miniaturization of microprocessors from yesterday. It wasn’t simply a matter of ‘oh, we’ve... [Read More]

A visit to the Computer History Museum has left me with an excellent brain buzz. Of the cognitive cogs that it set in motion, here is a first round of highlights: It is so easy to think of history as a series of large nodes, connected by lines through a... [Read More]