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]

Saturday Stories! Sometimes people act like we have Space all figured out – mostly nothing with a few interesting phenomena, but we haveunknown unknowns in our own backyard!</p> Cremation Cubesats Anybody? Privacy concerns... in spaaaaaace Things I don't think the news needs to be reminding people: Trees record things in... [Read More]

Sad news from today: it looks like the planet-hunting Kepler telescope has been permanently crippled by a mechanical malfunction. I wonder what amount of the unfeasibility of sending a mission to fix Kepler is technical, what part is due to real cost-benefit analysis, and what part is just a lack... [Read More]