December 10, 2011 – 5:25 pm
Okay, forget Solyndra. If the Obama administration really is serious about “investing” in “innovation”, they should have a look here.
November 23, 2011 – 12:31 pm
A recent article in the Times took a look at Google X, Google’s hush-hush advanced-projects lab. It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the […]
November 17, 2011 – 10:59 pm
As we grow more and more dependent on interactive electronic media, we’re also giving away more and more information about everything we say and do. We don’t seem to mind much, given that we’ve blithely been making this tradeoff en masse for some time now, but the latest generation of smartphones have upped the ante […]
November 1, 2011 – 9:42 pm
The “uncanny valley” is getting creepier all the time. Have a little tour — here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and, perhaps creepiest of all, here.
October 26, 2011 – 8:53 am
Among the snazzier features of the new iPhone is a voice-activated assistant called Siri. My daughter has one of the new phones and gave me a demo the other day, and I was duly impressed (although this is obviously a technology that is still in its infancy). Apparently, though, Siri is having trouble adjusting to […]
October 12, 2011 – 5:47 pm
Here’s a short video from Ray Kurzweil, in which he outlines his view of our progress thorough six “epochs” of the evolution of intelligence. I’m inclined to think he’s overlooking or ignoring some serious possible impediments to this progression, going forward (not to mention some unwelcome possible outcomes), but this is of course just a […]
October 3, 2011 – 8:36 pm
Poking around at NRO just now, I ran across some solid pessimism from PayPal founder Peter Thiel. In a piece called “The End of the Future“, he argues that the steady technological progress that pulled the world’s economy upward for a very long time has stalled. The essay seems a shade too gloomy, even for […]
October 1, 2011 – 11:14 pm
Here’s something I’m in no hurry to see on the road: the mind-reading car. Scientists at the EPFL have already developed brain-machine interface (BMI) systems that allow wheelchair users to manoeuvre their chairs by thought transference. Their next step will be finding a way to incorporate that technology into the way motorists interact with their […]
September 26, 2011 – 8:04 pm
I have to admit: this looks like fun. Thanks JK for the link.
My friend and colleague, the extravagantly gifted software engineer, globe-trotting bon vivant, and intrepid adventurer Yaniv Sarig, has sent me a outrageously funny item that will, I’m afraid, only evoke incapacitating hilarity in those of you who know a thing or two about programming. But it’s too good not to share, so here it is. […]
Here’s a happy item: More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA’s twin Voyager probes are now at the edge of the solar system. Not only that, they’re still working. And with each passing day they are beaming back a message that, to scientists, is both unsettling and thrilling. The message is, “Expect the […]
My birthday’s just gone by, on April 13th — but in case you’re wondering what to get me next year…
This is brilliant, just wonderful. I don’t know how I hadn’t heard about it until just now.
January 17, 2011 – 10:33 am
I like it for watching “Nictitate at Nite”. Here.
December 6, 2010 – 12:36 am
In the old days of recording, we did our work in magnificent studios, lavishly equipped with the finest consoles, microphones and signal-processing equipment, and we preserved our work on magnetic tape. But now that the digital revolution has battered the record business to its knees and ground most of the old recording studios into dust […]
November 26, 2010 – 5:07 pm
A little while back we posted an item about the purpose of the sophisticated “Stuxnet” computer virus, which appears to have been aimed at Iran’s nuclear program. Everybody agrees it was one hell of a piece of work. Now, here’s an update on how it did what it did. This is some serious programming, folks. […]
November 15, 2010 – 4:46 pm
Readers may recall the “Stuxnet” computer virus that appeared in the news a few months ago. It was widely assumed that the malware was aimed, probably by Israel, at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant. The code has now been very thoroughly analyzed, and it seems it had a tightly focused purpose: to sabotage uranium-refinement centrifuges by […]
October 10, 2010 – 10:53 pm
In Thursday’s post I took the measure of the river of data that my plugged-in life brings my way, and noted that, as much as I like having access to it all, I’m finding it almost impossible to keep up with its ever-increasing volume. (“Drinking from a fire-hose”, we used to say at PubSub.) The […]
October 7, 2010 – 11:03 pm
As much as I love the Internet — I’m a keen consumer of information, and I don’t know how I spent the first four decades of my life without it — it sure is getting hard to keep up. I have a personal email account, and a work account. In order that I don’t miss […]
September 28, 2010 – 10:49 pm
Yesterday’s paper had an item about a computer virus, Stuxnet by name, that has found its way into industrial networks around the world, most particularly in Iran. So sophisticated was the virus that it seemed to all that it was probably the work of a government agency — and the likely suspect, given the apparent […]
August 9, 2010 – 10:33 pm
In an apt follow-on to yesterday’s post, computer scientist Jaron Lanier contributed an Op-Ed piece to today’s Times on what he sees as a budding secular religion — a kind of soteriology-by-Singularity that has taken root, he argues, amongst our technological elite. We are far too quick, Lanier writes, to see a kind of transcendence […]
I’ve previously mentioned the idea of the Technological Singularity, which I described as the belief that: the convergence of accelerating accomplishments in nanotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, computer science, neurobiology, and artificial intelligence will soon result in a cascading series of mutually supportive breakthroughs that will amount to a discontinuous historical disruption, the anthropological equivalent of […]
Here’s a nice example of the graphical representation of quantitative data, from Adobe Flex guru Michael McClune. It’s a 3-D map of the distribution of various types of crime in San Francisco.
The bottom having fallen out of the recording business, for the past ten years or so I’ve been writing software to earn my daily crust. You probably know that programmers spend a good deal of time “debugging” the software they write (I’ve often felt inclined to refer to the remainder of what we do as […]
As you all know by now, NASA’s mission has been redefined by the Obama administration. The conquest of space having lost its luster, the agency’s new primary objective, as explained by director Charles Bolden, is to make the Muslim world “feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.” Our investigative-reporting […]
Writing in the Washington Post, one Stan Cox, who presumably grew up in the jungles of New Guinea, suggests that we abolish the air conditioner, an artifact of human ingenuity that I consider to be roughly on a par with the invention of the wheel, or the taming of fire. Mr. Cox (rhymes with “pox”) […]
Readers of these pages will know by now that America, along with Western civilization generally, is most likely headed straight down the toilet. But it wasn’t always so. We’ve been focusing so relentlessly here of late on our accelerating collapse that I thought it might be nice to take a look back at a happier […]
If you’re like me (which, of course, you are) you’ve been saying to yourself, as you have watched the accelerating march of technological progress these past few decades, “Yes, yes, all very nice — but where’s my flying car?” Well, according an item in today’s news, it may now be on the way. Have a […]
For those of you who pay attention to these things, a long era of American technological superiority in air-combat systems appears to be at an end with the deployment of the Russian Sukhoi T-50 PAK-FA. This aircraft’s raison d’etre is to match or exceed the capabilities of our own F-22 Raptor, and early assessment seems […]
Florida scientist Dr. Rainer Meinke has a new and clever idea for sealing the leaking oil pipe. Here.
I’ve written in the past about the idea, popularized by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, of an impending “Technological Singularity”: a convergence of accelerating progress in computer science, neuroscience, and biotechnology that will, in a few decades, lead to a kind of critical mass in all these fields, with historically discontinuous effects. (If, as […]
It’s a busy stretch just now: I’ve been putting in long days at work, and will be traveling tomorrow evening. So for tonight, here’s a timely piece by Wellfleet resident John Stossel about the realities of “green energy”. He reminds us that it is unrealistic to imagine that there is anything in prospect anytime soon […]
I’m old enough to remember the Apollo 11 mission, the one that put men on the moon for the first time ever. It was a pretty big deal. (We won’t be doing that again anytime soon, thanks to You-Know-Who.) Now, with a hat-tip to my boy Nick, here’s the fateful launch as you’ve never seen […]
Here I am again, toiling away in the office on a Friday night, just to earn a crust. I suppose I shouldn’t complain, though; for all I know I could soon be replaced by one of these.
February 18, 2010 – 11:05 pm
Having got home rather late from teaching class, I’ll leave you this evening with a brief but truly uplifting item: about the implementation, finally, of a technological fantasy I’ve been entertaining for decades. Seriously, this is outstanding. Have a look here.
January 24, 2010 – 12:47 am
It’s been a busy Saturday, and what time I’ve had for writing today I have spent commenting here and elsewhere, rather than on the gestation of new posts. So, it being late, and with my computer on the fritz (a new one is on the way), I’ll just leave you with this amusing recent story […]
January 14, 2010 – 11:50 pm
I’m in rather a bit of discomfort sitting at the computer tonight, having pulled, with a loud “pop”, something in my after rigging while teaching class earlier this evening. So I’ll leave you for now with an advisory item that’s been making the rounds about online security. Here.
January 11, 2010 – 11:52 pm
I’ve lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, since 1982. It’s one of New York’s prettiest residential neighborhoods, and generally has a lot going for it: Prospect Park, great restaurants, good schools, beautiful Victorian architecture, a wonderful library, convenient subways, concerts at the Bandshell, and so on. It’s been a great place to raise two kids, and […]
December 27, 2009 – 11:44 pm
I’ve been slacking off over the holidays. I’ve hardly even read the news, and I’ve had nothing to say even about the Mutallab incident (others have said it all by now, anyway; in particular, Janet Napolitano’s idiotic comment that “the system worked” has been ridiculed amply and deservedly). As usual, my family gave me books […]
November 6, 2009 – 7:16 pm
In a recent post we mentioned that some of the boffins at CERN had begun to suggest, apparently seriously, that the problems that have dogged the development of the latest generation of high-energy particle colliders — first the Superconducting Supercollider here in the US, and more recently CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — might actually be […]
October 19, 2009 – 10:57 pm
Time travel is a persistently tantalizing idea, and has been a recurring theme in literature and other cultural media since at least as far back as the Mahabarata. Today it lives at the very edge of scientific plausibility: never entirely ruled out, but subject to persuasive objections. One of the most problematic is the “grandfather […]
October 13, 2009 – 10:31 am
National Geographic recently added a new feature to its website: a zoomable map du jour. I particularly enjoyed today’s offering, depicting 50 years of space exploration. Here.
August 23, 2009 – 2:14 pm
From my daughter ChloÁ« comes a link to a dazzling video showing the state of the art in robotic manipulation of small objects. Here.
David Pogue, the personal-technology columnist for the New York Times is hopping mad. Why? It’s those annoying little messages you have to listen to before you can leave voice-mail for a cell-phone user. You know: “At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for […]
Once again, it is approaching midnight, and I am still at the office, lashed to the wheel. This should not last much longer, I hope — perhaps things will be back to normal next week — but for now, serious bloggery remains entirely out of the question. Fortunately, you needn’t turn away empty handed, for […]
Here’s a handy item for you hobbyists out there: courtesy of the Federation of American Scientists, it’s the Nuclear Weapon Effects Calculator. Enjoy!
By way of Dennis Mangan, here is a review of the new hybrid car from Honda. It is less than favorable.
It’s been a busy weekend — it often seems there is less free time on the weekends than during the week — so there has been little opportunity for brooding and writing. For tonight, then, here’s a cheery little item about Google and you.