In a fenced-off corner of Washington, D.C, down at the very tip, where the city’s diamond shape meets the Potomac river, is a giant feeding station for gulls. Ok, that’s not its main function. If you have ever pooped in DC, or in parts of four surrounding counties, including Dulles International Airport, you have helped […]
Technology
Like many of you, I suspect, I have a love hate relationship with the internet. I love the access it gives me to all sorts of information, and how it connects me with people I would have never been able to hear from before. I hate how it also contains spaces for people to easily […]
You know those things that people say as an aside? Things that aren’t their main point, but just kind of come out of their mouths. Fun facts, little anecdotes, steam of consciousness blips. I find that when I’m looking back at my notes from conferences, the things that pop out to me are, largely, those […]
The electronics of the future could be made of a material you leave in your toilet. If you’re up on your electronics of the future, you’ll recall that they were supposed to be made of graphene. Remember graphene? It was supposed to be better than silicon, because it lets electrons go really fast. That’s great, […]
The post has taken me entirely too much time to write. Not because I’m procrastinating or writing slowly, but because I’m being held hostage by the spinning beach ball of death. I bought my current iMac in early 2011, which means that enough time has elapsed that the Apple Care warranty I purchased with it […]
This post first ran May 28, 2012. Uncle Bundy has since died — at a nice old age with his family around him, but still — and when I think about soldiers and Memorial Day I always think about him, I’m not sure why: he didn’t talk about the war, maybe because he stood so […]
I’ve just been through several bouts of technical assistance and I have to say that 1) the ESL problem still exists but is much better than it used to be; and 2) a new sentence in their checklist is “Why yes, we can fix that;” 3) the last one thanked me for being such a […]
Charles Hard Townes died a week ago, aged 99. He was a physicist at Berkeley who came up with the principle of the laser; at age 98, he’d stopped coming into the office every day. His obituaries are thorough and their praise is justified. I’d met him for reasons the obituaries don’t mention. He helped […]