Think small
My 12-year-old daughter has generous grandparents. Her paternal grandmother inquired about Christmas-gift possibilities. My daughter came up with the idea of a microscope. Her grandmother was all over it. My daughter’s grandmother’s...
These colors are bleeding
Watching as the Trump Administration and Senate leaders pander to those rare Republican holdouts is one part entertaining (The Florida senator Trump once insulted, repeatedly, as “Little Marco” can now hold the Republican tax bill hostage, looks...
Blowing leaves, blowing $1.5 trillion with a lousy tax plan
I was driving the carpool home down east Sixth Avenue in Denver yesterday. This is million-dollar territory, grand old houses, big lawns. Huge trees with lots of leaves, both on the properties themselves and in the boulevard’s grassy...
U.S. renewable energy forecasters got it *slightly* wrong, turns out
The future didn’t look much like we thought it would. I’m not talking about flying cars or colonies on Mars – although those two are looking promising at the moment. In 2006, the U.S. Energy Information Administration laid out its predictions for...
Hurricane Irma forecasts for Florida in pictures
Denver’s a long way from Hurricane Irma, but like everybody else I’ve been following it. With events like this one, it’s fascinating to check out the detailed Weather Underground forecasts. With Hurricane Harvey...
Lucy McRae is thinking ahead. Like 2,500 years ahead
A lot of us have a hard enough time deciding what to scrounge up for dinner. Lucy McRae is thinking about life in the year 4,600. She’s not alone. Science fiction writers have spent plenty of time imagining the distant future. But McRae is not a...
Ancient craft yields storage medium of the future
The preservation of our collective story — so much of which is told in electronic pulses and stored in bits and bytes — may well hinge on the oldest of materials: clay. It’s not just any clay. It’s a specially designed stoneware (the stuff of...
Robots kill, and they’re just getting started
For Gabriel Hallevy, one of the world’s leading legal thinkers in the emerging field of criminal law as it applies to intelligent machines, it started in a movie theater. The professor at Ono Academic College in Israel had already established...
Autonomous ErgoChair: a review
Before getting to the brass tacks of this post – a review of an office chair made by a company called Autonomous – I’d like to get on the record that Autonomous is an interesting-as-hell company. I mean, how many other outfits selling sit-stand...
‘Mein Pate’ and the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Program
We had been scheduled for 15 minutes, but between Helmut Kohl’s meetings with economic advisors, discussions with coalition partners about what to do about the assumed bombing by Libya of a Berlin discotheque four days before – plus having to...
Autonomous SmartDesk 2 sit-stand desk: a review
It’s probably an overstatement, and it’s become cliché, but there’s enough truth to it that it bears repeating: Sitting is the new smoking. And so when shopping for a desk, the smart money is on sit-stand. There are, obviously, simple...
Maps matter way beyond finding the nearest coffee shop
A Skype conversation skips across continents with no perceptible lag. The manufacturing economy cranks forth like a containerized, globally integrated, seamless, just-in-time wonder. Hollywood films are released simultaneously in Boston, Berlin...