A Q&A with Velodyne
I wrote quite a bit about Velodyne in The Laser That’s Changing the World — David Hall, the company’s founder and CEO, is a brilliant engineer who developed the lidar sensor that paved they way for the first great leaps in...
This is in 1/210,100th of the sky
With the Hubble Legacy Field, what it doesn’t capture is as remarkable as what it does.
Good times at ILMF 2019
The 2019 edition of the International Lidar Mapping Forum is a wrap. The folks at Diversified Communications provided a booth (thank you!), which gave me the opportunity to hang out and chat with a bunch of interesting folks for the better part...
Elon Musk is right: lidar is a crutch
Elon Musk was right when he called lidar a “crutch” when it came to self-driving cars. Where he’s not right, though, is that the technology’s crutchitude is somehow a reason not to employ lidar—which uses lasers to scan the world around them...
At ILMF 2019, a mobile lidar story about Afghanistan 2003
I’m at the International Lidar Mapping Forum in Denver for the third-straight year. The first year, I came to get some sense of the lidar landscape for a book project I was thinking about proposing. That experience distilled into the opener for...
GEDI is on the ISS (“May the forest be with it”)
I’m a little late on this (thanks to Eric Desfonds of Excelitas for the reminder this morning), but GEDI launched on Wednesday, Dec. 5, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket. It’s being integrated on the International Space Station as I type...
Great lidar story in the Christian Science Monitor today
Eva Botkin-Kowacki’s excellent big-picture story on lidar is out today in the Christian Science Monitor. In her reporting, she came across “The Laser That’s Changing the World” and, from there, me. It’s an...
What the #$%& is lidar?
I was recently in touch with a writer friend of mine who lives in London. We’re both old enough that we emailed rather than Snapchatted or WhatsApped. I mentioned that I was writing a book about the history of lidar. He’s a wry type. He answered...
Did you have a life-changing professor? Mine got fired on Aug. 3.
I posted this on the Wolverine Forum, the University of Michigan Alumni Association’s online community a few days ago; figured it should see the light outside the community’s gates and re-post here. For those of you who missed the...
Quick commentary on a Coors ad
I’m a fan of Coors, particularly of the family, which does great philanthropic work around here. Its marketing materials are a consistent source of enjoyment, too, particularly the Coors Light side, which posits that drinking a product that...
Parents of teenagers: Juul should scare yuu
I’m as out of touch as my parents were as far as what teens are up to. I had to look up “Fortnite” yesterday. I spelled it like the poetic way to say “two weeks.” Generally, if it doesn’t involve spreading...
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...