On the passing of Barbara Ehrenreich
Fifteen/Twenty years ago, when it was easier to believe, I read "Nickel and Dimed" and "Bait and Switch". Catherine Liu pays a tribute…
History
36 posts
Before the end
I had previously read the “Age of …” series by Eric Hobsbawm, and though I have a mixed personal opinion of him, I found his books insightful. This book, written much after those sweeping overviews,…
Blackberry finale
All good things must come to an end, a personal technology lesson that’s hard to learn.…
Another look at (old) Distributed Systems
Remember watching this talk by Michael Bernstein many years ago, and some good things are worth revisiting, so I re-watched it today. It’s backed by some reading material too. Part 1 These days I’m…
Of Noogler times
Found this while spring-cleaning: Must have got this on my first day at Google, 12 years ago! Resolved not to hold on to things out of pure nostalgia (or there would be more of them than ones I use)…
Ye Olde Linux
An account of “Linus-as-Martin Luther” from an article in Salon, 25 years ago: Linus Torvalds is an information-age reformer cut from the same cloth. Like Luther, his journey began while studying for…
Building big
There have always been “mega-building projects”. In the past, these were large hydro-electric projects, and more recently skyscrapers competing to be the tallest building. Today one such mega-project…
(Untitled)
TIL (thanks to Ed West) Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Provisional Government in 1917, was born in 1881 and lived until 1970, having escaped Russia following the Bolshevik takeover. He died in…
What's in a name
Three years ago, the New York Times published this article. It was about "the fourth spy" at Los Alamos (in addition to the previously known ones, Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, and David Gree…
The making of a friendly robot
Learnt more about the "origin story" of Roomba from an article in the WSJ this weekend. * First sold as a product 20 years ago * Joe Jones joined the AI pan 20 years before that * Variou…
Spending time, sharing time
When you hear the phrase “lost technology”, you tend to think of something mysterious from millennia ago. However, as I discovered from “Einstein’s clocks, Poincaré’s maps”, even just a century ago,…
The solid world
Interview with Bertrand Russell, from 1952 Interesting perspective on the changes felt in the world, speaking a century ago, about the century before that. The contrast, or irony, or whatever the fe…