Seeing Your Work

On my first job out of school, I was told to design an instruction decoder for a microprocessor.   It was a complex block for the early 80s, taking all of 30,000 transistors, and it occupied one whole corner of the chip.  When people asked what I did, I would say “You see these little shiny [...]

The Education of Billionaires

Or rather, the lack thereof. The recent movie about Facebook, “The Social Network”, claimed that those guys became billionaires by abandoning their schooling and being as jerk-ish as possible.   Two of the four billionaires created by Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, have no degrees at all, while Eduardo Saverin (the main screwee) has a [...]

Where Science and Religion Actually Do Mix

I wrote a while back about how the science-oriented movies “Creation” and “Agora” appear to have failed in the United States because of animosity from Christianists.  It was a pleasant surprise, then, to find a scientific institution that is entirely backed by a religious one: the Vatican Observatory (VO), or Specola Vaticana.  It was founded [...]

How Nice To Have a President Who Can Speak

So even when he’s had a pretty serious political defeat, even when he looks really depressed, Obama still has the presence of mind to use an obscure term like “shellacking” in his post-midterm-election press conference. You know this is something that I think every president needs to go through, because the responsibilities of this office [...]