Electric Vans Already Win

Update 5/13/11 – Smith will soon start using A123 batteries.  See bottom. I wrote here about how electric cars were just better pieces of machinery than gas-powered ones, since they were quieter, handled better, and were more reliable.  This article, “Doing Delivery Rounds in an Electric Smith Newton” by Nick Kurczewski, talks about exactly this [...]

The Research Organizations of the World as seen at ISSCC

As described in the last entry, the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) is the largest and most important electronics conference in the world. That entry listed which countries and US states contributed the most papers to it. How about organizations? Which companies, labs, and universities do the most significant electronics research? I did a [...]

The Technical Progress of the World, as seen at ISSCC

The world’s largest, oldest, and most important electronics technical conference is the International Solid State Circuits Conference, ISSCC.  It’s been held every year since 1954, about as long as there have been solid state circuits, i.e. transistors.  It was originally held at the University of Pennsylvania, then alternated between New York and San Francisco, and [...]

The Long View

At a time when the US Congress is divided on whether climate change even exists, the Massachusetts Audubon Society is making plans on how to adapt to it.   Their problem is that climate change emperils their nature sanctuaries.   They own 34,000 acres of land in the state, about 0.5% of the total, making them one [...]

Edward Tufte – Guru of the Information Class

I recently had the pleasure of taking one of Edward Tufte‘s seminars, “Presenting Data and Information”.  He’s a professor emeritus of statistics, political science, and computer science at Yale, and the author of an important set of books on charting: “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” (catchy title) (1983), “Envisioning Information” (1990), “Visual Explanations” (1997), [...]