Well, this isn’t literally what I wanted to be, since I wasn’t reading magazines like this in 1959, or at all, actually. But this sense of the mysterious and awesome work that was happening right now in labs all over the country was something that very much informed my childhood in the 60s. A picture [...]
Archive for January 2012
What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up
January 21, 2012A Catastrophic Failure of Verification
January 15, 2012So your competitor has come out with a new product. It beats yours hands down. You’ve been working away on a similar thing, but your engineers are arrogant and uninterested in the ideas of others. You’re now hopelessly behind. You panic. An outsider comes to you with a new design that’s much flashier than what [...]
A Small Eco-Doom
January 4, 2012So your family has been farming a particular spot of North Dakota for the last 130 years. When you were a kid, there was a lake off in the distance, Devil’s Lake, that was good for perch fishing, but horrible for drinking because of high salt and sulfate levels. Over the last few years you’ve [...]
