Articles
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The Decline and Fall of the Cell Phone
December 3, 2013
Read more(Another post from the Wayback machine, found stuck in the blogpost “drafts” - this from two years ago, around this time of year.)
My daughter was cleaning out some of her old toys and stuff (in anticipation, I guess, of the forthcoming Christmas arrival of new toys and stuff) and decided it was time to part with this.
Motorola’s Micro T.A.C. Lite 
I gave her this old phone a few years ago; it had been sitting in my parts bin, and I thought it would make a great “play phone” – and it did, until this year it was outgrown and replaced with a desire for a real cell phone (no, Santa’s definitely not bringing a nine-year-old a cell phone for Christmas…)
Looking at the phone, which represented the state-of-the-art when I bought it back in the early 1990s, I found myself musing on what had happened to cell phones since then.
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Oh The Crushing Banality
December 3, 2013
Read more(I originally wrote this a couple years ago, and stumbled across the draft. It’s still an accurate account; there’s been some improvement but not enough to invalidate the observations.)
I’ve noticed a couple of trends at work lately, and they aren’t ones I like.
The Fallacy of Saving Cost by Reducing Support Staff
As in so many companies and gov’t agencies, we’ve gradually reduced support staff to a bare minimum over the last several decades. Where we once would have had several secretaries and other administrative professionals supporting our 200-person department, we have one. Where we once would have had a team of technical writers and graphic arts professionals available as a resource, we have none. The consequence of these “cost saving measures” has been to push secretarial duties and assorted skills that normally demand considerable education and experience, onto the technical staff.
The logic is dubious.
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An interesting comparison
September 10, 2011
Read moreA friend sent me an article in the New York Times, in which the author uses the data from his GPS bike computer to fill in the gaps in his memory following a crash. The Times’ illustrator Johnathan Corum created an infographic depicting the rider’s route, and the data from the bike computer. It’s a nice figure, but it’s gratuitously similar to the classic Minard depiction of Napoleon’s 1918 march to Moscow (often cited as one of the best infographics ever, and available as a poster from Edward Tufte.)
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Suffering for the cause
May 24, 2011
Read moreLast week, the Amgen Tour of California bike race came through town. Last year, we went to watch the local stage, and despite the rain/drizzle/general wetness, had a fun time hanging out with friends and new acquaintances on the side of the road. We had such a fine time, in fact, that we figured we just had to do it again this year.
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Ethics and Intelligent Systems
April 25, 2011
Read moreThis isn’t by any means a new topic; Asimov codified it in his famous Three Laws back in 1942; and Wired ran an article in 2005 that considered some of the broader ethical implications of introducing ever-more-humanoid machines into society.