nzeldes Anyone interested in the Brain – that ultimate piece of high technology – has seen the true but overused statement that each age in history sees the brain as analogous to the latest current technology: the ancients thought of it as a hydraulic system, our grandparents as a telephone exchange, our parents as a computer… … Read more
I’ve lamented before the disappearance in our time of the Tinkerer, that fix-everything general technology expert of ages past. I ran into a demonstration of how far he’s gone the other day when shopping online for a new bluetooth hands-free cellphone car kit (my old one conked out, and fixing it would of course have … Read more
We saw that Newark Liberty International airport has some serious problems keeping its electronic signs straight… here, and here. Well, here’s a third and (for now) last installment. This is the baggage claim area at the Continental domestic terminal where I landed coming in from San Francisco. See the nice colorful sign identifying this baggage … Read more
We’ve discussed Engrish before… it’s always hilarious, but this one beats them all. Read it through! This is from a very nice flannel shirt imported by Azouri Clothing Ltd, and manufactured in China. The amazing part is that in addition to mangling the spelling and grammar, as in “You can’t using bleash”, which is fairly … Read more
I discussed the growing obesity of our paperbacks before… and now, a look at our print magazines, with show the exact opposite trend. This trend is visible in many magazines (Fast Company is a good example), but I illustrate it with an old favorite, Scientific American. Here are three issues from my shelves. See the … Read more
We saw how the electronic boards at Newark Liberty airport made the ridiculous omission of adjusting for the Daylight Savings move. Evidently this is not an exception: something is very wrong with that airport’s electronic signage. These guys have an “Airtrain”, an internal elevated light rail system for moving between terminals. The train has two … Read more
In the US, where I just gave a lecture at a conference on Information Load and Overload, and of course I found the time to visit the wonderful Computer History Museum in Mountain View. This is always a delight, but this time they surpassed themselves: they demonstrated the newly built Difference Engine #2 in action! … Read more
Had to take a flight out of Newark airport on the morning after the move from daylight saving to winter time. The preceding evening I took good care to set my alarm clock and wristwatch back the required hour, and took off to the airport in the morning. And when I got there, I was … Read more
Flying to the States on a Continental 777, my favorite jetliner, alternating my attention between my notebook and the video screen in the seat back in front of me. The latter is a new model, fitted to every seat in the cabin. The technology has been evolving ever since I stared flying to America back … Read more
I’ve mentioned the headup publisher widget before. This nifty add-in identifies entities (places, people, companies, books, etc) mentioned in a site it’s installed on, marks them up with a dotted underline, and when you mouse over them a small pop-up comes up with information, news, photos and videos about that place/person/whatever. That was then. Now … Read more
