Many, many years ago when I was a teenage geek, I was green with envy at the Coil Winding Calculator that an older friend had access to in his university lab. It was an extremely useful device – a cardboard slide chart that allowed you to compute the parameters for winding a coil of a … Read more
Here is a striking photo I snapped in Tubingen, in southern Germany, showing a building with a tile roof… bearing a weird pattern: The cause of the red circle on the roof is unmistakable, the air flows around the chimney… but it is the opposite of what you’d expect, and the details are a bit … Read more
Isaac Asimov once wrote a SciFi story named The feeling of Power, in which a future age has become so accustomed to computers that the rediscovery of how to calculate sums with pencil and paper – or in one’s head – is considered a major breakthrough. That age may be nearer than we think. Recently … Read more
Was filling up the car at a gas station when I noticed a bicycle chained to a signpost at the corner. Well, part of a bicycle… As you see, this bike has been there for a long time (enough to develop serious rust), and in the meantime it lost wheels, seat, handlebars and more. Only … Read more
New on my Possibly Interesting site: a weird superhero comic spoof that I drew when I was studying Mathematics in College. It follows closely the style of 60’s Superman comics, but it takes place entirely in the domain of geometrical figures (and no, at that time I hadn’t yet read Abbott’s Flatland). Lost for years, … Read more
Last year I posted about FameLab, the science communication competition organized by the British Council in the Jerusalem Science Museum. Well, here it comes again, and today I’m a judge again. Like before, we get treated to a group of fine young students presenting diverse scientific subjects in only 3 (yes, three!) minutes each. Fascinating! … Read more
My loyal readers know that in addition to this blog I maintain Nathan’s Possibly Interesting Web Site, where I share my history of computing collection, software, and various articles. I built it some years ago as a personal web site, and am happy to have it as just that. However, now that I am starting … Read more
Today I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the Computing and Communications museum of the Israel Electric Company. The IEC has been around for almost a century and has kept pace with computing advances since its early days; curator Dlila Shapira did a great job rounding up some lovely vintage pieces from the … Read more
First, wishing all readers of this blog a superb new year. May it be far better than the last one, yet worse than the one to follow it. For my part, this year heralds a new freedom – after 26 years of doing many wonderful and innovative things at Intel, I decided it’s time to … Read more
Had this strange deja vu at an IBM HRL seminar… I met there the CTO of PopTok, a start-up with a product that allows you to use short video clips from your favorite movies, TV shows, and music videos in your online conversations on Facebook or IM chats. So, if you wanted to express anger, … Read more
