Archive for Featured Articles
“DHL, Three Letters That Shrank the World”
I’ve just finished reading “DHL, Three Letters That Shrank the World”. People like stories, and these 800-plus pages tell a good one. It’s not usual to find a book that gives so much fine-grained detail but reads as a page-turning narrative. Before DHL there was no international courier business and so this company became an […]
The Antikythera device
This machine – this lump of corroded metal – fascinated me when I read of it a decade back. Could it really have been made more than 2,100 years ago? There were tantalizing hints of a complex geared mechanism, but the corrosion made speculation about it little more than wild guesswork. For long after its […]
Amazon and drone-deliveries
Let’s think of some of the problems that have to be solved before Amazon (or anyone else) can make drone deliveries. Given that Amazon’s deliveries are often to homes, it will often be that no one is there at the time of attempted delivery. Drones will need a reliable means of attracting the attention of […]
A tale of South American music
@lizamyers, the noted Vermont artist, tweeted that she was “Listening to Andean music and talking with my students about the Machu Picchu trip next summer!” and it brought something to mind that I hadn’t thought of for many years. In the late 60s, around the time of the first Moon landing, I was working in […]
Big Al, a true tale of China, America and war-time Italy
I want to tell you the story of Big Al. I had a part in it–made it connect, you could say–but just a small part. It’s a true tale that spans an arc from Word War II Italy through pre-handover Hong Kong, via Shantou in mainland China and across to Colorado, USA. I met Big […]
