July 2022 Most glass beverage bottles nowadays are molded with screw threads so you can twist the metal cap off with your fingers. But some — particularly beer bottles — still come with metal caps crimped onto the top. Those caps have a name: they’re “crown corks.” They were invented in 1892 in Baltimore, and… Continue reading

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” October, 2022 Desire is a lot of things. One of those things is Bob Dylan’s 1975 album, which doesn’t have any of my favorite songs, but — unusually for me, at least — somehow hangs together as a collection that’s somewhat more than just the individual… Continue reading

August, 2022 Time is not what we think it is. What we perceive it to be. Time seems to pass steadily, in just one direction. We regulate our lives with time; our perceptions are full of what seem to be regular, reliable cycles and markers. The sun rises and sets. Our hearts beat. Living creatures,… Continue reading

May 2023 Artificial intelligence is, for sure, the ‘it girl’ of the day. A bunch of people who are richer than everybody else (which leads them to assume they must be smarter than everybody else) are warning that AI is out to get us. Other people take a more utilitarian position and point out that… Continue reading

September 2022 Do you own any artificial things that are so well designed and satisfying to use that you’d happily keep them for your whole life? If you do, chances are they are already old. Newly made things are not intended to last for long, even though some of them really are satisfying and well… Continue reading

Computers and their cousins — smartphones, tablets, and so on — are supposedly easier to use nowadays, right? In the early days, you had to know a set of “commands” and enter them into the computer by typing them. Often there wasn’t much, if any, on-screen help. Now we’ve got little pictures (icons) and ways… Continue reading

May, 2022 Sometimes there’s a technology that captures our minds so much that it becomes a metaphor for practically everything. The universe — and the mind — seemed like an infinitely complex clockwork back in the days when the mechanisms inside clocks were new and fascinating. The “clockwork universe” showed up around the 1400s, and… Continue reading

May 2022 It’s a funny thing about repetition — it’s great, but sometimes it can quite suddenly cross a threshold and become “too much.” The pulse of loud music is a good example; I can be enjoying it and then for some reason, I’ve had enough. I seldom see the threshold approaching. Maybe there isn’t… Continue reading

It’s been a minute and the hysteria has moved on to other things, so I thought I’d take a minute to reconsider Elizabeth Holmes. What a strange story it is, almost like it’s a puzzling myth looming out of antiquity to make us wonder. It might be any of several stories.  A technically adept undergraduate… Continue reading

November, 2022 It feels like there’s less hope in the world lately. Politics is nastier than it’s been in decades. European wars are back, and in the rest of the world many of them never left. We’ve changed the climate in ways we won’t even know about for years. People with fewer resources are finding… Continue reading