Apr 13, 2009

Douglas Adams, in his famous speech titled “Is there an Artificial God?” at Digital Biota in September 1998, said, “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our...

Apr 6, 2009

Circuit boards have certainly come a long way over the decades. Were one have approached Messrs. Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen back in 1947 and suggested to them that their little invention would soon be packed, over 60 million a chip, one would surely have been excluded from the gene pool right there and then. Yet here we are, in the year 2009, and the...

Oct 22, 2008

“Okay, well, Charles, you are a mathematician, you’re always looking for the elegant solution. Human behavior is rarely, if ever, elegant. The universe is full of these odd bumps and twists. You know, perhaps you need to make your equation less elegant, more complicated; less precise, more descriptive. It’s not going to be as pretty, but it...

Aug 25, 2008

Mechanical Engineering Department “What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale. As soon as I mention this, people tell me about miniaturization, and how far it has progressed today. They tell me about electric motors that are the size of the nail on your small finger. And there is a device on the market,...