The Result
America has a new president. His party has full control of congress.
The one thing I am truly worried about is what that means for the urgent fight against climate change. Everything else can be fixed.
Recent posts
The Debate
For those who live outside the United States as citizens of countries who are in alliances and partnerships with the United States, very little of yesterday’s debate can have mattered as much as this exchange about mutual global defense:
TRUMP: “Nuclear is the single greatest threat. Just to go down the list, we defend Japan, we defend Germany, we defend South Korea, we defend Saudi Arabia, we defend countries. They do not pay us....
Moonshots and Cathedrals, Part 1
The year 1248 saw the beginning of the construction of the grand cathedral of Cologne in Germany, the ”Dom”. The 13th century original plans set the dimensions of today’s building, including the imposing façade with its twin bell towers that each rise over 150m high. In its day, the Dom was by (very) far the tallest building ever envisioned.
Master Gerhard von Rile, the original architect of the cathedral’s overall construction plan, and Archbishop Hochstaden...
IoT is Software trying to grok Hardware
The (mainstream, information) software industry thrives on standardization and scale. For servers and desktops, Intel’s x86 architecture has become the universal foundation, the UNIX userland model (and Windows) reign on the server, the PC desktop/notebook space is overwhelmingly dominated by Windows and OSX, tablets and mobile phones are similarly split between Android and iOS. The software industry likes some level of platform competition, but things tend to shake down to two major choices, and sometimes...
Airplanes?
“Are you a pilot?” is a question I get asked a lot - No, I am not.
I’m not ruling out completely that I might still go for it, but at present I’m okay with being flown. My fascination with flying machines isn’t about sitting in front and controlling them; it’s about the engineering history and then there is also a good amount of “hardware envy”.
Software engineers build volatile virtual things. Until a few...