Biography
Books
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
(
Blog
Recent Posts | All Posts
George Dyson's "Among the Machines" in Mountain View
October 19 2009
Science historian, author and Make columnist George Dyson will give a lecture tonight on the "Evolution of Technology: Darwin Among the Machines." The talk will be at 7 p.m. at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Mountain View. The talk is part of a series hosted… read moreA More Public Role for Public Broadcasting: Education
October 09 2009
Imagine a broadcast network in America that was dedicated to education, where the best educators had the opportunity to produce its programming, and where individuals as well as institutions could develop a new genre of wide-ranging educational programs? Educational programming could elevate the role of teaching in our culture and… read moreMay 30 2009
Maker Faire is here again, our fourth annual event in the Bay Area. Once again, you just won't believe how much there is to see and do at Maker Faire. Makers were busy today setting up on Friday. In the morning, we had 400 kids visit the fairgrounds for a… read moreMarch 02 2009
Are iPods changing our perception of music? Are the sounds of MP3s the music we like to hear most? Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford, was on a panel with me at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Mountain View, CA on Saturday. Berger's… read moreCapturing the Knowledge of Mill-Wrights
February 04 2009
Driving through Napa over the weekend, I saw a roadsign that said "Milling Today" at the Old Bale Grist Mill. I had to stop and take a look. The restored mill has a 36' "overshot" waterwheel so called because water pours on top of the wheel, directed there by a… read moreJanuary 31 2009
If you watch sports, as many will do this with the Super Bowl on Sunday, you know that games can change direction. Something happens and momentum changes quite suddenly. A team that was piling up scores suddenly becomes tentative and defensive, as was the case with the Arizona Cardinals in… read moreDecember 24 2008
Dare I say this on O'Reilly Radar? I admire Bill Gates. If I had a vote for Person of the Year, Gates would get mine. Let me explain why. This year, Gates made an important and potentially difficult transition at age 52, leaving Microsoft as CEO and devoting more of… read moreDecember 10 2008
Open the door and smiley-face carolers sing a song that you can customize and send to others. That's the emoticarolers concept, worked up by Jason Striegel, our Hackszine editor, who leads the development side of things for Colle+McVoy in Minneapolis. The team created this clever holiday "text-to-sing" promotion for Yahoo… read moreNovember 11 2008
I wrote this piece about a month ago as the Welcome for Make: 16, which will be on the newsstand soon. As I write this, there is panic on Wall Street despite Washington’s $700 billion rescue attempt. The crisis is not contained by U.S. borders, but extends to Europe and… read moreAugust 27 2008
Microsoft has received a patent on a "new and improved" Page-Up and Page-Down system. Timothy D. Sellers et al. was awarded the patent on August 19, 2008 for a "Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments." Abstract for United States Patent 7,415,666 A method and system in… read moreJune 19 2008
This past weekend I watched a superhero fall to incredible lows and rise to unbelievable heights. I wasn't watching one of the manufactured Marvel superheroes on the big screen. I was watching Tiger Woods live on TV. I was watching him create one of the most compelling stories ever in… read moreApril 28 2008
Today, in most schools, science is taught as a body of acquired knowledge, but not as much as a set of tools and practices that were used to discover that knowledge and expand upon it. Students are expected to learn from lectures and textbooks, not labs with hands-on learning and… read moreApril 01 2008
(This entry itself had problems after posting and it took a day to fix. A good entry gone bad.) My sister, Doreen, who is seldom on the bleeding edge of technology, bought a Kindle in January and by March she was sending it back. My Kindle was a clunker. I… read moreMarch 22 2008
Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week, fourteen people showed up at a City Council meeting to make the claim that wireless caused health problems... read moreI Make... (Maker Faire Bay Area May 3-4)
March 15 2008
If you wonder what Maker Faire is all about, check out this video, created by eric michael berg, a video intern working with us out of New York. He came to Maker Faire Austin and put together this simple but... read moreRecent Posts | All Posts
