A couple of months ago, our building suffered a series of power cuts due to a faulty circuit breaker. I hadn’t realized quite how much we depend upon electricity. The first outage struck at around 10.30 am. My laptop had about half an hour’s charge before it went dead. I ... Read More...
Technology
Scott Locklin continues his Compelling Machinery series. It's the turn of the truly epochal and somehow tremendously appealing steam engine. Before computers, before men learned to fly, before the European empires fell apart, there was the age of steam. The age of steam lives on only in rusted hulks and remnants of ... Read More...
Until recently, I prided myself on never having downloaded an App to my mobile phone. I began to understand how King Canute must have felt when Apps started downloading automatically – I must have pressed the wrong button, or given my permission, but it didn’t seem like I had… Perhaps ... Read More...
Rather than being led to despair though joblessness, apparently we should be uplifted by the fact that we’re all works of art, designed by God. I wonder what graduates embarking on their search for employment would make of yesterday’s BBC Radio 4 Thought for the Day from Rt Rev Lord ... Read More...
We continue today's maritime theme with the latest in our series of aesthetic appreciations of sublime machines… The Battleship is one of the most glorious, evocative and ultimately useless machines ever created by human beings. They’re fast: in their heyday of displacement speed vessels, they were the fastest things on the high ... Read More...
Continuing our series of aesthetic appreciations of sublime machines… No other nations built anything like them, until the Soviets released the Tupolev Tu-20 Bear nuclear bomber in 1955, 10 years after the end of the war (they also copied the B-29). Other nations had bombers in the WW2 and immediately prior ... Read More...
Continuing our series of aesthetic appreciations of sublime machines... My interest in the aesthetics of technology always brings me to early eras of device. In the first generation of a technology, the device physically is at its most pure and evocative. Often times, the implementation is bad, but it is rare that ... Read More...
The first in a series of aesthetic appreciations of sublime machines. The early stages of a technology are always the most aesthetically evocative. One of the most charming inventions from the time of the dawn of human flight is the dirigible. The dirigible was invented at the last gasp of the era ... Read More...
I recently wrote a magazine article on how the last 50 years of progress haven't been particularly spectacular. A friend who has actually been around for the last 50 years and involved in the development of new technologies in that period of time recommended I read this book - Toward ... Read More...
Scott Locklin works on quantitative finance problems in Berkeley, California, but has lately been considering emigrating to America. He blogs at Locklin on Science. British engineering is one of those things which periodically fascinates and repulses me. Their engineering unquestionably has a national character, just like their Wensleydale cheese and bitter ... Read More...
