My twelve year old daughter is working a science fair project on electricity and home usage. As part of her project, we have been taking lots of measurements of the electricity usage throughout our house. This provided a great opportunity to talk about smoothing and for me to publicly work through my resultant confusion. Smoothing … Read more
Tonight, I was rewiring switches to a more modern set of switches. These days I don’t have time to learn by experience, I have to think my way through this. Without experience, I have to go back to first principles. Funny enough, understanding a four way switch is very similar to understanding digital logic and … Read more
“Intervention in atmospheric and climatic matters . . . will unfold on a scale difficult to imagine at present. . . . this will merge each nation’s affairs with those of every other, more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war would have done.” — J. von Neumann Disclaimer: This is … Read more
While I can’t get into the background here, I was recently asked to describe the most geeky event in history. Something like this is hard to bound and as I asked those around me I got lots of answers from moment the zero was invented (“without that, you got nothing”) to the first demo of … Read more