2013 - It Was A Very Good Year

It has been almost exactly a year since my last post at the close of 2012. As my title suggests, this last year has been busy and productive but without any posts to Tech Almanac. What gives?

In 2013, I stepped away from posting in the blog to develop and complete a feature-length documentary. The subject of this documentary was not even related to technology - unless you call the Nazi's search for efficiency in the extermination of Jews and other so-called Undesirables a topic in technology.

My journey began with a conversation over dinner with new friends, Bill and Paulette Terwilliger. Paulette was born in 1942 in Paris to Jewish parents. That simple fact provides the impetus for a story of survival and heroism.  Paulette's mother, Rose, was 21-years old when she gave birth to Paulette. Rose was alone in Paris. Her husband was already in a French prison for trying to find a place of safety in the south of France for his family. Rose's parents and brothers had been arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Rose somehow escaped the ever-increasing roundups and had to make her way to safety on her own. A Catholic grandmother in a tiny village in southwest France had agreed to hide Rose and Paulette for the duration of war.   You can see a trailer for the documentary here:



The full documentary runs 82 minutes. I have submitted it to four film festivals around the country for consideration. I am hoping that at least one of them chooses to show it. I won't know until late January or early February.

Having now finished that project, I hope to find more time to return to posting here at the Tech Almanac.  I love sharing my thoughts on technology and its impacts on the world. This is not to say I won't be spending a great deal of time on new documentary projects. I already have three ideas in the hopper - one of which is even technology related! The common link between the blog and the docs is the stories and ideas that capture my attention.

Best wishes for a wonderful 2014.

How To Build a Steam Locomotive

It seems that manufacturing and craftsmanship are reported in some quarters to be disappearing from the the scene. It is true that many manufacturing jobs have been automated.  But beyond automation, some crafts and some products seem to be just plain extinct. The steam locomotive falls into this category.  There are certainly a few old locomotives puffing around railroad museums and there are even a few Class A steam locomotives, like the Union Pacific's No. 844 , still operational enough to remind us of why past generations had a love affair with the steam locomotive.

But how do you build such a machine? Virtually every locomotive was a custom made machine.  It took many skilled engineers and craftsman to create the design and fabricate the components. Parts were made in foundries or forges from molten iron and steel. Holes and surfaces were shaped to exacting tolerances on vertical mills, shapers, and lathes. Assembly was done in giant erection shops with huge overhead cranes. It was an impressive operation.

I recently came across a film clip on YouTube that shows what went into building a steam locomotive in 1937. The setting is England but the operations were the same everywhere.  In the video, you can see a very interesting combination of controlled force and high craftsmanship. In every step you see skilled people working together to build a complex machine. I don't want to read too much into this but I would hazard a guess that they also felt considerable pride in their work.

But this is not the end of the story. In the early 2000s, a group of railroad buffs decided to build the first steam locomotive to be crafted in England in fifty years. The locomotive, a Peppercorn Class A1 (named for the designer), was rolled out of the Darlington Locomotive Works on August 1, 2008.

I find it encouraging that the skills needed to build this magnificent machine have not disappeared completely. I think the men who worked on Number 6207 seventy years earlier would have been pleased to see their work carried forward.

This is, after all, the very definition of craft - a skill learned through apprenticing to a master. When the chain is broken, that craft is in danger of disappearing. Sometimes, it can be resurrected by relearning the old ways. As an example, I think of another video I saw recently of a man in Wilmington, North Carolina who painstakingly relearned how to make tintype photographs.

Why resurrect old skills and crafts in the digital age? I think we need them to connect us to our heritage. We need to feel a part of a continuity of technology that spans more than our hyper-connected, online world.  While all things digital now dominate our consciousness, the undeniable presence of our physical technology provides an anchor to the real world. And, ironically, the descriptions for how to build a locomotive or create a tintype are most likely to be archived in digital formats somewhere on the World Wide Web. And so it goes.

Credits:

I found the video for A Study in Steel on The Old Motor.

Amtrak Video

I took a video class this fall and I had to put together a little video on something that interested me. I made a (very) short little story about the Amtrak trains that run through the small North Carolina town I call home. Hope you like it.

Curiosity

Artist's Rendition of Curiosity on Mars

This morning, we witnessed the launch of the latest Mars roving explorer, aptly named, Curiosity. What a wonderful moniker for a machine that will, hopefully, spend the next few years exploring the surface of Mars and sending back gigabits of new types data to the anxiously awaiting scientists here on Earth.

Curiosity is something that you don't hear much about these days but it is very clear that curiosity has been one of main drivers of our technological advances for millenia.  Certainly, a lot of technology developed less from curiosity and more from simply trying to fill a need.  But with all the potential solutions that people tried, there had to be a lot of, "I wonder what will happen if...".

Boulton and Watt Steam Engine

You might argue that curiosity is more a driver of science than technology. Science is almost entirely based on the desire to learn and understand - not a bad definition of curiosity itself. As technology developed, it often preceded the science of understanding how the physical world worked. Steam engines, for example, developed before the thermodynamics of steam were understood. Once the science caught up to the technology, major advances and refinements became possible.  James Watt had the benefit of 50 years of scientific investigation of steam before he made his much-heralded advances in the improvement of Thomas Newcomen's original steam engine design.

It seems to me we live in an age of curiosity but most people experience it in ways that aren't so much related to science and technology. We are social creatures and seem to be endlessly fascinated with what other people are doing.  We try to keep up with them through any number of social networking websites. We are curious about the rich and famous and scan the gossip magazines and newspaper columns for juicy tidbits.  We check our smartphones to find out the latest football score or read our email. As humans, we cannot help but be curious.

As you can tell, I am all for curiosity.  We need to follow our desire to know more than we do.  But what we seek out is at least as important as the desire to seek in the first place.  We might need to lift our sights a bit and seek to know something more interesting than what's the latest on Lady Gaga. We might want to spend just a little time learning more about what is going on in our world. What's behind Occupy Wall Street? What's happening in Egypt? What's happening in electric vehicle design, or climate change, or even green energy initiatives?  Most of what I see going on in social networking is like a candy bar - a quick energy boost but no substance.

Personal Disclaimer: I also spend a fair amount of time each day on Twitter and somewhat less time on Facebook. What I follow on Twitter are posts that relate mostly to news, technology, science, and culture. Why? Because I find them interesting. There is so much that is being put out there each day that it is nearly impossible to keep up with it. I try to screen the Tweets that relate to technology and technology history and put them up on my own Twitter Stream - TechAlmanac1.  As I screen this torrent of information, I learn a lot that I otherwise would be unaware of. 

I am not advocating for Twitter or any other particular  web tool. I am not even advocating for the internet. Curiosity can be pursued anywhere.  Curiosity is like a muscle - use it or lose it. The more you open yourself to wondering about something, the more you find the world an interesting place.

We need more well-directed curiosity.  The great thing about curiosity is that it requires no particular preexisting expertise.  It only requires a desire to learn something new.  I believe that if we are not learning something new our minds are stagnating and even going backwards. Let's hear it, then,  for Curiosity.

p.s. Stay tuned over the coming months to Curiosity, the Mars Rover. Its landing on Mars eight months from now will be one of the most technically challenging landings ever attempted by a space craft. JPL has put together a really good animation of how they plan to get Curiosity on the surface.

Technology and the City: For Better and For Worse

Roosevelt Center
Greenbelt, MD

The city was created by technology. Technology has also made the city a poorer place to live. This cycle of creation and degradation has gone on since people started building their mud and straw huts close together. The by-products of cohabitation, whether sewage or air pollution or even epidemic diseases, has been the price one paid for living close to markets or places of work.

This pattern was reinforced for me by a film I happened upon entitled simply The City. The  film is a documentary created for the 1939 New York World's Fair City of Tomorrow which was part of the Futurama exhibit.  The film was the brainchild of Catherine Bauer Wurster who was the leading member of a small group of idealists known as "The Housers" who were committed to improving housing for low-income families. The New York architect, Robert D. Kohn, shared her interest in low-income housing and commissioned the documentary.

The film focused much of its attention on the planned community of Greenbelt, Maryland which was constructed under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal as a model community. The idea was to build an ideal community near Washington, D.C. to relieve a severe housing shortage in the area of the Capital which existed at that time.  Two other cities were also planned and built - Greendale, Wisconsin (near Milwaukee) and Greenhills, Ohio (near Cincinnati).

The film was originally written by FDR's filmmaker, Pare Lorentz, but was re-scripted by the noted architectural critic and advocate of planned suburban communities, Lewis Mumford. Interestingly, the documentary's music was the first commissioned film score for composer Aaron Copeland and had largely been forgotten until this film was rediscovered in the archives a few years ago.

When I watched the film (which is available on YouTube in four parts), I was struck by how many of the problems we face today were already there in 1938: traffic congestion, over-crowding, air pollution, and terrible housing for low-income people. The model city of Greenbelt, MD looks like a little utopia compared to the squalor of the mill towns and the congestion of New York City. In many ways, however, the future longed for in the film has come to pass. Many of us live in nicely laid out suburban communities with good roads, schools, housing, and shopping. Yet many of the problems are still with us or have even grown worse over time. Despite our advancing technology, the city remains challenged to perpetually come up with new - mostly technical - solutions.

Quite coincidentally, the latest special issue of Scientific American is about the future of cities.  Must be something in the air about cities lately. I keep coming across all these connections. In any event, the 1939 documentary is linked below. If you want a better view, click through to the YouTube site and watch the video.

Pale Blue Dot Revisited

Earth is barely visible as
a pale blue dot in the  red
band on the right.

I love Carl Sagan. He was as much a poet as he was an astronomer.  Back in 1994, he published a book  entitled, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. These are the opening words to his book:

The spacecraft was a long way from home, beyond the orbit of the outermost planet and high above the ecliptic plane - which is an imaginary flat surface that we can think of as something like a racetrack in which the orbits of the planets are mainly confined. The ship was speeding away from the sun at 40,000 miles per hour. But in early February 1990, it was overtaken by an urgent message from Earth. 

Obediently, it turned its cameras back toward the now-distant planets. Slewing its scan platform from one spot in the sky to another, it snapped 60 pictures and stored them in digital form on its tape recorder.  Then slowly, in March, April, and May,  it radioed the data back to earth. Each image was composed of 640,000 individual picture elements ("pixels"), like the dots in a newspaper wirephoto or a pointillist painting.  The spacecraft was 3.7 billion miles away from Earth, so far away that it took each pixel 5 1/2 hours, traveling at the speed of light, to reach us. 

What the pictures showed was the Earth - just a pale blue dot in the black of the universe.  Sagan's words have become the inspiration for many, including artists and filmmakers.  I highlighted one such artist/filmmaker in an early post on the Symphony of Science. Recently, I came across another video on Vimeo by Michael Marantz using Sagan's words. Sagan himself provides the narration. Marantz shot the time-lapse images and composed and performed the music. I thought it might be worth sharing here. In these troubled and troubling times, a little perspective is useful.  Hope you enjoy.


EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.

Kudos to one of my favorite sites, Open Culture, for suggesting the idea for this blog.

Even Subways Can Be Beautiful

I came across a couple of items recently that make me realize that even the mundane can be beautiful.  The first is a photo from the Library of Congress's Detroit Photographic Company archives showing a 28th Street subway station in New York City when it was being newly constructed in 1904.  The tile work in the domed ceiling and the woodwork in the ticket booth are beautiful.

28th Street Station, New York City Subway, 1904
Click on photo to enlarge

The second was a more recent video made by Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, two filmmakers at Redglass. They describe the film as a visual poem of the experience of emerging from the subway into a new environment above.  This film was taken   in New York City and is set to music by Erik Satie.


Sub City New York from sarah klein on Vimeo.

[Thanks to BrainPickings for the video link].

King Tut's Chariot

The New York Times ran an interesting story on August 3rd describing a recent addition to the King Tutanhkamun exhibit that is going on in New York near Times Square.  The centerpiece of the exhibit is King Tut's chariot - not a ceremonial chariot but the real deal.  Of the six chariots found in Tut's vault, this was the only one that was not obviously intended as a ceremonial burial vehicle.  The wheels and axles of this chariot show real wear indicating that this simple but elegant vehicle was actually used.

Earlier conjectures on the cause of Tut's death suggested he was murdered as he had a hole in his skull.  This is now known to have been created in the embalming process and more modern forensic analysis indicates that he probably died of malaria complicated by an infection from a broken bone.  The money at the moment seems to be that he might have fallen off this same chariot and broken his leg.  Hence, it was buried with him when he died.

It's not often you can see a wheeled vehicle of any kind that is thirty-three hundred years old. This is the first time that the chariot has been allowed out of Egypt by the Egyptian antiquities authorities and it is a real coup for the exhibition.  Two horse-powered. As Steve Martin would say in his classic parody, "Funky Tut!"



(Photo of chariot from Times website)

New (Old) Wax Cylinder Recordings

I am on a bit of a roll at the moment looking around various news websites for stories that relate to the history of technology.  Forgive me if this gets to be too much.  This phase will probably pass rather quickly.

I just read a very interesting story about recording on wax cylinders.  Now, this was not news in the late 1800s or even the early 1900s but it IS news if you want to do it today.  A British Steampunk band called The Band That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing, who loves all things Victorian, decided to release 40 copies of their new CD on wax cylinders.  However, they did not release a wax cylinder player thus the crew at the BBC Technology website decided to "give it a go" (as the Brits might say) and build their own wax cylinder record player.  You can see the results in the video below:



You can also read the full story at the BBC website here.

Thomas Edison (pictured above with his first recording device) was dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park, not because of his electric lights, but because of his invention for mechanically capturing sound for the first time in history.  He thought his invention would be most useful as a stenographic tool for business and actually frowned upon the idea of using it for entertainment purposes.  But technology has this habit of morphing into forms that users want rather than what inventors conceive.  Clearly, the customers had spoken (no pun intended).

Cheerio!

Food, Inc. - We Are How We Eat

I had a chance tonight to watch Robert Kenner's documentary, Food, Inc., on the PBS series, POV.  If you haven't seen it, I would highly recommend the film as a sobering look at the industrialization of the food we eat.  It touches on many issues that resonate with what I write about in this blog, including the effects of industrialization, patent issues, innovation, and an open society.  The film was nominated in the Best Documentary category for the 2010 Academy Awards.

One of the themes of the film had to do with Monsanto's patents on soybean seeds which were genetically modified to resist Monsanto's own herbicide, Roundup.  This means that soybean fields can be sprayed with Roundup and everything but the soybeans will be wiped out.  But, Monsanto insists that farmers who wish to use this seed have to re-buy their seed stock each year from Mansanto.  If they try to reuse seed that comes from last year's crop, Monsanto will sue them for patent infringement and even blacklist the farmers so they cannot buy seed.  Monsanto has a team of around eighty private investigators that roam the countryside looking for growers who might be reusing their seed and then strong-arming them into signing agreements that are favorable to Monsanto.  This is the case even if pollen from an adjacent field where another farmer has planted Monsanto seeds cross-pollinates his neighbor's field that was not grown from Monsanto seeds.  Monsanto can test the soybean plant and determine if it contains their patented gene.  If it does, all hell breaks loose.

I am a supporter of a strong intellectual property system to encourage innovation, but the Monsanto case seems to be a situation where the patent owner has too much power.  The way these cases are being identified and handled could easily make someone who is paranoid believe that industry and government are working hand-in-hand for the benefit of  the Monsanto's profit and not for the greater good of society.  Not surprisingly, Monsanto (like other large agribusinesses) declined to be interviewed for the film.  I can't say I am surprised.

Book Notes: The Brooklyn Bridge

The Great Bridge:  The Epic Story of the Building the Brooklyn Bridge, by David McCullough, Simon & Schuster, 1972, 636 pages.

A Picture History of The Brooklyn Bridge, by Mary J. Shapiro, Dover, 1983, 122 pages.






May 23, 1883 was the last day that people commuting between New York City and Brooklyn needed to take a ferry.  The next day, the Brooklyn Bridge was officially opened for business.  The opening celebrations that day included everyone and anyone who was a dignitary or connected to the building of the bridge.  The review committee was headed by President Chester A. Arthur and Governor of New York, Grover Cleveland.  The mayors, the aldermen, the trustees of the bridge company, all were in attendance.  Everyone was there except the Chief Engineer, Washington Roebling.  Roebling, in fact, had not set foot on the bridge once in the entire 14-year history of the construction of his bridge.  That fact is part of what makes the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge such an epic.  And no one writes a better historical narrative than David McCullough.

I read McCullough's book just this week.  I must confess, for someone who professes to enjoy all things historical about technology, I have had his book for years but it has gone unread.  Maybe it was my reprinting his speech on history here in this blog a few weeks ago.  Maybe it was the fact that I came across Mary Shapiro's wonderful photo documentary of the bridge in a used bookstore.  Whatever the reason, I sat down and started to read them both together.  I am so glad that I did.  McCullough writes beautifully about the characters and events that shaped the bridge.  He writes at great length about the engineering and the construction of the bridge itself.  But when it comes to visualizing something so complex, the old saw that "a picture is worth a thousand words" remains true.  The Great Bridge does have photos and illustrations in the middle of the book but there are so many more good photos and engravings in Shapiro's Picture History.  If you are interested in reading McCullough's book, I would seriously suggest getting a copy of Shapiro's book as a reference companion.

As the subtitle of McCullough's book suggests, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge really was a saga.  Construction of a bridge across the East River had been thought about for years - as far back as 1811 when Thomas Pope imagined his Rainbow Bridge that I wrote about a while ago.   It was on an East River ferry that became trapped in the ice in 1852 that John A. Roebling conceived of an idea for a great bridge spanning the river between New York and Brooklyn.  John Roebling was the pre-eminent bridge builder in America and with him that day was his young son, Washington Roebling.  Because of the Civil War and economic problems, construction of the Brooklyn Bridge would not start until 1869.

John Roebling was the engineer who designed the bridge, including its massive gothic towers and the multiple traffic lanes and pedestrian walkway.  But on June 28, 1869, before any work could be done on even the footings of the bridge towers,  John Roebling badly crushed his foot in an accident at the ferry dock.  He contracted tetanus and died a horrible death 24 days later.

From the beginning, John Roebling had intended that his son, Washington, would be the Chief Engineer on the bridge.  Washington Roebling (photo) was trained as an engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.  In 1861, Washington enlisted as a private in the Union Army.  Over the course of the Civil War he would become a hero at Gettysburg and finally resign his commission in 1865 at the rank of Colonel.  Shortly afterwards, he joined his father in Cincinnati to help him complete the suspension bridge over the Ohio River (the bridge still stands today).  Washington Roebling was no novice when he assumed full responsibility for constructing his father's design in 1869.

The building of the bridge was inevitably linked to politics and scandal in both New York City and Brooklyn.  Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall was an early backer of the bridge and it was only Tweed's downfall from other disclosures that removed that particular opportunity for pillaging the public coffers.  Politicians were always trying to use the bridge for their own political purposes.  Through it all, Washington Roebling refused to become embroiled in any of the controversies or to bend to any of the political pressures.

Washington Roebling himself would be crippled for years afterward from Caisson's Disease, otherwise known as the Bends, when he was down in the New York caisson, 70 feet under the East River, in December, 1872.  Roebling was in such pain that he requested a leave of absence and from that time forward performed all his duties as Chief Engineer by mail and written instructions.  His wife, Emily, acted as his corresponding secretary, caretaker, and confidant.  She became well-known to the assistant engineers of the bridge and later would often visit the construction site to convey instructions from her husband.  By unanimous choice, Emily Warren Roebling was the first person to walk across the decking of the bridge when it was completed in late 1882.  The Brooklyn Bridge was very much a family legacy: father, son, and daughter-in-law.  It is a story about honorable engineers and far less honorable politicians.  Mostly, it is a story of the triumph of will - personal and collective.

The Great Bridge was McCullough's second book following The Johnstown Flood (1968).  Several publishers offered him advances to write other disaster stories including one on the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.  But McCullough decided that he didn't want to become labeled as a writer of disaster stories and wanted instead to write a positive story - the building of the  Great Bridge.  Virtually every book after The Great Bridge has won McCullough awards, including two Pulitzers (Truman and John Adams).  If this book had come later in his series of books, it probably would have won a Pulitzer as well.  But the book did receive wide-spread critical acclaim at the time and now, 38 years later, it is still in print and still thought to be the single best history of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

McCullough began his book with a quote from Montgomery Schuyler, written for Harper's Weekly, May 24, 1883 (the day the bridge opened).  Shuyler was in some ways the first of the architectural critics in this country.  Schuyler wrote:

It so happens that the work which is

likely to be our most durable monument,

and to convey some knowledge of us to the

most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility;

not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.

Note:

If you are more the visual type, instead of reading the books I would recommend watching Ken Burns' 1981 documentary entitled The Brooklyn Bridge.  David McCullough is the narrator.  You can download the video from iTunes for a couple of bucks.

The Hindenburg Disaster

I came across some newsreel footage from the National Archives (via the Internet Archives) that show the disaster of the Hindenburg crash in Lakehurst, NJ on May 6, 1937.  This newsreel gives you some idea of what an 800 foot long airship looks like in flight. Ironically, the Hindenburg crashed exactly one year to the day following its maiden flight in 1936.

The interior of the airship was beautifully appointed as you can see in the photographs below.  At one point, it even carried an aluminum grand piano, although it was later removed to allow more room for passengers.

The Hindenburg had just completed its first Berlin - New York voyage of the 1937 season.  Due to bad weather, the airship had to idle for some hours before landing in Lakehurst, NJ (at the Naval Air Station which had mooring towers for large airships).  Everything was normal in the landing until the hydrogen-filled dirigible suddenly exploded near the tail section.  The entire craft was consumed in a minute and 35 of the 97 people on board were killed.  The images of the explosions shocked the world which had rarely witnessed a disaster unfolding in front of the cameras.  The cause of the explosion has never been determined.

Today, with video in our cellphones and with all our portable video cameras, capturing events as they happen is not nearly so rare an occurrence.  That doesn't mean that disaster is any easier to take now than it was on the Hindenburg's final day.

Sagan and the Symphony of Science

I came across a unique website via Discover Magazine's Discoblog, called the Symphony of Science.  A musician named John Boswell has put together a number of mashup videos on his website that use old science program footage, digital re-mixing, and auto-tuning software to transform spoken text into a sort-of singing.  One of the scientists he features prominently is Carl Sagan and his series, Cosmos, which I blogged about last year.  Other scientists who "sing" in his videos include Steven Hawking, David Attenborough, Neil deGrasee Tyson, Jacob Bronowski, Richard Dawkins, Richard Feynman, and many more.

Boswell got into this to try to combine his interest in electronica, music tools, and his love of science.  The results are very cool.  You can see his first (and most watched) video, A Glorius Dawn, below but click through to his website to watch the others.  They are all different, and all intriguing. Boswell deserves kudos for his creativity. Nicely done!

Sean Carroll and the Arrow of Time

Sean Carroll is a cosmologist at CalTech. He is also a gifted teacher.  I became aware of Carroll when my wife and I ordered a lecture series by him from the Teaching Company.  His course was entitled, Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe.  In the 24 lectures of this course, Carroll explains why the "stuff" we can see in the universe is only five percent of what is thought to be there.  Twenty-five percent is Dark Matter, needed to explain gravitational effects, and seventy percent is Dark Energy, needed to explain the perpetual expansion of the universe.  I would recommend the course. Even though it is taught using layman's language, it is very detailed.

Carroll prepared that course in 2007.  Since that time, he has written a new book called From Eternity to Here: the Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.  This book attempts to explain why time goes in only one direction.  "Well", you say.  "Duh?"  But it is not so obvious why time goes in one direction.  The fundamental laws of physics work with time going in either direction.  How can it be that we only get older?  Turns out, entropy has a whole lot to do with it.  Entropy is a measure of disorder and it can only get bigger.  Entropy explains why eggs turn into omelets but not the other way around.

You can see Carroll in action (and for free!) in a two-part video lecture he gave at the University of Sydney in December of last year.  Part One is here and you can see the link for Part Two on the right of that page. Each video lasts 30 minutes. If you like what you see, you can order his book from this link at Amazon or you can read the blog, Cosmic Variance, to which he contributes at Discover Magazine.  He also has his own website. Enjoy.

Kevin Kelley on Technology's Epic Story

Kevin Kelley is something of a technology guru.  He was the first executive editor of Wired magazine.  Kelley spoke to the Amsterdam TED conference last year on "Technology's Epic Story".  He has some interesting things to say (although I am not sure I would agree with his entire thesis).  If you haven't looked at the TED Talks before, check out their website.  They have many interesting speakers addressing a broad range of topics.

Dream Machine in Miniature

Imagine spending fifteen years on one hobby project.  That's what one Italian man did to pursue his dream of building a perfectly-scaled, operational model of a Ferrari 312BP.  Even if you aren't into cars, you should watch the five minute video to see what it means to spare no effort in building the perfect model.