Category Archives: culture

I’ve been learning Chinese for some time. Most people know three things about Chinese: it’s a tonal language, it’s hard to read all those pictogram thingies, and it must be really complicated. Well, the first two of those things are … Continue reading →

A few years ago I walked the John Muir Trail in the highest parts of the Sierra Nevada mountains from Yosemite Valley to Whitney Portal with my then-girlfriend. Actually, the trail technically ends at the top of Mount Whitney but … Continue reading →

It’s interesting how certain phrases catch the popular imagination and almost overnight become clichés, appearing in all sorts of writing. The best of these phrases have the twin benefits that they are both memorable and also immediately communicate the point … Continue reading →

About 12 years ago I went on a three-day seminar about the wireless industry presented by the wonderfully named Herschel Shosteck (who unfortunately died of cancer last year although the company that bears his name still runs similar workshops). It … Continue reading →

I spent a day last week at Bletchley Park, about an hour north of London. As I think is now well known, during the Second World War this was where a team of smart people, notably Alan Turing, broke the … Continue reading →

Unfortunately semiconductor is not the only thing that has some level of exponentiality going in its favor. For some areas this is a good thing: the human genome project spent 3 billion dollars to sequence the first genome (back when … Continue reading →

It’s Chinese New Year, or the spring festival as the Chinese call it, the start of a year of the Ox. It is also, by coincidence, Australia day, the equivalent of July 4th down there. But there is not much … Continue reading →