Hopefully Interesting

Enough public policy, time for more shiny technology.  For a while now I've been following some presentations Ivan Goddard has been putting on a series of lectures for this group called Out Of The Box Computing which has some seriously ambitious plans to totally re-think how computers work.  I'm afraid those videos (and the rest of this post) are going to get a bit technical, so fair warning. It's sort of interesting to see how little the base abstractions governing how we interact with computers have changed over the last 50 years.  Back then instructions executed one by one, taking however many clock cycles they took before the processor passed on to the next instruction.  First people pipelined computers so that though instructions were only started one at a time you could start a new instruction before a previous instruction had finished.  Then people created computers that could issue more than one instruction with each cycle of the clock.  Finall...

This is the result of a comment I left on Hacker News a while ago, which I thought might be worth expanding into a blog post.  We all know about the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant , and probably heard about all the many things that have gone wrong there.  I've often seen people use Fukushima as an example of why nuclear power is too dangerous for us to use, and that we have to move to other methods of generating electricity.  Some people have claimed that Germany is replacing their nuclear power generation with Coal after Fukushima, while others says that that's wrong and Germany is merely replacing Nuclear with renewables when it would otherwise have replaced coal with the growth in it's use of coal being merely incidental. But at the same time, how things get talked about by the media is often a poor guide to how dangerous things really are in practice.  So bad was the Fukushima disaster, really?  The Tsunami that hit Japan was a humongous disas...

People tend to spend a lot of time thinking about national politics and that only makes sense.  We, or people in my social circles, do spend most of our time consuming national news and the New York Times or similar papers aren't going to concern themselves about little old Cambridge.  Even the Boston Globe has barely mentioned the election.  Which makes sense, in a way, since any given local election will only effect a relatively small number of people. But there are some ways in which the cumulative effect of city council elections from around the country have large impacts on the world.  The most significant of these is probably decisions taken by the local government regarding building density.  People frequently talk about the local effects of decisions by the town or city government regarding new development.  It might increase tax revenue or increase the supply of housing on one hand, but it might overload transportation infrastructure or change ...