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Keith says he not only doesn’t use his cell phone when driving (CWD), but doesn’t talk to people when they are driving. Good for Keith, and the NTSB, which has recommended a flat ban on using cell phones while driving, hands-free or not. Our designated ‘conservative’ columnist, Debra Saunders, weighs in with one of her [...]
Archive for the ‘Technology and Society’ Category
December 20th, 2011
December 18th, 2011
Category: Health and Medicine, Technology and Society
As has been discussed here before, driving while using electronic communication devices is dangerous whether you go hands free or not. Matt Richtel, who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering distracted driving (and is a very nice fellow to boot), has a piece in NYT today examining whether the reason people keep doing something so [...]
December 4th, 2011
Category: Technology and Society, Uncategorized
…is a wonderful short story by E.M. Forster, set in a dystopia where everyone lives underground in little cells and only communicates with others via technology. On the Friday after Thanksgiving, UC Berkeley’s email, calmail, crashed and has been available in fits and starts at best ever since (for several days only via a web [...]
November 29th, 2011
ARM´s 25 billion general-purpose computer cores are like mitochondria in cells.
November 20th, 2011
Category: Humor, Technology and Society
This is the best joke I have heard about faster-than-light neutrinos: The bartender says “Sorry, we don’t serve faster than light neutrinos”. A faster than light neutrino walks into a bar.
November 16th, 2011
A colleague was just typing something on her iPad. When she typed “law review,” it auto-corrected to “laser Jew.” Discuss. UPDATE: Other excellent examples can be found here.
November 13th, 2011
Category: Technology and Society
Family members have an increasing capacity to spy on each other using hidden cameras, GPS trackers and the like. Common applications of these ever-developing technologies include sussing out an unfaithful spouse and detecting when a teenager has driven the family car over the speed limit. Robert Mendick’s article largely follows the usual line of media [...]
November 7th, 2011
Category: Economics, Technology and Society
I wrote a few weeks back about how the rise of the hotel buffet breakfast has eliminated jobs while at the same time wasting food and causing many people to overeat. Craig Lambert sounds similar themes in NYT: The conventional wisdom is that America has become a “service economy,” but actually, in many sectors, “service” [...]
October 28th, 2011
Category: Personal moment, Technology and Society
You know those annoying stories older people tell younger people about how “In my day, we didn’t have X, and you whippersnappers don’t realize how lucky you are…”? Well, this is one of them. The year was 1974. As the nation reeled from Watergate, President Nixon’s resignation and the rise of disco, a wonderful new [...]
October 20th, 2011
Category: Britain, Technology and Society
With the passing of Gil Hayward, the magnificent British code breaking team at Bletchley Park moves, sadly, further from living memory. We appropriately admire the tremendous risks front-line soldiers took at Dunkirk and Normandy, but should also appreciate that some of the biggest victories of the war were produced by turbo-nerds with thick glasses working [...]
