Collaborate Disseminate
Some brand names become the de facto name for the generic product. Xerox, for example. Or Velcro. Teletype was a trademark, but it has come to mean just about any …read more Continue reading A Teletype by Any Other Name: The Early E-mail and Wordprocessor
If there’s an enduring image of how large steel structures used to be made, it’s probably the hot riveting process. You’ve probably seen grainy old black-and-white films of a riveting …read more Continue reading Mechanisms: Tension Control Bolts
Usually, designing a CPU is a lengthy process, especially so if you’re making a new ISA too. This is something that can take months or even years before you first …read more Continue reading What Happens If You Speedrun Making A CPU?
So far in this series, we’ve talked about man-made byproducts — Fordite, which is built-up layers of cured car enamel, and Trinitite, which was created during the first nuclear bomb …read more Continue reading Boss Byproducts: Fulgurites Are Fossilized Lightning
Probably not too many people around the world celebrated November 1st, 2023, but on this momentous date FreeBSD celebrated its 30th birthday. As the first original fork of the first …read more Continue reading FreeBSD at 30: the History and Future of the Most Popular BSD-Based OS
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a major functional component of the modern Internet. We rely on it for just about everything! It’s responsible for translating human-friendly domain names into …read more Continue reading Will .IO Domain Names Survive A Geopolitical Rearrangement?
One of the standard tropes in science fiction is some kind of device that can render someone unconscious — you know, like a phaser set to stun. We can imagine …read more Continue reading Tech In Plain Sight: Tasers Shooting Confetti
Orbital mechanics is a fun subject, as it involves a lot of seemingly empty space that’s nevertheless full of very real forces, all of which must be taken into account …read more Continue reading Lagrange Points and Why You Want to Get Stuck At Them
Plastics are unfortunately so cheap useful that they’ve ended up everywhere. They’re filling our landfills, polluting our rivers, and even infiltrating our food chain as microplastics. As much as we …read more Continue reading Recycling Tough Plastics Into Precursors With Some Smart Catalyst Chemistry
For months before liftoff, the popular press had been hyping up the fact that the Polaris Dawn mission would include the first-ever private spacewalk. Not only would this be the …read more Continue reading Polaris Dawn, and the Prudence of a Short Spacewalk