All designers want the product they’re working on to be successful. Sometimes success just means that a routine business keeps going as usual with a newer model of the product. Then there are successes like Microsoft, Apple, and Google—mega-successes that bring on revolutions in both industries and the culture at large. Is world-changing success on […]
Watch Where You’re Pokémon Go-ing
The Japanese megacorporation Nintendo was founded way back in 1889 to sell playing cards, and when I hear the word “Pokémon” I think of the collection of cards one of my nephews accumulated when he was about eight years old. They showed bizarre-looking fantasy creatures that had complicated made-up genealogies and quirks that he committed […]
‘Cornfield Meet’ Near Panhandle, Texas: How?
On Tuesday morning, June 28, the stretch of U. S. 60 leading east from Amarillo, Texas past the small town of Panhandle was quiet in the early morning sun. The flat horizon was broken only by the spinning blades of a wind farm in the distance and a towering grain elevator near the double BNSF […]
Tesla’s Growing Pains: The Wheel-Falling-Off Incident
First, the known facts. On Sunday, Apr. 24 of this year, Pete Cordaro had driven his Tesla Model S about 73,000 miles, making it one of the higher-mileage electric vehicles on the road. The Model S is an all-electric vehicle introduced by Tesla in 2012, and currently retails for about $70,000. While driving slowly on a back […]
The Rights & Wrongs of the Human Genome Project—Write
The highly prestigious journal Science carried an unusual article on June 2. Most scientific papers are about new discoveries—we figured out this theory or we measured thus-and-so in that experiment. Well, this paper was neither of those things. In “The Human Genome Project—Write,” the twenty-five co-authors announced their intention to synthesize a human genome from scratch. In layman’s terms, they […]
A Test Case for How to Lower Carbon Emissions: Texas
No, I haven’t gone off my nut with blind patriotism toward my native state. Yes, I know that ex-governor Rick Perry said in 2014, “Calling CO2 a pollutant is doing a disservice [to] the country, and I believe a disservice to the world.” But the fact of the matter is that Texas has the most installed […]
Will Robots Ever Have Moral Authority?
Robots build cars, clean carpets, and answer phones, but would you trust one to decide how you should be treated in a rest home or a hospital? That’s one of the questions raised recently by a thoughtful article in the online business news journal Quartz. Journalist Olivia Goldhill interviewed ethicists and computer scientists who are thinking […]
Drone Delivers to Doorstep: What Next?
Last Friday, Mar. 25, the Nevada startup Flirtey announced that it had made the first successful package delivery to a residential area in the U.S. with an autonomous drone (not steered by a person on the ground). The demonstration flight, which was completed Mar. 10, carried a package of emergency supplies half a mile through […]
AlphaGo Defeats Human Go Champion: Go Figure
First it was chess: world champion Garry Kasparov lost a contest of five games to an IBM computer named Deep Blue in 1997. And now it’s the game called Go, which has been popular in Asia for centuries. Earlier this month, Korean Go champion Lee Sedol lost four out of a series of five games in a […]
Hot Feet from Hoverboards
Not long after my university went back in session in January, I saw a couple of young men tooling along a sidewalk on campus on two-wheeled things that looked like Segways, but without the vertical handle. They turned out to be hoverboards, a gadget that packs two high-power motors, some gyros and accelerometers, some electronics, […]