25 years ago today, John Lennon was shot and killed in front of the Dakota Building in New York. Even though I was a toddler when the Beatles were active, they still had a great impact on me as a teenager and beyond. I can’t quite recall the moment in which I received the news of Lennon’s death, only that I was shocked and sad. Hard to believe that 25 years have passed since then.
Journalist and media professional currently based in Los Angeles, California. Focusing on science and technology.
Wall Street research firm Needham & Co. announced yesterday that in 2005, over 1 million Windows users have switched over to Mac, which completely beat the most optimistic expectations. The trend is expected to become even stronger in 2006, for which the Needham forecasts 1.3 million to abandon Windows in favor of Mac.
Journalist and media professional currently based in Los Angeles, California. Focusing on science and technology.
In San Francisco for a conference. Every time I’m in the Bay Area, I am amazed about how different San Francisco is when compared to L.A. It feels a lot more like a European city.
I am fascinated by San Francisco’s cable car and every time I am in town, I have to make it a point to ride all four lines from beginning to end. I find it amazing that a system which by today’s standards would be considered completely unreliable, inefficient and slow was once a much admired marvel of innovation, and a great relief for the traffic challenges of its period. Cable cars are an example of centralized engineering. The problem: Steam engines, the power plants of the time, were too heavy and otherwise ill suited to be placed on small, urban vehicles. The solution: Make the engines stationary and place them in a central location. At this location, the steam engines drive long loops of steel cables, which run over a complex system of wheels and gearing and through shafts dug underneath San Francisco’s streets.
The cars have no motors or power source of their own. Instead, they passively latch on to the moving cable, which keeps moving along at a steady speed of 15 mph. A primitive friction clutch mechanism allows drivers to regulate the car’s speed. Thus, the engines at the central station drive all the cars around the city — a concept which reminds of the days of mainframe computing, before the PC revolution.
Such an engineering solution might seem antiquated and peculiar, but trust me: The cable car is a whole lot of fun and still the best way to move around the areas it serves.
Should you want to learn more about how cable cars work, I highly recommend a visit to San Francisco’s cable car museum, which is where the central gearing stations and the motors are located. (Sadly, the old steam engines have been replaced by electric motors, but otherwise, things still work as they always have.)
Another place worth a visit is the Wells Fargo Museum in the Financial District. The exhibition is well maintained and provides good insight into California’s pioneer era and the Gold Rush, a time in which what is now Wells Fargo Bank has its origin. Back then, Wells Fargo wasn’t really a bank. The company provided postal service, transportation by coach, gold trading services and access to the civilized world in what became known as the “Wild West”.
Journalist and media professional currently based in Los Angeles, California. Focusing on science and technology.
Only a few days after Hurricane Katrina had washed away New Orleans, its evil sister Rita sent 2.8 million people running from the Houston area. But in the end, Rita turned out to be a dud. The storm refugees (including some personal friends of mine) are already returning.
The nation’s response to Katrina and Rita has been much debated and will be scrutinized for a long time. One wonders how a nation which prides itself on its wealth, technological expertise and power may be reduced to chaos and incompetence in the face of disaster. On the other hand, to put things in perspective, one needs to look at the havoc caused by tropical storms in other parts of the world. In 1942, a hurricane in Bengal, India caused 40,000 deaths. In 1991, a cyclone in Bangladesh killed 139,000. The same country was hit by a cyclone in 1970, which cost 300,000 lives.
While the economic loss from “Katrita” will be gigantic, the loss of human life will be relatively small for storms of this size. Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved by the communication system, the traffic infrastructure and above all, space technology which allows the remote tracking and forecasting of storms and makes timely evacuations possible.
Lives saved means survivors who need to be supplied with shelter, security, medicine and food in the short term, and jobs and housing in the long term. These are problems Bangladesh didn’t even need to deal with. There, 300,000 deaths also meant 300,000 fewer people to feed and clothe.
In the case of Katrina and Rita, science and technology have not been able to completely prevent the loss of life. But at least it was minimized dramatically.
Journalist and media professional currently based in Los Angeles, California. Focusing on science and technology.
News of the premature and surprising passing of a very dear person has reached me.
“Willi” was a kind mentor and fatherly friend during my student years. And had life not taken a different turn, he would have become my father in-law. He inspired my fascination with creative pursuits, vintage markets and the tireless acquisition of interesting, unusual books and objects. He also awakened my appreciation for the art of cooking, fine wine and cheese. During my most rebellious years, he accepted me the way I was, without passing judgment on the eccentric, provocative and outrageous ways in which I thought, dressed or wore my hair at the time. Willi loved to cook, and although I was on a tight student budget, I ate like a king whenever I was a guest at his house, and often left with leftovers for the next day.
He was a remarkable man, a person of genuine warmth and honesty who possessed unfettered tolerance for others, and whose philosophy was simply to “live and let live”.
Without him, I would never have become the person I am today. Thank you, Willi. I am lucky that fate joined our paths for a time, and I miss you a great deal.
Journalist and media professional currently based in Los Angeles, California. Focusing on science and technology.
When I was a student in Vienna, I was often annoyed with the massive amount of dog excrement littering the streets. It’s really a stinking mess. Vienna’s famously feared old ladies, who seemed to own the majority of the city’s dogs and represented a sizable political lobby, never dreamed of cleaning up after their beloved little pets. Dogs are allowed in parks, and since there are few landscaped areas along the old streets and sidewalks, their leftovers are usually deposited on the sidewalk or between cars parked along the streets. Being somewhat radical and angry young men, we had all sorts of wild ideas about how to sanitize the problem — most of which are unsuitable for reciting here.
One idea we would never have dreamed of in these days: To take samples of the feces and match the DNA against a database, then fine the dog owner. The idea has recently been circulating in Europe, and I got to write a short blurb about it for the American magazine, Popular Science. (It’s here: A Pooper Scooper Law with Bite).
In L.A.’s wealthy neighborhoods, such problems seem rather strange. Not only are there plenty of landscaped areas, but the folks here conveniently have (mostly) Latino gardeners who get stuck with the unpleasant task of cleaning up. (In all fairness, some dog owners are actually responsible enough to do it themselves).
Journalist and media professional currently based in Los Angeles, California. Focusing on science and technology.
During the morning commute hours of Thursday, 7 July 2005, four Islamist extremists separately detonated three bombs aboard London Underground trains across the city, and later, a fourth on a double-decker bus.
Having greatly enjoyed my time in London, during which I took extensive bus and underground journeys throughout the city, I was especially saddened. How people can delude themselves to think that the indiscriminate killing and maiming of innocent, random members of the public could accomplish political or religious goals is beyond me.
Fifty-two people ended up killed, and over 700 more were injured in the attacks, making it Britain’s deadliest terrorist incident since the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
P.S. in 2017: It is astonishing how Islamist terrorist attacks have now become such regular occurrences that the 2005 London bombings are almost forgotten by the global community.
Here is a List of Islamist terrorist attacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks
Journalist and media professional currently based in Los Angeles, California. Focusing on science and technology.
My grandfather was in the steel industry. When I was a boy, he took me to see the iron mine at the Erzberg in Austria, a site where iron had been extracted since the times of the Roman empire. The huge trucks used to haul rock down the mountain made quite an impression on me. 20 years later, these memories inspired me to write a magazine article on these fascinating machines.
Today’s mining trucks are much bigger than what I saw as a boy. They are true monsters. Largest of them all: the Liebherr T282B, which is nearly 15 meters (48 feet) long and 7 1/2 meters (23 feet) high. Vehicle weight: 222 tons. Payload: 360 tons. Each tire weighs six tons. The diesel engine has 20 cylinders with twin turbochargers and generates 3700 horsepowers. That’s good for a top speed of 65 km/h or 40 mph. If you want to own the biggest and meanest truck in the world, it will set you back $3.5 million.
In the fall of 2004, I visited the Virginia factory where these machines are built. Then, I flew back to L.A. to finish the manuscript, which was quickly accepted by the publisher. It still took more than half a year for the story to go into print. (That’s why it’s always good to negotiate for ‘payment on acceptance’ versus the unfortunately very common ‘payment on publication’).
I’m glad the story is finally out. Somehow I never feel it’s all done until I hold the magazine in my hands.
Journalist and media professional currently based in Los Angeles, California. Focusing on science and technology.
Visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and loved the photograhps of André Kertész (Budapest 1894 – New York 1985). Here are some samples.
Journalist and media professional currently based in Los Angeles, California. Focusing on science and technology.
In today’s edition, the L.A. Times leads with this story: For the first time, a large scale comparative study has shown that male and female brains work differently. Of course, no two brains are ever identical, nor are two minds ever the same. But there are subtle but profound biological differences which have now been shown to be remarkably consistent within either sex. Leading the research is Sandra Witelson at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Her work was recently published in Science, the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet.
Surprisingly, this turns out to be politically charged stuff – and therefore makes good headlines.
But why should this be controversial? Society accepts the fact that male and female bodies are anatomically different and each has distinct features and properties. This is why men and women generally do not compete against each other in sports. But Western society has come to have real issues with the idea that male and female brains are not the same, and that therefore, male and female minds think in different ways.
It will be interesting to see if we, as a society, will implement this knowledge, or if we will continue to promote politically correct ideology in ignorance of scientific fact.
Journalist and media professional currently based in Los Angeles, California. Focusing on science and technology.