I'm currently reading Gordon MacKenzie's delightful book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball. Chapter 19 is the shortest, most insightful chapter I have read in some time. I will repeat it in its entirety for your reading pleasure: Orville Wright did not have a pilot's license.

We have all been there at some time—standing in line at the airport waiting to board a plane and thinking to ourselves that “there has to be a better way.” Well, apparently, there is now. According to this informative articlea researcher at Fermilab has figured out the optimal way to board an airplane. His findings…

Following up on yesterday's post, I invite you to look at the logo to the right. Undoubtedly, it is one you have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of times. How many of you, however, have ever noticed the arrow between the "E" and "x." It is a wonderful  example of negative space and I want you…

In his famous speech at Rice University where he declared that it was America’s intention to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, President Kennedy said “the greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds,” adding that “the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished…

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting review of the book, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel, a while back. It is a history of the world’s first machine gun. Interestingly, although the gun was patented during the Civil War and Mr. Gatling urged the Union Army to adopt it—arguing that it would "save lives, wounds and…

IBM recently announced that it has developed a new supercomputer capable of performing 1,000 trillion calculations per second. It is a little hard to wrap your brain around such mind-boggling numbers, but last year I wrote an article discussing an IBM supercomputer that was capable of performing 70 trillion calculations per second. In the piece,…

Marcel Proust once said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” I was reminded to this quote yesterday after reading John Markoff’s insightful article on Pax Scientific — a company that has applied biomimicry to create new industrial designs for everything from aerospace designs to parts…

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting review of the new book, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel. It is a history of the world’s first machine gun. Interestingly, although the gun was patented during the Civil War and Mr. Gatling urged the Union Army to adopt it — arguing that it would "save lives, wounds and…

It is common knowledge that only about 20 percent of an iceberg floats above the waterline. Yet, if you are a ship captain, you need to concern yourself with the remaining 80 percent. If you don’t, you could end up sharing a fate similar to that of Edward John Smith, the captain of the Titanic….