RSS Bilingual Reader

The front of the American grocery store contains a strange, liminal space: the transitional area between parking lot and checkstand, along the front exterior and interior of the building, that fills with oddball commodities. Ice is a fixture at nearly every store, filtered water at most, firewood at some. This retail purgatory, both too early and too late in the shopping journey for impulse purchases, is mostly good only for items people know they will need as they check out. One of the standard...

Previously on Computers Are Bad, we discussed the early history of air traffic control in the United States . The technical demands of air traffic control are well known in computer history circles because of the prominence of SAGE, but what's less well known is that SAGE itself was not an air traffic control system at all. SAGE was an air defense system, designed for the military with a specific task of ground-controlled interception (GCI). There is natural overlap between air defense and air t...

Some years ago, I had a frustrating and largely fruitless encounter with the politics of policing. As a member of an oversight commission, I was particularly interested in the regulation of urban surveillance. The Albuquerque Police Department, for reasons good and bad, has often been an early adopter of surveillance technology. APD deployed automated license plate readers, mounted on patrol cars and portable trailers, in 2013. Initially, the department kept a six-month history of license plate ...

One of the difficult things about describing a grift, or at least what became a grift, is judging the sincerity with which the whole thing started. Scams often crystallize around a kernel of truth: genuinely good intentions that start rolling down the hill to profitability and end up crashing through every solid object along the way. I'm not totally sure about Evelyn Wood; she seems to have had all the best in mind but still turned so quickly to hotel conference room seminars that I have trouble...

I have at least a few readers for which the sound of a man's voice saying "government cell phone detected" will elicit a palpable reaction. In Department of Energy facilities across the country, incidences of employees accidentally carrying phones into secure areas are reduced through a sort of automated nagging. A device at the door monitors for the presence of a tag; when the tag is detected it plays an audio clip. Because this is the government, the device in question is highly spec...

How much do you remember from elementary school? I remember vinyl tile floors, the playground, the teacher sentencing me to standing in the hallway. I had a teacher who was a chess fanatic; he painted a huge chess board in the paved schoolyard and got someone to fabricate big wooden chess pieces. It was enough of an event to get us on the evening news. I remember Run for the Arts, where I tried to talk people into donating money on the theory that I could run, which I could not. I'm about six mo...

We think that we're converting time into energy... that's the engineering principle. In the 1820s, stacks, ovens, and gasometers rose over the docklands of Dublin. The Hibernian Gas Company, one of several gasworks that would eventually occupy the land around the Grand Canal Docks, heated coal to produce town gas. That gas would soon supply thousands of lights on the streets of Dublin, a quiet revolution in municipal development that paved the way for electrification---both conceptually, as it p...

Where we left off , Albuquerque's boosters, together with the Forest Service, had completed construction of the Ellis Ranch Loop and a spur to the Sandia Crest. It was possible, even easy, to drive from Albuquerque east through Tijeras Pass, north to the present-day location of Sandia Park, and through the mountains to Placitas before reaching Bernalillo to return by the highway. The road provided access to the Ellis Ranch summer resort, now operated by the Cooper family and the First Presbyteri...

The Rotary Club will take immediate action on the Ellis ranch loop project. The Rotarians reached this decision at their weekly luncheon, held yesterday at the Albarado hotel. The club's plan is not merely to give Albuquerque a good, short road to the Ellis ranch... They embrace the building of a seventy-mile scenic loop. 1 Many Western cities are defined, in part, by their mountains. Those moving from town to town often comment on the disorientation, the disruption, caused by a change in the ci...

Few aspects of commercial telecommunications have quite the allure of the T-carrier. Well, to me, at least, but then I have very specific interests. T-carrier has this odd, enduring influence on discussion of internet connections. I remember that for years, some video game installers (perhaps those using Gamespy?) used to ask what kind of internet service you had, with T1 as the "highest" option. The Steam Hardware Survey included T1 among the options for a long time. This was odd, in ...