Year: 2007

Enrico Fermi was one smart guy. The Italian physicist is most famous for building the world’s first nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago in 1939, but he was also famous for his work in the development of quantum theory and for winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity in 1938. However, one of his more enduring theories came about as a result of a seemingly flippant remark that Fermi made one day at lunch.

The year was 1950. Fermi and some colleagues were sitting down and enjoying a nice lunch. The topic of the day was extraterrestrial life; professors and grad students eagerly traded theories about where alien life could be found and what it might be like. As the excitement level of the crowd continued to rise, someone noticed that Fermi hadn’t said anything. In fact, he was just sitting there quietly, eating his lunch. During a brief lull in the conversation, that person asked Fermi what he thought about extraterrestrial life. Fermi looked up, thought for a minute, then asked “Where is everybody?”

Now, that three word phrase might seem silly. Condescending. Flippant, even. But it was actually a very deep thing to say. And it would become the basis of the Fermi Paradox. The paradox is awfully complex, but in a nutshell it goes something like this: modern human beings (that is, humans that have left a physical record of their existence, such as writing or buildings) have been around for around 6,000 years. The universe has been around for around 14 billion years. Obviously, 6,000 years is a teeny, tiny fraction of the universe’s 14 billion total years, so isn’t it logical to assume that some other intelligent life has been around for longer than ourselves? And if so, why can’t we see any trace of their existence? We haven’t seen any evidence of their space probes, their battles to colonize other planets or their messages left in radio waves. Not only can we not find the alien equivalent of a Starbucks on Mars, we can’t find any evidence of their existence whatsoever.

The interesting question is why. Does intelligent life eventually get smart enough to destroy itself… and then do just that, as is the fear with nuclear weapons? Does the very process of gaining the intelligence necessary to colonize space ruin home planets, as is the fear with global warming? Is space simply so very vast that Wars of the Worlds are going on at this very minute, but humans lack the ability to notice it? Or is our greatest fear true: that we really are alone?

Ever heard of the “Romantic Movement”? It didn’t have anything to do with bringing home roses and chocolates for the missus; indeed it didn’t have anything to do with what we think of as “romance” at all. Wikipedia says that it was “an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe”. It was partly “a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period”, but it was also (and more importantly) “a reaction against the rationalization of nature”.

There were two major scientific advances that led to the birth of the movement:

The first was medical science (and science in general), in that it seemed that scientists of the day were creeping ever closer to discovering the true “essence” of life. Whatever you want to call it – Life Force, Primal Essence, you name it – it seemed as if scientists of the day were mere inches from figuring out what that thing was and the Romantics feared that all manner of Bad Things would happen once Pandora’s Box was opened. One of the most famous pieces of Romantic literature – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – deals with this question directly: a “mad scientist” type figures out how to harness the power of life and uses his skills to create a monster. You probably know the rest of the story. In any case, Mary Shelley’s fear is hardly unknown to us. In fact, such fear may be even more prevalent today than it was two hundred years ago. It seems that medical science – with its DNA and stem cell research – might again be on the cusp of “harnessing life”. And it scares people now just as much as it did then.

The other scientific advance that kicked off the Romantic Movement was the Industrial Revolution. For centuries, people made things with their hands. But suddenly, factories were popping up all over Europe, factories that could do the work of thousands of people using machines that didn’t require wages or sleep. People had a real fear of technology – much like people in the 1960s and 1970s that feared that computers would take over their jobs. In fact, the fear of technology was so great that a political movement took root in England that went from factory to factory smashing up the machines. The movement made such an impression that to this day “Luddite” is a pejorative term for someone that has a (real or imagined) fear of technology.

Continue reading “The Beautiful Forgery”

The British Empire was the largest, most powerful empire in the history of the world. At its height, the Empire controlled over 14 million square miles of territory and 458 million people – both of which constituted a quarter of the entire planet. The old saying “the sun never sets on the British Empire” was indeed true – so much land was held in so many places that the sun was, in fact, shining on some piece of land held by the British at all times.

It all came to an end after World War II, though. Exhausted and broke after battling Hitler for so long, Britain could no longer afford the luxury of an overseas empire, and most of the territories held by Britain were eventually given their independence.

Although the Empire began falling apart in the late 1940s, Britain still acted as an Imperial power in many industries until the mid 1960s. In shipbuilding, medical research and aeronautical design the Brits still ruled. In fact, it was the last category – aeronautical design – the Brits were in fact ahead of both the Americans and the Soviets. For on January 22, 1952, the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), the forerunner of British Airways, began the first commercial passenger jet service using the de Havilland Comet jet.

Continue reading “How a Comet Destroyed An Entire Industry”

This story has been told and retold on the Internet so many times that it should be old-hat by now. Unfortunately, it’s almost always told incorrectly. I don’t claim to have any special knowledge of the subject, but I have read several books on the birth of personal computers; I have also seen the documentary “Revenge of the Nerds” and the TNT film “The Pirates of Silicon Valley”, so I think that entitles me to weigh in on the subject.

IBM long prided itself on making the best computers in the world. IBM made huge mainframe computers, elegant, power-hungry monsters that were as big as a refrigerator on the small end and as big as a tractor trailer on the large end. IBM made billions making “real” computers like these, so it’s not entirely surprising that they initially looked at the “personal computer” of the late 1970s as a toy. Much to their distress, however, companies like Apple, Commodore and Timex were shipping personal computers by the millions. While IBM scoffed at the notion that a personal computer could be useful for anything more than storing recipes, entire industries were being built up around the Apple II and the Commodore 64. IBM’s absence from the personal computer market thus started to become quite noticeable. After all, IBM was seen by most Americans as the computer company… yet they offered nothing for the home consumer, enthusiast or even smaller businesses that needed a computer but couldn’t afford one of IBM’s mainframes.

A working group was thus created within IBM to bring a personal computer to market as quickly as possible… which presented a problem. IBM had long prided itself on designing and manufacturing every single part of their computers. That was just “the IBM way”. But the working group quickly discovered that designing a brand-new personal computer from scratch would take years. Since IBM management wanted to enter the personal computer market as quickly as possible, designing a brand-new machine was therefore not an option. The new IBM PC was thus designed with off-the-shelf parts to allow the company to start shipping PCs as quickly as possible.

But then another problem surfaced… what operating system would the new IBM PCs use? It can take just as long (usually longer, in fact) to create an operating system than the hardware it runs on, and IBM didn’t have the time to create one of their own. So they looked to an outside source. And one of the first places they went was a small Seattle company called Microsoft.

Continue reading “The Biggest Loser in IT History”

Back in the mid-1980s, the “Baby Boomer” generation began entering middle age. Many began to look back to their childhoods for comfort or nostalgia, and one of the things that stuck out in their collective memories was baseball cards. These simple pieces of paper brought back powerful memories of lazy summer afternoons trading cards with friends, breathlessly opening new packs hoping for “THE card” and even putting the cards into the spokes of their bicycles to create faux motorcycle sounds as they pedaled down the street.

Unfortunately for the Boomers, most of their mothers had thrown the cards away ages ago, thinking them to be worthless. However, since the Boomers were entering their prime earning years, many had cash to spend on the hitherto “worthless” cards. Almost overnight, a huge market opened up for old baseball cards, and cards that might have sold for a quarter at garage sales now started commanding hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

The baseball card industry took immediate notice. They began producing baseball cards of all kinds: cards based on “classic” 1950s designs, cards branded under the names of 1950s manufacturers (like Bowman) that had long since gone out of business, cards with “low numbers” (which included the previous season’s rosters) and cards with “high numbers” (which incorporated last-minute trades), packs of cards with autographed cards or other pieces of memorabilia, and so on. And where there had been only two companies making baseball cards in the early 1980s (longtime market leader Topps and perennial second-banana Fleer), new companies like Donruss, Score and Upper Deck entered into the market.

Baseball card hysteria took off in the early 1990s. Most every town, regardless of size, seemed to have at least one card shop. And with so many cards available, markets for complimentary items like price guides and protective plastic casings helped fill the stores’ shelves as well. People began buying cards left and right, but not for the nostalgia value… they were hoping to pay for their kid’s college education with a few boxes of baseball cards. Card auctions were closely watched, as prices for cards seemed to rise ever higher.

Continue reading “All About Bubbles”

Are you reading this article at work? Via a public Wi-Fi hotspot at a coffee shop or airport? Anywhere in public? If so, look around you. You’ll probably see at least one door with one of those standard illuminated EXIT signs above it. You might notice that the exit door has a brightly colored handle, so as to be easy to see in case of a smoky fire. You might also have noticed that just about every door leading to the outside in a public building – be it an office, a church, a shopping mall or a school – pushes out from the inside, rather than pulls in, so that in case of emergency the people inside can exit the building as quickly as possible. You might have even noticed that buildings that have revolving doors always have at least one “normal” door next to the exit, so that if there’s some emergency people aren’t stuck waiting to walk through the revolving door.

All of these fire\emergency safety precautions might seem like common sense today. But it took one of the greatest tragedies in American history for such changes to become required by law. That tragedy was the Cocoanut Grove Fire of 1942.

The Cocoanut Grove nightclub was the place to be in early WWII-era Boston. The club had a maximum official occupancy of 460, but the club was so popular that it often had two or three times that amount inside. And it’s not difficult to see why everyone would want in: the club was a virtual paradise inside, a lush, tropical-themed club lined with artificial palm trees and cloth coverings on the walls and ceilings. The club even had a retractable roof that was opened in the summer months so that the club’s patrons – a lot of them soldiers and sailors on their last fling before setting off to fight in Europe – could dance under the stars. The club had a main floor which had your basic bar and dance floor setup, a dining room upstairs, and an intimate lounge downstairs. If a GI played his cards right, he could spend an entire evening there: after a nice dinner upstairs, he could go downstairs for drinks and dancing on the main floor, and then go down to one of the dark corners of the lounge for a make-out session if he’d been lucky.

Continue reading “The Cocoanut Grove Fire”

Medical science might be on the verge of a truly amazing discovery. For decades, it’s been thought that the only organ responsible for human memory is the brain. And while it’s true that the lion’s share of memories and preferences are indeed kept in the brain, it turns out that the brain might not be the only organ where such things are kept.

It all began when two American doctors – working separately on either coast – noticed something odd about heart transplant patients. Once the patients had recovered, their personalities started to undergo subtle changes. For example, a woman named Claire Sylvia started drinking beer and eating green peppers and chicken nuggets, even though she’d never enjoyed doing so before. Bill Wohl, a middle aged man from Phoenix, was a dedicated businessman that rarely – if ever – exercised before his heart transplant; as soon as he was healthy enough to do so, he stopped working so much and took up extreme sports. An Englishman named Jim that had barely graduated from school and led the decidedly non-academic life of a truck driver suddenly began writing poetry. An unnamed woman that hated violence so much that she’d even leave the room when her husband watched football started watching football and swearing like a sailor while doing so. Another unnamed person – this time a 47 year-old male – suddenly developed a fascination with classical music, and could even hum obscure classical pieces he’d never heard before.

Continue reading “The Heart’s Memory”