Archive for June, 2009
Techmix: Tata Nano + Kerosene Tank Bicyclist
Image: Keith Bedford/Bloomberg News. Linked from the NYT.
“Couldn’t You Do It With Lasers?”
This is one the best anecdotes about the way that the Department of Energy labs, used to BIG SCIENCE, responded to the Carter Administration’s late 70s attempts to get them to research renewable energy. It’s from the MIT-published History and Overview of Solar Heat Technologies, edited by Donald Beattie.
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory [home of The [...]
The Reading List: Now With More Nuclear Power and Electric Vehicles
Since Berkeley was kind enough to let me start hanging on as a visiting scholar, I’ve been accumulating an intense amount of library books. It’s almost embarassing actually.
Right now, I’m interested in three key categories: nuclear power, electric vehicles, and theories of technological change. All three areas now have their own spot in the Reading [...]
Techmix: Solar Panel + Hut
Well, if you were a nomad in Mongolia, you’d probably want some television via a satellite dish and powered by a solar panel, too. Right?
Image: A random trip to Mongolia by a couple, Peter and Jackie.
Techmix: Airplane + Carrier Pigeon
This is another techmix inspired by David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old. These “old” and “new” tech juxtapositions are intended to help us remember that the technological timeline is not actually a relentlessly upward spiral. We use things invented long ago right alongside the latest gadget and never even notice it, except in the [...]
Techmix: Camel + Skyscraper
This is the first of a new series of photographic posts that I’ll be doing based on my reading of David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old. In it, he describes the disorientation that people experience when their sense of “technological time” is thrown off by the juxtaposition of what they think of as old [...]
A Mini-Course in Understanding Money and Technology
The deeper I get into the history of energy in America, the more I realize that it’s impossible to examine energy (or green tech) alone. I want to know more about technological diffusion, the systems that constrain or promote tech R&D, the financing systems that allow different types of technology companies to be founded, and [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
