Tales from the Technoverse

  • The Beginning of the Nationals 2014 Season

    So yesterday, Saturday, March 29th, we were able to experience two aspects of the Nationals preceding the Monday opening day game against the New York Mets in New York. We first attended the rainy ribbon cutting ceremony for the opening of the Nationals Youth Baseball Academy in Southeast Washington, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/nationals-journal/wp/2014/03/29/ribbon-cut-on-nationals-youth-baseball-academy-in-southeast/.

    —

    by

    Daniel
    in

  • President Obama’s Visit to Saudi Arabia

    When a country plays a significant role internationally, that mere fact can bring on a lack of popularity. Becoming irrelevant is not necessarily the solution and often leads to being even less popular. As Machiavelli wrote (long, but relevant quote) “I say that every prince ought to desire to considered clement and not cruel. Nevertheless he…

    —

    by

    Daniel
    in

  • A Discussion of the Hobby Lobby Case

    This last week, the Hobby Lobby case was argued before the Supreme Court. For those unaware of the case, the owners of the Hobby Lobby company feel that the requirement under the Affordable Care Act to provide certain kinds of contraceptive coverage violates their religious beliefs. The case brings up, once again, the intersection between public…

    —

    by

    Daniel
    in

  • Tastes of Baseball Are In the Air

    From the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/dc-sports-bog/wp/2014/03/27/nationals-park-to-feature-new-food-items/

    —

    by

    Daniel
    in

  • My Second Mention in the Washington Post

    One of my now favorite sports writers for the Washington Post, Tracee Hamilton, wrote a column today, Olympic hockey rules for overtime and shootouts,  http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/olympics/wp/2014/02/15/olympic-hockey-rules-for-overtime-and-shootouts/. This followed the dramatic eight round shoot-out, technically in International Hockey referred to as Game Winning Shots (GWS), where the U.S. beat Russia in a preliminary round game in hockey 3-2.

    —

    by

    Daniel
    in , , ,

  • Defense One Webinar

    AMARC, www.amarcedu.org, was the sponsor for a webinar last week entitled “Beyond Mobile: Arming DoD for the Future”. The guest was Dan Kaufman, the Director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, interviewed by Kevin Baron, the Executive Editor of Defense One. The last part of the webinar included a brief discussion between myself and Tim Hartman, President…

    —

    by

    Daniel
    in ,

  • Stigmergic Systems

    In today’s Washington Post there was an article “Termites inspire construction robots?”,  http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/termites-inspire-construction-robots/2014/02/13/e6ef44ce-941f-11e3-83b9-1f024193bb84_story.html. The article discusses an approach to making a building following the process termites use to build their large nests. Termites, and the robots discussed in the article use a technique called stigmergy.  Communications are indirect creating loosely coupled but aligned collections capable of…

    —

    by

    Daniel
    in , ,

  • Obamacare Will Reduce Employment By Two Million Jobs

    In the Washington Post this morning, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/cbo-botched-health-care-law-rollout-will-reduce-signups-by-1-million-people/2014/02/04/c78577d0-8dac-11e3-98ab-fe5228217bd1_story.html. The column was based on a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study, http://www.cbo.gov/publication/45010, that also indicated that healthcare enrollment will be initially reduced by about 1 million (the headline but not the politically most interesting part) due to the problems with the website. The most powerful reasons, to me at least,…

    —

    by

    Daniel
    in ,

  • COBOL (COBOL?), Defanging, and Still More Snowden Fallout

    I was lucky enough to be asked, again, by Francis Rose to be on his regular Friday ‘Federal News Countdown”, this last Friday, January 31st. The show can be heard here: Federal News Countdown. The other guest was Jon Desenberg, the Policy Director for the Performance Institute, The Performance Insitute. For those unfamiliar with the…

    —

    by

    Daniel
    in , ,

  • Lego My …, Oops Wrong Analogy

    I have a feeling that the new Lego movie, called creatively The Lego Movie, may be one of those that I will have to go alone without Ellen. Even though the initial Rotten Tomatoes rating is the rarely achieved 100%, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_lego_movie/. From the WSJ article about the movie, we learn: Lego estimates that children spend 5 billion…

    —

    by

    Daniel
    in

Join 900+ subscribers

Stay in the loop with everything you need to know.

Sign up