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Thanks to NPR for bringing some mainstream attention to the lack of dynamic range in pop music today.
Have you ever heard a pianissimo on the radio? Nope. How can a song build to a rewarding musical climax without crescendo?

As we come to the end of the decade, we turn to one of the more dramatic [...]

With my engineering roots, I can’t resist occasionally lobbing some props to fellow engineers (or Imagineers) who produce undeniable displays of creativity, even when I share none of the motivation that inspired their innovative adventures.
Take Christmas lights. As a teenager, I had no intrinsic motivation to hang the family Christmas lights. In my mind, hanging [...]

The “study” I refer to is All Songs Considered’s annual ballot of listeners’ picks for best music of the year. As usual, there isn’t much diversity on this list in terms of musical styles, but at least it’s not an echo of the Billboard list. Thank goodness for that.
And the presence of Andrew Bird at [...]

Didn’t I see something like this in Goonies? Oh wait, that was slick shoes. Well, I think the concepts are related.

Apparently DARPA is funding research to develop a synthetic “black ice” that can be deployed to keep the enemy from following them, you know, across narrow bridges. Think of it as a very high-tech banana [...]

Whenever I start to feel like the challenge of preventing climate change might just be insurmountable — this happens often as I read reports at work on the scale of carbon reduction needed — it’s a welcome news to hear that some hair-brained scientist/engineer has broken assumed technical barriers by employing a completely novel method.
Well, [...]

Technology for automating the bore of highway driving may actually encourage drivers to eat in the car, apply makeup, shave, read a book, surf the ‘net, paint, or yoga-cize.
This sounds like a significant technical challenge. If one desires to take advantage of aerodynamic gains, as the article suggests, the vehicles will need to be driving [...]

As an energy analyst, I often see in my own work the drastic effect of scope on analysis results.
For example, take a simple-sounding question like, “How much energy is required to produce a ton of iron?”
This is a relatively straightforward analysis if the scope of energy usage includes only the iron plant. You count the [...]

I don’t enjoy posting links to articles like this one. I wish the article didn’t exist, that it’s nightmarish tale was a demented horror story born in a sick man’s imagination, not a reflection of true human behavior.
But sadly, sickeningly, this story is real. We can’t ignore the gruesome and depressing reality of situations like [...]

Good news for the future of cap and trade — and our climate — from a couple researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) probably won’t cost as much as previously thought, which will keep the overall price of carbon credits lower because the carbon dioxide emitted from coal power [...]

This map is so cool. Maybe National Geographic should change its name to Universal Geographic?

Excerpt:
If all this talk of moon bombing has you curious about space exploration, you’re in luck: National Geographic recently produced this astonishingly elegant map of every space exploration in the last 50 years. Every. Single. One. (If you’re annoyed by that [...]