An Underground Atlas in Geneva

Have you ever seen a supercollider up close and personal? Do you even know what one is? Today I deep inside the Swiss countryside, face-to-face with ATLAS, what soon will be the world’s largest proton supercollider. Or black hole creator if the swarms of particle physicists get their math wrong.

And right about now, fighting back jetlag while listening to George, our gracious host, explain the difference between protons and muons, and how his giant muon spectrometer will measure the deflection of muons after they pass through the Barrel Toroid, I’m in awe of the human mind.

Somehow, in the grey mush between our collective ears, we’re able not only to conceive the existence of “dark matter” and other universe-level mysteries, we’re actually able to build things like this Large Hadron Collider to smash beams of speeding, highly energetic protons together to explore them.

Read More

The Comming Computex 4P Computing Competition

Now that One Laptop Per Child has brought the 4P Computing vision into reality, and Asus proved its market with the Eee PC, expect to see an amazing plethora of form factors at this year’s Computex that ascribe to the power, performance, price, and portability required by the developing world.

But don’t take my learned opinion on the matter, just listen to Mary Lou Jepsen, inventor of the XO laptop’s dual mode screen:

So many new machines are coming out about the size of the XO laptop. I’ve heard that 50 distinct different laptop models will be introduced at Computex (in Taiwan) alone in early June. These machines use screens between 7-10″ diagonals – and have been slapped together rather quickly to capitalize on the momentum first created by One Laptop per Child.

Now she sees the new 4PC entrants being high on price, and they are. The cheapest 4PC laptops that I’ve seen are still around $450 for the base models.

Read More

A Whole Other Kind of Taxi Time

“Taxi! Come here Taxi!” This is what I shout on a daily basis now. I’m calling a Taxi in the morning, during the day, and even late into the night. But it’s not the taxi your thinking of.

This is not a New York Taxi story, nor a taxi experience in Macedonia, Russia, or even Bangkok, and its much better than the San Juan Taxi Mafia.

This is a story even better than Portland taxi driver perfection, this is a whole other kind of “taxi”.

Read More

Deconstructing Downtown Washington DC

Walking to work the other morning, I was struck by an amazing sight. A pinnacle of destruction piercing the downtown skyline, another office building deconstructed in the name of development.

This office building was special to me. Back when I first moved to DC, I worked at its sister building across Connecticut Avenue and the two were the only buildings around that had windows that could open. On beautiful spring days like today, I loved listening to the hustle of commuters exiting the Metro and melodies of the musicians singing for spare change.

Over a decade later, I find myself deconstructing my own downtown DC experience. No longer am I a clueless beginner accountant in a small nonprofit. No longer to I think Washington DC is the shit. Now I’ve lived on the world stage. I’ve circumnavigated the earth twice, and I’ve even been on 60 Minutes. And I’m the better for it.

Read More

Thomas Lee: A Married Man Now

Ladies, its time to mourn. The most eligible bachelor between New York City and Beijing, via Toronto, is now officially off the market. Thomas Lee is a married man, and a lucky one at that. This weekend Thomas married his long-time love, Holly Krambeck is a sweet and swank shindig at the University Club in Washington DC.

The formal wedding ceremony, where I was Best Man and kept Thomas focused on Holly versus all the other stimuli, was followed by wedding photos at DC’s Spanish Steps. But not just any wedding photos.

Thomas, being Thomas, had the photographers take hundreds of photographs of the wedding party. His family, her family, both families, groomsmen, bridesmaids, and every conceivable combination that could include each group and Tom and Holly, or as they’re now known as “Ta-Molly”.

Read More