My previous post on the 50-foot-rule led to an interesting exchange with reader tubelite, which led me to a more sophisticated appreciation of the idea behind twitter.com, and introduced me to the interesting ideas of Dunbar’s number and the Monkeysphere. After mulling the straggling exchange, and starting with tubelite’s insight that the 50-foot zone is [...]

Posted in Business, Culture, Economics, Work-Life 4 Comments »

According to my passport, as of August 5th, I have lived in America for 10 years. Somehow, no profound thoughts occur to me. When I try to look back, no grand ethnographic synthesis or thick description suggests itself. Perhaps all the profound observations about America have already been made by Alexis de Tocqueville and the [...]

Posted in Culture, General 2 Comments »

I have heard cited several times the so-called fifty foot law of sociology, which says that most collaborations happen among people who work less than fifty feet apart (the idea is generally credited to Tom Allen of MIT; the primary reference seems to be his monograph, Managing the Flow of Technology, MIT Press, 1977, which [...]

Posted in Culture, Economics, Science-Math, Technology 10 Comments »

Occasionally engineering provides me with startling perspectives on art. This happened for me with the third book in the Harry Potter series, the Prisoner of Azkaban, generally acknowledged to be the most accomplished of the series. Critics make a compelling case that among the movies too, Alfonso Cuaron’s treatment of this book has been the [...]

Posted in Culture No Comments »

In my first article in this Harry Potter series, I took a serious look at the foundations of the idea of magic in general, and its manifestation in the Potter universe in particular. In this second part, I want to ferret out that elusive aspect of the Potter series that makes it a [...]

Posted in Culture 2 Comments »

Ever since Einstein got us thinking about the fourth dimension and string theorists got us worried about ten and eleven dimensions, we have not really given serious thought to the mundane old third dimension. Several things, ranging from the emerging three-dimensional Internet over at Second Life, to the delightful modern religion of Parkour and [...]

Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Technology, Thinking 5 Comments »

The upcoming end of the Harry Potter series demands piggyback attention, especially from a new blog like mine. Since I have been talking lately about concepts and definitions using toy examples from geometry, I thought I’d take on a more complex concept: magic. In this first of a series of posts aimed squarely at [...]

Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Thinking 11 Comments »