I’m a sucker for big, round-number anniversaries. It’s a great excuse to look back and think longer term and bigger picture (and to put off thinking about losing weight or cleaning out the garage). Since I turned 50 this year, I have all the excuse I need to look back at what has changed in this world since 1960. Here is a very brief collection of factoids about what was new in 1960, and what has changed in the last 50 years.

Some major events of 1960:
– John F. Kennedy elected US President
– Gary Powers shot down over Russia while flying a U2 spy plane
– US launches the first communications satellite, the first weather satellite, the first navigation satellite, and the first spy satellite
– First Teflon non-stick cookware goes on sale
– First CERN particle accelerator becomes operational in Geneva
– France tests its first atomic bomb in the Sahara desert
– Timothy Leary begins experimenting with LSD
– Mossad agents abduct Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires (he is tried and executed in Israel)
– The 50-star US flag makes its debut
– Numerous former African colonies become independent nations as the era of European colonialism finally comes to a close
– The Beatles perform in public for the first time
– To Kill a Mockingbird and Green Eggs and Ham are published
– The birth control pill is put on the market in the US
– The Laser is invented (and first demonstrated by Theodore Maiman)
– Moore’s Law begins its climb with an integrated circuit of two components

Half Century of Growth: In the last 50 years, the global population has grown from 3 billion to nearly 7 billion people. The rate of fossil fuel consumption has increased by more than 4X, and the rate of food and fresh water consumption has increased by more than 3X.

The electronics revolution has been so incredible that the even the most grandiose hyperbole pales compared to reality. In the last 50 years the cost of a bit of electronic memory has decreased by about a factor of 100 billion. Today’s kitchen appliances boast more computing power than the supercomputers of 1960. And the rate at which transistors are made today exceeds ___________ (fill in whatever big number you can think of, like the rate of raindrops falling on the earth, or the number of grains of sand that stuck in my swimsuit last summer).

I’m not a fan of futurism (making predictions beyond a few years out is not much different from science fiction writing), but I know this: the next 50 years will be another wild ride.

Science vs. Engineering:

“Science is about understanding the origins, nature, and behavior of the universe and all it contains; engineering is about solving problems by rearranging the stuff of the world to make new things.”
– Henry Petroski, IEEE Spectrum, December 2010

BGO – blinding glimpse of the obvious

(From a meeting today, where I heard approximately 50 acronyms of unknown meaning.)

A few years ago, while we were drinking in a basement beer bar in Yokohama, some Japanese friends decided to figure out how to spell my last name in Kanji. Generally, a foreigner writing his name in Japanese would use the Katakana alphabet. But occasionally foreigners will “spell” their name in Kanji, the Chinese characters that Japanese use for many of their words. The goal is to match the sounds made by the characters to the name (for me, the two sounds are ma + ku). But since the Kanji have meaning as well as sound, and there are usually several Kanji with the same sound, one can also choose the Kanji to provide a meaning that in some way reminds you of the person. After some discussion (that I didn’t understand) and some beer (that I did), a final spelling was agreed upon. Here is my name in Kanji. I like it.

The other day my three-year-old daughter Anna saw an Apple iPad for the first time. After seeing if for just a few seconds, she looked at me and said “Why does he have that big iPhone?” While lots of people have talked about the proper way to think about the iPad in the spectrum of computing products, I think my daughter got it right at first glance. It is a big iPhone, only without the phone.

“Red is the color of love.”

– Anna Mack, my just-turned-three year old daughter, when asked what color sprinkles she wanted on her birthday cake.