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At one time Electronic Design Magazine (and I) had an office in downtown Reedsport, Oregon, directly opposite the fire station and police department. The central location – although everything in Reedsport is pretty central – was low cost and spacious and had been built out as overflow offices for a local software company servicing the radio industry. The only real negative was when there was a call out for the volunteer fire fighters: the siren, only about ten meters from my window, was absolutely deafening. That didn’t deter the young people who occupied another office on the same floor. They were researchers from the University of Oregon and their work involved traveling through the local forests with UHF receivers tracking spotted owls that had been equipped with tracking devices. They looked a little silly in their second-hand, originally state-owned Jeep with their Yagis in hand, but what a great caper to get outdoors. There was a preconceived notion that the spotted owls were threat...

Forget the Mayan Long Calendar; Friedmann has come up with a formula that converts ‘Bible time’ to years as we know them in calculating the age of the universe, the sun, and life on Earth. The surprise? Friedmann’s calculations consistently match scientific estimates derived from the study of fossil timelines, the solar system and the cosmos. In his book The Genesis One Code, the CEO of the aerospace company known for building the space station’s robotic arm, describes how he developed the formula – 1000 x 365 x 7000 – from references in religious texts. “The formula is simple,” Friedmann says. “The Bible tells us in Psalms that one day for God is 1000 years for us. We know that 365 days is our solar year, and from other studies of the scriptures we can conclude that one creation day in Genesis equals 7000 God years.” “Multiply those numbers and you find that in years as we know them, each creation day is an epoch of 2.56 billion years,...

We’re coming out of over a week without proper Internet access, all because the local telco technicians were too terrified to climb a pole located on the downhill curve of a main road beside us! Finally a bucket truck and flaggers were rolled and service has been restored. In the duration we did manage to find one very weak, non-secured Wi-Fi network signal that we could latch onto, but as I average over 15 Mbyte of e-mails a day poor ‘sven18’ could not cope in any realistic number of hours. So, I ended up a few times in the parking lot of a nearby motel and our local library just to download my mail. It made me reminisce to my daughter this morning about how it was when she was young and after I had made her breakfast of scrambled eggs I would take her to the incredibly expensive Northern California daycare and then go to my desk at Electronic Design Magazine in San José. Every morning, on arrival, there would be a short stack of FedEx envelopes each containing a press release and t...

Fans of the Fox TV drama House, now in its final season, may wonder why New Jersey isn’t known as The Mysterious Medical Maladies State – it seems everyone who lives there has one. Fortunately, they also have the fictional Dr. Gregory House, who makes up in diagnostic acumen what he lacks in charm and bedside manner. Hugh Laurie’s acting talent isn’t the only reason the 2012 Guinness Book of Records ranks House the world’s most popular TV show. It’s as much because the premise is all too real, says Sean Belanger, CEO of CSDVRS, a national video relay services provider for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. “Many illnesses defy diagnosis and ingenious specialists are few and far between,” he says. “Which is why recent technological advances in video conferencing are so exciting. Telemedicine is not just about more convenient meetings: it’s about saving lives.” Belanger’s corporation launched Stratus Video last year to focus on honing that t...

When I first came to live in North America just thirty years ago (I didn’t know I was staying, but I did) the most surprising thing was not the different language, culture, way of life, indigestible food, love of the motor car, geographical ignorance, or any of that sort of thing: it was how many ‘friends’ people claimed. Friends to me have always been a very particular thing and have numbered just few – from Michael (now Sir Michael) in secondary school to the likes of Festus (my driver in Nigeria who would have taken a bullet for me) – people who are not just acquaintances or associates but those who are well known to you and with whom you share an enormous bond of affection and loyalty. (I exclude ‘liking’ because a few of one’s real friends are probably not that likeable.) The really poor definition of friendship in the US has remained a constant in my three decades on this side of the pond and it continues to be observed in today’s electronic world;...