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Since our household is a lively mix of Jewish, Christian and African-American culture, the holiday season (we call it Chanukwanzamas) is a particularly busy and exciting time of year. In keeping with our principles (and pocketbooks) most of the gifts we exchange with friends and family consist of the home-made jams, sauces, and liquors we cook up over the year as the local fruit crops ripen. Nevertheless, we always turn to the Internet (and even the local mall) for a few “store-bought” goodies to brighten the hearts of our loved ones. For the past few years I’ve been working hard to make the gifts I buy reflect the spirit of the season by “buying green” wherever possible. If this sounds like something you’d like to do, I’ve assembled a short list of things to make sure the stuff you give is as green as the holiday tree it sits under. One of my favorite places to shop is Real Goods, a mail order alternate energy equipment company that also stocks a huge assortment...

Like it or not, nuclear power is making a strong comeback – and gaining the support of many previous foes who have decided that they’d rather worry about how to safely process radioactive waste than try to figure out how to survive on a fatally-overheated planet. As one of those granola-munching protesters who helped blockade the Seabrook and Limerick plants back in the 1980s, I too have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we must at least consider nuclear power for at least part of the global energy mix. That’s why I’m especially intrigued about the so-called “backyard nuke” technology being promoted by Hyperion Power Generation. When I ran into them at GreenTech Media’s Green Power Symposium this spring, they made a convincing argument for small (25 – 70 MW), mass-produced nuclear reactors with a fail-safe, self-moderating design that should let them run with minimal supervision for 5 – 8 years before being brought back to their factory for refu...

After my daughter was born in 1994, my career also changed direction. That was when I joined Electronic Design Magazine as Analog Editor working alongside Frank Goodenough, that veteran ex-ADI employee who was such an enthusiastic man about technology. His writing was, quite honestly, dreadful in grammatical and structural quality but at that time we had a copy desk that could deal – for the most part – with the ramblings from the Editors, who were all engineers. It was fascinating to me that one of our major analog vendors continued for years to try to hire Frank as a technical writer: they had no idea of the trouble they would have brought on themselves. Frank has gone and I still miss him and his enthusiasm. On one trip to the Valley (when I was still living there) we turned up for an appointment, incorrectly on the wrong day, and the look on the PR Manager’s face – when he thought it was his problem – was an historical moment. Frank was somewhat of a power house in the analog...