Latest posts
- cash issuing terminalsFeb 27, 2026
In the United States, we are losing our fondness for cash. As in many other countries, cards and other types of electronic payments now dominate everyday commerce. To some, this is a loss. Cash represented a certain freedom from intermediation, a comforting simplicity, that you just don't get from Visa. It's funny to consider, then, how cash is in fact quite amenable to automation. Even Benjamin F
- forecourt networkingFeb 08, 2026
The way I see it, few parts of American life are as quintessentially American as buying gas. We love our cars, we love our oil, and an industry about as old as automobiles themselves has developed a highly consistent, fully automated, and fairly user friendly system for filling the former with the latter. I grew up in Oregon. While these rules have since been relaxed, many know Oregon for its long
- the essence of frigidityJan 25, 2026
The front of the American grocery store contains a strange, liminal space: the transitional area between parking lot and checkstand, along the front exterior and interior of the building, that fills with oddball commodities. Ice is a fixture at nearly every store, filtered water at most, firewood at some. This retail purgatory, both too early and too late in the shopping journey for impulse purcha
- air traffic control: the IBM 9020Jan 17, 2026
Previously on Computers Are Bad, we discussed the early history of air traffic control in the United States. The technical demands of air traffic control are well known in computer history circles because of the prominence of SAGE, but what's less well known is that SAGE itself was not an air traffic control system at all. SAGE was an air defense system, designed for the military with a specific t
- Flock and Urban SurveillanceDec 26, 2025
Some years ago, I had a frustrating and largely fruitless encounter with the politics of policing. As a member of an oversight commission, I was particularly interested in the regulation of urban surveillance. The Albuquerque Police Department, for reasons good and bad, has often been an early adopter of surveillance technology. APD deployed automated license plate readers, mounted on patrol cars
- speed reading (the meaning of language)Dec 08, 2025
One of the difficult things about describing a grift, or at least what became a grift, is judging the sincerity with which the whole thing started. Scams often crystallize around a kernel of truth: genuinely good intentions that start rolling down the hill to profitability and end up crashing through every solid object along the way. I'm not totally sure about Evelyn Wood; she seems to have had al
- RuBeeNov 22, 2025
I have at least a few readers for which the sound of a man's voice saying "government cell phone detected" will elicit a palpable reaction. In Department of Energy facilities across the country, incidences of employees accidentally carrying phones into secure areas are reduced through a sort of automated nagging. A device at the door monitors for the presence of a tag; when the tag is detected it
- memories of .usNov 11, 2025
How much do you remember from elementary school? I remember vinyl tile floors, the playground, the teacher sentencing me to standing in the hallway. I had a teacher who was a chess fanatic; he painted a huge chess board in the paved schoolyard and got someone to fabricate big wooden chess pieces. It was enough of an event to get us on the evening news. I remember Run for the Arts, where I tried to
- the steorn orboOct 27, 2025
We think that we're converting time into energy... that's the engineering principle. In the 1820s, stacks, ovens, and gasometers rose over the docklands of Dublin. The Hibernian Gas Company, one of several gasworks that would eventually occupy the land around the Grand Canal Docks, heated coal to produce town gas. That gas would soon supply thousands of lights on the streets of Dublin, a quiet rev
- The Ascent to Sandia Crest IIOct 19, 2025
Where we left off, Albuquerque's boosters, together with the Forest Service, had completed construction of the Ellis Ranch Loop and a spur to the Sandia Crest. It was possible, even easy, to drive from Albuquerque east through Tijeras Pass, north to the present-day location of Sandia Park, and through the mountains to Placitas before reaching Bernalillo to return by the highway. The road provided