October 6, 2009

You know the name, but just who were the Luddites?


Not long ago I met a filmmaker friend for lunch in the Fisherman's Wharf area of San Francisco, where she was doing some work. She showed up in her sports car with her digital video gear and spent much of our meeting setting it up. At some point she got a call and took it on her BlackBerry. Toward the end of our conversation, I mentioned a new piece of software I had downloaded.

"I don't get that stuff," she nervously confided. "I'm such a Luddite."

ars technica

3 Americans win Nobel in physics

Three American "masters of light" who created technologies that made it possible to capture digital images and transmit them and other electronic information long distances today won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics.

Charles K. Kao, a naturalized American who did most of his work in England and Hong Kong, will share half the $1.4-million prize for demonstrating that highly purified fibers of glass can carry light waves for long distances, setting the stage for the globe-girdling fiber-optic networks that transmit the bulk of everyday television, telephone and other communications.

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, who worked at Bell Laboratories, will share the other half of the award for developing the charge-coupled device, the electronic eye that makes digital photography possible and that in less than two decades has filled the world with inexpensive digital cameras and camera-bearing telephones.

Los Angeles Times