NavList:

There are many folks with electrical engineering experience in the NavList community, and I thought some of you might enjoy this article. It's off-topic. If you want to comment on it here, it's "OK" but please keep it short.

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems.

There's a comment in the article about lightbulbs with computers in them. On weekends in the past few weeks, I've been running stargazing cruises on ferries out of New Bedford and also on the Jersey shore. It's fun, pays well. I get applause and nice complliments, and I get to talk about whatever I like in astronomy including basic celestial navigation topics, too. But related to this tech issue, I sometimes jokingly ask people "what do you call a telescope with a computer in it?" In the year 2022? You call it a telescope. Because of course a telescope has a computer in it. That goes without saying! Your lightbulbs have computers in them! I recall twenty years ago, physicist and science popularizer Michio Kaku predicted that the word computer itself would fade from common language because everything would soon be a computer, or soon contain significant computing power as part of its fundamental components. That hasn't quite happened, but we're getting there.

Frank Reed