John A. Dodds

A remarkable--and sad--story, Jun 15 2005

I came across this movie while playing flip-the-channel on TV one evening. I had heard of the Arrow before, but I had not realized how ambitious and successful the project had been, how precipitously it had been cancelled, and how all the airplanes, equipment, and plans had been destroyed. It seemed from the movie (I want to read more on this) that many officers in the U.S. military were impressed with the Canadian machine and wanted to buy it or at least investigate it. I wish they had been able to win the day, and that Canada's fighter had been fairly evaluated.

Mostly NON-robot short stories, July 18 2004

I expected this to be a collection of robot stories because of the title, but only two are robot stories. They are the first two, and the first one is also a story from _I, Robot_ (which I just re-read). The second one is "Robot Dreams" from which the book takes its title, and it is another Susan Calvin robot story like those from _I, Robot_ but was written in the mid-'80s (_I, Robot_ was written 30 years earlier). It is in the same mold with the earlier stories, but with a nod to advancing technology (small computers, for instance).

Many other stories in this collection center on "Multivac," an immense computer. The name is an obvious derivative of UNIVAC, a… Read more

A wonderful tale of vital historical importance, July 12 2004

The beginning of this film makes clear the importance of knowing one's position at sea. Disasters--some of epic proportions--were distressingly regular when doubts about one's position relative to land or dangerous reefs were the order of the day. This film tells two stories in parallel. The first is of John Harrison's efforts to make accurate nautical clocks--called chronometers--that could be used at sea and provide a simple means of acertaining longitude (by comparing the time at the home port of known longitude to that of the ship determined by the sun or the stars). Harrison had to struggle against many technical odds to make his machines--and against many bureaucratic barriers to… Read more