Form: Essay
-
Universal Maintenance Design: Making Infrastructure R2-Accessible
How Designing for Robots Creates Better Systems for Everyone Part 3 of the R2 Astromech Project series In the previous posts, I explained why we need helper droids and traced how we lost the modular design philosophy that would have…
-
The Death of the Helper Droid: How Modular Design Philosophy Gave Way to Vendor Lock-in
A History of Lost Technologies and Changed Incentives Part 2 of the R2 Astromech Project series In the first post, I explained why I’m building an R2-D2 style helper droid—a universal translator for machines that can diagnose infrastructure, speak multiple…
-
Teaching an Old Droid New Tricks: Why I’m Building an R2-D2 inspired ‘droid
Or: How Star Wars Reveals Everything Wrong With Modern Technology Part 1 of a series on astromech droids, universal design, and the technologies we’ve lost and/or failed to develop. I’m sitting in my workshop come sitting room with an NVIDIA…
-
The Persistence of Dualism: Why a Decade of Theoretical Innovation Has Failed to Advance Archaeological Science
Update of 2014 article Dualism: The “Great Divide” in the Philosophy of Archaeology. “They made up their minds to name two forms, of which they must not name one—in this they have gone astray.” Parmenides of Elea Archaeology is a…
-
The Archaeological Peninsula: Sligo’s Development Constraints and Planning Crisis
Sacred Ground, Modern City Planning Within Ancient Landscapes Article 1 of 7 Archaeological Constraints • UNESCO Heritage • Urban Planning • Neolithic Landscape How one of Ireland’s most significant Neolithic landscapes is reshaping urban planning in the 21st century Sligo…
-
Beyond Typologies: Why Archaeology Needs a Signal Processing Revolution
First in a three-part series introducing a groundbreaking approach to archaeological data science The Hidden Patterns in Ancient Landscapes Imagine standing in a field in County Roscommon, looking at what appears to be just another Irish pasture crossed by modern…
-
The Mind and the Colonial Death Star
Author – Bernard Sweeney 2021 Wouldn’t it be enlightening to know the unknown, to know something you always had known deep down, and something that makes more sense once known. For example, say if someone said that the Settled Irish…
-
Queen Medb and Lakshmi, Irish Kingship and the Feminine Power
“for ’tis I that exacted a singular vow, such as no woman before me had ever required of a man of the men of Erin, namely, a husband without avarice, without jealousy, without fear. For should he be mean, the…
-
Rural Ireland is Rich, not Poor: The Exploitation of Ireland by its Own System
Despite success in raising living standards in Ireland since independence, and especially since joining the EU in the early seventies, Irish governments have failed to prevent the imbalance of development in Dublin at the expense of almost every region in…
-
The Curious Re-Emergence of an Ancient Irish Tuath
Indiana: Balloq’s medallion only had writing on one side? You sure about that? Sallah: Positive! Indiana: Balloq’s staff is too long. Indiana: Sallah: They’re digging in the wrong place! Raiders of the Lost Ark, (1981) County Sligo, and the…