Paul Hansel

Author: paul

  • In praise of open source hardware

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    This year, I plan to spend more time documenting the work I do that is accelerated by the use of open-source resources. To kick off that effort, I’ll describe a small project I finished this week. 3D-printing and open source hardware is eating the world. I don’t know who Sleighbells64 is, and given that their…

  • Beating the heat with an electric heart

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    Back in the days before computerization, cars used to use thermal oscillators to make their lights flash. This Ideal Heavy Duty Flasher 537 (12V) is one such oscillator. Although it might be called a flasher relay, it differs from its cousin, the electromagnetic relay. They come in a metal can and hardly weigh anything –…

  • Are good things still happening?

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    Some excitement, past and future. From UNSW, new research: quantifying the urban heat island effect in cities like Sydney and Kolkata. Community Earth System Model 3: Incoming update to the CESM series of open-source planetary physics simulators, targeted for this summer. Potentially featuring better clouds. Upcoming NASA science missions: Including Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1…

  • Pack it up, Mark: a 15-year Thanksgiving retrospective

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    Way back in January 2009, I joined Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Poke! It’s now November 2024. I’m not yet 30, so 15 years is a majority of my life. In that time, Facebook’s valuation grew from $10 billion to $1,400 billion, Mark changed up his fit, Myanmar’s military exploited Facebook to execute an ethnic cleansing, and…

  • Regularized by cars

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    The most American activity is driving. The high-volume production car? Invented in America. Coast-to-coast highway systems? America. The car-centric city, car-centric suburb, desert road trip culture? USA! USA! USA! Driving is liberating. The freedom of the road. Adventure in a pedal. The thrill of adventure, the surprise of speed. It’s completely heretical to claim that…

  • Silicon Valley Engineers: The Visionaries Who Are Changing Everything

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    Imagine if every cracked engineer in the world converged on Silicon Valley (which, let’s be real, is already happening). Intel would likely leapfrog TSMC. Apple’s phones might actually run cutting-edge AI models locally and boast solid-state batteries. We’d see mobile silicon fabrication units popping up everywhere – and spent units almost as common by the…