Analog jumps back into the game and kicks serious patootie.
Tom Swift’s New Camera, Ready for Space and Spies
As an adolescent, Clifford Ross was an apathetic science student but obsessed by Tom Swift. Now 52, Mr. Ross has become a character appropriate to a boys’ adventure novel. An artist and businessman, he recently became an inventor – of a camera unusual enough to capture the attention of serious scientists, including the kinds who work for the government, experimenting with nuclear fusion, space travel and spy systems. What grabbed them were photographs Mr. Ross took that allowed them to see with astonishing clarity a tiny footpath on the top of a Colorado mountain seven miles from the camera.
Yesterday and today, Mr. Ross is talking gigapixels, art and the essence of visual comprehension with a dozen scientists, at a meeting at New York University. This summit, closed to the public, was organized by Mr. Ross and his new scientific pals at the government’s Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, which specializes in matters pertaining to nuclear weapons and threats to national security.
For that last line, read, “How can we spy on our citizens better?”