In the new issue of Newsweek, veteran tech journalist Steven Levy profiles inventor Danny Hillis. From the article:
…Hillis has never had to put out an APB for his inner child.
This becomes clear as soon as one crosses the threshold of Applied Minds, which sprawls over five flat buildings in an industrial area of Glendale, Calif. Behind an ordinary reception area, a door opens to a small room with only a red phone booth that could have been a prop in an Austin Powers movie. Hillis picks up the handset. “The blue moon jumps over the purple sky,” he says, a twinkle in his eye acknowledging the corniness of the process. The wall behind him opens up to what geeks hope to see when they go to heaven: a vast room packed with brainiacs at work and exquisitely bizarre gizmos, ranging from a 13-foot skeleton of a robot dinosaur to a gleaming outback vehicle loaded with more communications gear than the trailers outside “Monday Night Football.” It’s a virtual museum of the future that rambles over several buildings.
At every turn, there’s something to make your mouth hang open. Here’s an array of data-display screens that looks like Han Solo’s cockpit. There’s a room populated with architectural mock-ups of “podules,” fully wired instant buildings designed for stealthy government agencies (that’s a picture of Donald Rumsfeld running a meeting in the full-scale version of the model sitting beneath it). Another area looks like Albert Einstein’s chop shop, stuffed with half- disassembled Cadillac Escalade SUVs hooked up to exotic telemetry. Oops! Almost stepped on a six-foot-long robotic snake, slithering on the floor with scary fidelity to a pit viper.