For me, ancestry is just one thing that connects us to people, and feeling connected to other people is generally a good thing, as long as one kind of connection does not have primacy over all the others. Heredity, race and nationhood are not the bes...
The best advice I ever got came from my mother, Estee Lauder: She believed that if you had something good to say, you should put it in writing. But if you had something bad to say, you should tell the person to his or her face.
You can't just count on becoming a syndicated cartoonist. I actually tried to calculate the odds once, and the best I could come up with is a 1-in-36,000 chance. And the odds of getting hit by lightning are 1 in 7,900 - which kind of shows how long t...
We humans usually feel that we are the best at everything we do, that we can safely drive ourselves. But tens of thousands of people die every year. We need to be open to having technology assist us, to find ways in which technology makes us safer.
Much as I would like to give out as much as I can, I do recognize that my resources are not unlimited, and therefore, it is imperative that we are able to determine the sustainability and effectiveness of the causes we support. In so doing, we can en...
Well, it's still a bit uncertain, but I will do the consulting, and I'll see how I can contribute. But I'm sure whatever I do will involve the space program. That's where my passion is.
In 13 years of doing my day job, I've learned a few things about motivating people. It's about setting a vision and, as long as everyone knows why they're doing what they're doing, you achieve that vision.
I think there will be an increasing convergence between content and commerce, that it will be about following consumers instead of making consumers come to you, and I am especially excited about the various platforms that will allow more and more acc...
I always thought I looked kind of like Keith Richards, and sometimes I think I look like Michael Jackson in his mug shot. But as I think Keith Richards is pretty great-looking, I'm embracing that part of me.
The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a fl...
The techniques of being an Internet visionary are just like those of lower-tech fortunetellers through the ages. A technological visionary must tell people what they want to hear, because your company's stock won't rise if you spout an unpopular visi...
By an irony of fate, my first employment was as a draughtsman. I hated drawing; it was for me the very worst of annoyances. Fortunately, it was not long before I secured the position I sought, that of chief electrician to the telephone company.
We wind a simple ring of iron with coils; we establish the connections to the generator, and with wonder and delight we note the effects of strange forces which we bring into play, which allow us to transform, to transmit and direct energy at will.
When a coil is operated with currents of very high frequency, beautiful brush effects may be produced, even if the coil be of comparatively small dimensions. The experimenter may vary them in many ways, and, if it were nothing else, they afford a ple...
We have 2 million users in the U.S. and about 13 million worldwide in more than 200 countries. We're getting 80,000 new users each day. And more than half a million people are connected via Skype at any given moment.
Look for when the environment is changing - the big shift now is mobile Internet. It's really happening big-time. The way you interact with services on a smart phone compared to the Web is quite different, so there's a huge opportunity.
In 2001, my father finally succumbed to the bone cancer that had tortured him for seven years. His last weeks were a terrible, black icing on the cake, the agony, the slow twisting, thinning and snapping of his skeleton. Everything fell apart.
One of the important lessons of the Internet is, how easy it is to get things done completely shapes what gets created. For that reason, technologies like Amazon's cloud service are very important. Even if they aren't technically impressive, they mak...
When you have an employee who's innovative in your organization, what are they thinking about in the shower? If they're working in an exciting place, they're not thinking what they're going to do over the weekend. They're thinking: 'How do I solve th...
Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector. It sorts and scours through all of the information looking for anything in the environment that might harm us. So given a dozen news stories, we will preferentially look at the nega...
As sensors and networks continue to expand around the world, we'll see violence drop even further. After all, when there's a danger that your actions can be caught on tape and shown around the world, you're more responsible for your behavior.
