Everything we do these days - our lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusal to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to cults of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national exceptionalism - all of t...
I am a curious creature and put my finger in as many cakes as I can: history, film, technology, etc. I'm also a freak for urban history, particularly Barcelona, Paris and New York. I know more weird stuff about 19th-century Manhattan than is probably...
Although prefabrication has a long history - the ancient Romans shipped pre-cut stone columns, pediments, and other architectural elements to their colonies in North Africa, where the numbered parts were reassembled into temples - the idea took on a ...
I try to be careful because technology changes so much over the years. But some things don't change. Kids and parents have disagreements, kids try to manipulate, parents try to sit down with rules and regs. That part never changes.
Everywhere, the rate of change is so fast that large U.S. companies are in constant danger of disruption. Not from competition in China or India, no. They're in danger of being made obsolete from two guys/gals in a garage in Silicon Valley, or anyone...
As technology progresses, and as it advances, many of us assume that these advances make us more intelligent, make us smarter and more connected to the world. And what I'd like to argue is that that's not necessarily the case, as 'progress' is simply...
Hard systems are everything we're using right now - computers, phones, planes, the clothes you're wearing, the room you're in. Everything there involves 100% use of technology and expertise to make it, and nothing we make - including space exploratio...
Technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: They create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then requir...
The early cyberpunk idea was that networked computers would let us do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asynchronous, decentr...
Theaters are always going to be around, and doing fine. With computers and technology, we're becoming more and more secluded from each other. And the movie theater is one of the last places where we can still gather and experience something together....
Police departments no longer have to pay overtime or divert resources from other projects to find out where an individual goes - all they have to do is place a tracking device on someone's car or ask a cell phone company for that individual's locatio...
The Keystone XL project has built strong safety measures into its design with the newest technology. Additionally, 80 percent of the new Canadian oil sands are being developed 'in situ,' meaning, it has a similar carbon footprint and emissions as con...
A survival tale peels away the niceties and comforts of civilization. Suddenly, all the technology and education in the world means nothing. I think all of us wonder while reading a survival tale, 'What would I have done in this situation? Would I ha...
It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics, because discrimination, poverty and ignorance restrict growth, while investments in education, infrastructure and scientific and technolo...
Fracking has been used for more than 60 years to successfully drill over a million oil and gas wells in the U.S. Nonetheless, the prevailing mythology on the radical left is that the technology is 'poisoning our children' by polluting the water we dr...
The Internet rewards scale; by trading higher up-front costs for lower marginal cost, market leaders can invest in better technology and service. As a result, there is nothing online that is both great in quality and small in scale. Amazon wasn't ori...
I've learned several lessons over the years. First, never take yourself too seriously, or work is boring. Next, people make the difference. You can have great technology, but if it's not complemented by great people, it won't go anywhere. Finally, cu...
China is a great manufacturing center, but it's actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial - more advanced industrial centers - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singa...
I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.'...
For me, a good thriller must teach me something about the real world. Thrillers like 'Coma,' 'The Hunt for Red October' and 'The Firm' all captivated me by providing glimpses into realms about which I knew very little - medical science, submarine tec...
People want to do good things, they just need a prod sometimes, and what Twitter and other technologies that connect people are showing us is that if you make it a little easier for people then you will enable them to do what they want to do, to help...
