As a historian, I love every little detail, but whole long passages about wood paneling and journeys on horseback and every stop at every inn had to go out the window. I decided the history in the books should be like spice in a soup - a little went ...
Nobody with an IQ higher than emergency-room temperature could ever believe that 'death panels' would be appointed to nudge the elderly toward euthanasia. Yet for idle entertainment, it's hard to beat Sarah Palin's ignorant nattering on the subject.
Conservatives are telling elected leaders that expansion of Medicaid comes at a moral - or more overtly, a political - price. At what price are they willing to go back on years of proclaiming 'socialized medicine' as the slippery slope to 'rationing ...
Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official.
I just invented a hug machine. It’s solar powered so you can use it when you feel depressed, like on a cloudy day. Shit.
The need to create a new taxonomy that isn't just applying to our own solar system will become so evident and apparent that something will come out of it. I'm sure of it, even if it's not tomorrow.
With sufficient water on the Moon, solar energy can be used to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen is, of course, critical for humans to breathe and the water important for us to drink.
We live in a world bathed in 5,000 times more energy than we consume as a species in the year, in the form of solar energy. It's just not in usable form yet.
The green appeal of solar sailing - traveling by light, once chemical propellants have done their dirty job of orbital insertion - ought to be powerful.
When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.
There are lots of ideas which extend the Copernican principle one step further. We went from the solar system to the galaxy to zillions of galaxies and now to realising even that isn't all there is.
From solar to electric cars, from geothermal to reconfiguring the grid, the scale of investment needed in green technologies in order to meet whatever agreements on emissions reductions are finally agreed will be immense.
One SF prediction that I would like very much to see: Get solar collectors launched to beam energy back home, and get away from fossil fuels.
All of this got me thinking about the history of the westward expansion, and got me to wondering how the exploration of the Solar System would be changed if there were an indigenous presence out there.
We're leading a fundamental shift from centralized energy to distributed energy. Energy will go in that direction, just like mainframe computers went to client servers, then to the Internet. I believe in solar, and the macro trends are just too unden...
It would be great some day to have astronauts in a rover on Mars. But just about anyone except an oil company executive would say its more important to have 50 million solar powered vehicles in the United States.
When wireless cellphones first came out, analysts predicted that at peak, it would only replace 5% of landlines. They said the quality wasn't good enough. Clearly that was improved. I think you'll find a similar thing in solar.
When I was a little kid, we only knew about our nine planets. Since then, we've downgraded Pluto but have discovered that other solar systems and stars are common. So life is probably quite prevalent.
My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.
We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.
