Back in the late 80s, I went to a conference on "revenue management," or the art of pricing airline seats in order to maximize yield. Too high, and you lost business; too low, and you got less than people were willing to pay. Most of the speakers were from the...

At a recent editors' conference in which I took part, a small crowd gathered to talk about journalism and new media. When I told the group that I had begun my career as a magazine fact-checker, several of them grew misty-eyed, as if someone had told a group of priests...

Many people think Yahoo! is as good as dead: The stock is off around 15 percent since its recent deal with Microsoft, and by more than half from when the Microsoft talks started. But in reality the company is now in a better position to stake out new ground, rather...

Health care is too expensive, and the problem is not who pays for it. It's what they pay for.

Just imagine that we paid for housecleaning the way we pay for health care -- by load of laundry, for example. And that homeowners weren't generally responsible for the costs. It...

Last week I ran a panel about the future of U.S. health care. Most of the discussion, as requested by the conference organizers, was around health care costs, the promise of medical records and the like. But one of the questions that came up on a card from the audience...

I watched the unveiling of Microsoft's Bing at AllThingsD yesterday, and was way more impressed than I expected. Of course, I should have known: Basically, it was Powerset repotted in fertile soil with lots of nutrients... I was an investor in Powerset, and it was a gratifying moment: like seeing...

Well, I still need to write the rest of the story of my days in the woods, but everything has been so busy lately. This past week has been full of excitement, from the tragi-comic (couldn't find my classroom and finally got an official to tell me directly that there's...

The thing that drives me crazy about this place is that there are no maps. Every week it seems that I have a class in some new place I have never heard of, and there's no map to find out where it is.

Posit that I am already crazy -...

This is the first part of three about my survival training. Photos here.

Every cosmonaut has to go through a two-night survival experience to be qualified as a cosmonaut. The training wears off, so career cosmonauts repeat it every five years. The idea is to have the skills and...

This post is a public thank-you letter to all the Burda folks, starting with Steffi Czerny and Hubert Burda himself. (I received the Aenne Burda Award at Burda's DLD conference yesterday. Today I'm already back training in Star City, as of 3.30 am this morning, but the brief trip...

Last Monday, my training manager e-mailed me a new version of my schedule (which I normally get each Friday for the following week) with two variants: One had a weightless flight on Thursday and the other had it on Friday. At first, I tried to parse the schedule to figure...

Well, no surprise I suppose: Today I fell off my bike twice even before I got to the swimming pool this morning. The slippery sheet-of-ice roads are unfortunately almost as difficult to walk on, but you're going much slower...

The good news is that I didn't break anything. The bad...

I just spent six action-packed days in New York, trying to sort things out for the next three months.

I felt a little like a dog marking territory, or perhaps a Web user cross-posting everywhere, spreading my meager presence in New York and trying to catch up with as...

I paged through the NASA report on the last moments of the Columbia crew's lives this weekend. The main report, published way back in August 2003, focused on what went wrong with the mission (and how it could be prevented). Basically, some insulation fell off and poked a hole...

To be politically correct, let me state for the record that there are no good or bad teachers, only good or bad students. As for me, there are some classes in which I am a good student, and others in which I am bad.

In the ones where I...

Snow gets in your tires
They asked me how I knew my black bike was true,
I of course replied, something here inside cannot be denied.
They said someday you'll find all who ride are blind,
When your legs're on fire, you must realize,
Snow...

How to get around Star City - and outside of it? It's actually quite a large place, and I haven't seen most of it. There is one main gate, as far as I know, that sits about 200 meters from the "elektrickhka," an electric suburban train that goes into...

Most New Year's resolutions begin on New Year's Day, but there's no real completion date, and the resolutions are usually vague. I prefer to make my resolutions about what I will accomplish before New Year's, even though some years I have to stretch it to December 32 or even...

I will be posting a thread of "Flight School" blogs about my cosmonaut training over the next few months, recounting my space EDventures as backup to Charles Simonyi, a civilian who will be going into space for the second time next March 25. I hope to get a rhythm...

I'm about to go into training in Moscow as a backup astronaut, shadowing Charles Simonyi, who is going up for a second time in March (and who long ago wrote Microsoft Word). Here is the press release from Space Adventures .

I started a conference a couple...