"Words, words, words" - that's what the cartoon character Butthead used to mumble when adults were speaking to him, and it all sounded like one big blur. It leapt to mind again, when I was trying to grasp what President Obama was saying about the big, new plan for NASA,...
Posted April 9, 2010 | 14:43:21 (EST)
Any stand-up comic will tell you -- you can have material that kills, but get the wrong audience, and it doesn't matter what you say. They're not buying you, no matter what.
The same scenario plays out every day on the so-called "news" channels on television and similar venues...
Posted May 12, 2009 | 18:24:08 (EST)
Back in the early days of blogging, which was not so long ago when you think about it, when people were pronouncing "blogging" verrrry slooooowly while making double quotes in the air with their fingers, there became something known as the "cheese sandwich blog."
As the story goes, one...
Posted May 1, 2009 | 13:42:47 (EST)
This week on Tech Nation, I interviewed Dr. David Kessler, the former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and currently a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. He has spent the last seven years focusing on the content of American foods and asking why we...
Posted April 22, 2009 | 14:40:04 (EST)
I teach a graduate course entitled "Global Information Systems," and in it we focus on data which informs us about the world. Now, I don't mean information which is available to the entire planet. That would be the Internet, which provides pretty much the same information to everyone, everywhere. No,...
Posted April 13, 2009 | 13:44:11 (EST)
The news that some 10,000 to 15,000 young people met spontaneously in the capital of Moldova to protest recent and questionable elections was crowned physically by the storming of Moldova's Parliament and a breaching of the offices of its President. It was crowned in cyberspace as the embodiment of that...
Posted April 6, 2009 | 16:48:15 (EST)
National Book Award for Fiction winner William T. Vollmann is wildly prolific on many fronts, but is arguably best known as the creator of a "moral calculus" which considers the right and wrong of numerous acts of human violence. In seven long and considered volumes entitled Rising Up and Rising...

Posted April 20, 2010 | 17:38:14 (EST)