Blog

As a Poli Sci major at the University of Redands, I often considered a career in the field of diplomacy and international relations. To that extent, the U.N. was always the Holy Grail, in terms of places it would...
POSTED Friday, May 1, 2009

On March 17th, the delegate country names lining the rows of seats in the main “theater” of the United Nations were replaced with the names of the colonies that were home to the crew of Battlestar Galactica. Whoopie Goldberg...
POSTED Thursday, April 30, 2009

If you know about the TED conference, it won’t surprise you that I’ve been a big fan for a long time. For more than 20 years, the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference has sparked our imaginations with “ideas worth sharing” by...
POSTED Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Those who gaze at big-box stores and fail to see future cathedrals, museums or artists’ communities have no sense of history. Or imagination. It is beyond time to start thinking creatively about what to do with all of those...
POSTED Wednesday, December 3, 2008

In early October, a small asteroid, about the size of a VW bug, impacted Earth coming in over Sudan. It was very special. This sort of event happens every several months on average, so just why was this one...
POSTED Wednesday, November 26, 2008

How can you save the world? Play more games. Not just any game will work. You’ll need to focus your gameplay efforts carefully, on games like Left 4 Dead, Rock Band, World of Warcraft, Little Big Planet, SF0, Halo...
POSTED Wednesday, October 29, 2008

For many of us, the gateway drug toward a lifetime of experimentation with world-saving endeavors was food. With so many points of personal relevance — from health concerns to the pleasures of taste to the simple fact of its...
POSTED Wednesday, October 15, 2008

I started a blog a couple of years ago in honor of “Flight School,” the name of my annual conference for entrepreneurs in air and space. Last June, we canceled this year’s event; we were getting a foretaste of...
POSTED Monday, October 13, 2008

In his marvelous book “Better,” Atul Gawande tells the tale of obstetric forceps. Invented in the 17th century to help stuck babies get unstuck during labor, they promised to be a valuable addition to the medical toolkit — so...
POSTED Monday, October 6, 2008

The young folks entering kindergarten these past few weeks are a fascinating group. Born at the dawn of the twenty-first century, they will retire — if they retire at all — in 2073. Many could live into the twenty-second...
POSTED Wednesday, October 1, 2008

If you want to save the world, you have only so much money, time and attention. So the question is - what effort should you throw yourself into that provides the biggest bang for the buck? The Copenhagen Consensus...
POSTED Monday, September 29, 2008

I spent Wednesday and Thursday of last week at Zeitgeist, the annual meeting that Google hosts for its partners and a few invited guests. On Wednesday afternoon, during the “Serious Sustainability” session, the award-winning author and journalism professor Michael...
POSTED Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Well, hello there! Smile. Good timing. Yes, I have had lots of thoughts out here, most fantastical with occasional but incomplete reality testing. There is a great deal of buzz these days over things combining, converging and emerging, and...
POSTED Monday, September 1, 2008

Science has always mattered to those of us old enough to realize how much society has achieved in a relatively short amount of time. The question becomes: are we creating a culture to ensure that the hearts and minds...
POSTED Monday, August 4, 2008

Industrial and scientific development in the void of space that surrounds our delicate planet is a key to ensuring our ability to carry on living on Earth at all over the next century. Satellites circling the planet already deliver...
POSTED Monday, July 28, 2008

Recently, MIT announced the launch of an interdisciplinary, faculty-led study of the future of solar energy. The study will focus on four key solar technologies: photovoltaics, solar heating and cooling, solar thermal power, and production of fuels from the...
POSTED Monday, July 28, 2008

On a recent trip to hunt up something for dinner, I popped into a food store that recently opened in my neighborhood. It's one of those new mega markets, about the size of an airplane hangar, that's designed to...
POSTED Monday, July 28, 2008