Urban Honking

“I read this book. It’s pretty good even if they made it in a week. Worth the fifty bucks, easy.” Bruce Sterling   In February of this year, I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a zygote of an institution nestled between departments at Carnegie Mellon University, to…

When my parents went to college in the 60s four years of private higher education cost around 5k. When I went in the nineties the same degree ran 100k. Today, it’s around 225k. When my two-year old daughter is ready to go off to school, it’s liable to be 500k For those of you saying […]

I’m proud to announce the launch of Drift, a text editor for iPad I’ve made with Devin Chalmers. Drift is a simple text editor that stores your documents as GitHub Gists so that they’re always backed up and easily shared. Drift also makes it simple to collaborate with other GitHub users on anything from a […]

After talking it about for close to a decade, I bought a bike. I used to bike everywhere. Then one day I stopped. If memory serves my tire got stolen and I never bothered to replace it. Life got busy and I drove. This summer I went on a work retreat to Sun River. The […]

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece here on Universe exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O’Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touche…

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece here on Universe exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O’Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touche…

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece here on Universe exploring the ideas of the futurist Gerard K. O’Neill, who designed far-out but ultimately quite pragmatic environments for human habitation in space in the mid-1970s. In that article, I touched briefly on the notion of the “Overview Effect,” a phrase coined by the…

I went to a blog salon. We ate oysters, drank champagne, and argued about Paul Graham’s article You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss. People focused on different parts of the essay but generally agreed that Paul Graham writes to a very specific audience and his ideas don’t really scale outside of that group (programmers). […]

The Book of Exogenesis: In the beginning was the word, and the word was a meteorite…

Earlier this month, a report, based on NASA studies of meteorites found on Earth, suggested that some building blocks of DNA may have been formed in space.

As i…

The Book of Exogenesis: In the beginning was the word, and the word was a meteorite… Earlier this month, a report, based on NASA studies of meteorites found on Earth, suggested that some building blocks of DNA may have been formed in space. As it turns out, DNA components have been found on meteorites before,…