Have you ever googled something and thought “If only I could just ask the computer this question instead of typing in keywords, sifting through pages and pages of crap and finally find THE ANSWER” buried in one of the web pages?” There has got to be a better way. Every science fict...

  For a long time, scientists and science-fiction writers alike have pursued the question whether you can accurately predict the future from the past given sufficiently large groups, historical information and computational power.  For example, in the Foundation Series , one of science-f...

Just about everyone agrees that we are living in an increasingly global, integrated, complex . . . and unpredictable world. What can you do about it? The only possible answer is to take the same information technologies that are making our planet so much smaller and flatter, and use them to make our...

The carnage underway in the financial sector reminds me of one those near-mass-extinction events that seem to strike industries and markets from time to time.  What can a company do to maximize its chances of survival at such times? Most everyone will agree that a strategy based on diversificat...

Last week we talked about some of the features of complex systems: emergence and self-organization. The discussion got me thinking about the complex system created by human beings. If we accept that the human network is non-Euclidean, what does that mean for the mathematics of our interactions? Eucl...

I love this post on VentureBlog about entrepreneurs using adjectives in lieu of facts. Smart investors want hard facts about what you will do or what you did. It’s easy to skip the facts and insert a bunch of intelligence......

I am suffering from extreme boredom right now. I'm really in the mood to go see a movie, but looking at what's playing in theaters in nearby Waldorf, MD, and Fredricksburg, VA, I find that every single movie at the multiplexes looks like garbage. I saw an ad on the Intarwebs for a Jackie Chan movie ...

Been listening to the national news a lot about the annual California wildfires and reminiscing a little about the Okeefenokee wildfires not so long ago... well seven months ago, anyway. I don't remember the media being so irate about Georgia being on fire. MSN this morning has an article bemoaning ...

Very little time, sorry. I would like to comment on this article, maybe later, but I think it pretty much says it all. There are some links to other articles in a similar vein at the original website. Lazy blogging, to be sure, but I've got crappy bandwidth and some obligations to meet. The article ...