02-Oct-2011

Let’s get big stuff done.

Innovation Starvation, a short essay by Neal Stephenson (via Bruce Sterling) Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy,…

27-Jan-2011

Bruce Sterling on Vernacular Video

Closing Keynote: Vernacular Video by Bruce Sterling on how media morph over time. Chief insight I’ve read before but never heard: to look forward in time, you have to also look twice as far back into the past.

23-Feb-2010

Jesse Schell: Beyond Facebook

Making the rounds today is a talk by Jesse Schell, of Schell Games who is an instructor at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He also has a blog called Things I Finished. His talk is full of insights that are very vivid. Here is the video of his talk from DICE, and…

05-Nov-2008

The future is unwritten

The past, we have written down and we can reference it: Barack Obama. I like him. He seems to be a straight shooter with upper management written all over him. I like that I my spidey sense doesn’t tingle with “Plastic Robot!” when I watch him speak. I would like him to be President. About…

28-May-2008

Soy Cowboy: Lily Pads & Rock Cod

After high school, it became something of a fetish of mine to travel from San Diego to Los Angeles and do various sightseeing. One of the things I (and my friend Chris) used to hit was the Art Center College of Design gallery. For us, Art Center was the pinnacle of cool, of talent, of…

20-Nov-2007

William Gibson, Gravy, and a Video

William Gibson: The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary Interview : Rolling Stone I find myself less pessimistic than I sometimes imagine I should be. When I started to write science fiction, the intelligent and informed position on humanity’s future was that it wasn’t going to have one at all. We’ve forgotten that a whole lot of…

01-Oct-2007

The Information Age: longer than you thought.

Alex Wright, The Deep History of the Information Age Download the audio to this talk at the Long Now Seminars page.