Essays

Netvibes recently opened a San Francisco office, and Mr. Krim acknowledged that he was fond of the Silicon Valley culture in which everyone seems to live and breathe computing and technology. “I miss the fact you can start an interesting company just by talking to someone you […]

In his classic A Mathematicians Apology , published 65 years ago, the great mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote that "A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities" has only one real defense, namely that "I do what I do because it is the one and only thing that I […]

This week's quote goes out to Mike Kaplan: If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. You don't even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. Paul […]

Rod Humble, Executive Producer of The Sims franchise (and a past acquaintance), on how he plans to expand the video game market: I don't know if there's any fixed lifecycle for the Sims franchise because I think that it can go a lot more places. Part of the mandate that I had […]

All, I'm once again blogging after nearly five months; I apologize to my readers for the hiatus. A combination of things conspired to keep me away after my last post, I was invited to join the Citizendium Executive Committee, my computer died, and a host of "real life" issues […]

Larry Sanger, the co founder of Wikipedia who later quit the project over differences in vision, just announced a direct competitor to the project: Citizendium.[1] In short, it's a Wikipedia style site with a focus on building a more scholarly, expert centric community. You can […]

A little lighter (and yes, tongue in cheek) fare this time. Back to the usual soon. 10 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Argue with Just a List of Reasons 1. It's overdone. Digg and Reddit are plastered with 10 reasons why this and 10 reasons why that. This argumentative structure is […]

Something I've been musing on recently is material wealth, and why it is (or isn't) important. Now, there are hundreds of books and millions of theories on money, what it's for, how to get it, whether it's important or whether material goods corrode the soul. But I'd like to […]

I should be on a weekly schedule starting next week, perhaps with a long delayed post on epigenetics. Until then, here's something that I found fascinating. The New York Times recently tracked the progress of Dmitri Belyaev's epic fox domestication experiment. The result: After […]

In my last set of links I brought up Gregory Cochran's "germ theory" of disease that many ailments we think of as primarily genetic or environmental are in fact due to infectious agents. I'd like to take this a step further, and mention a similar (yet even more speculative) […]