I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.

University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls.

The future is a process, not a destination. Richard Stallman is a guy my age. I sympathize with Richard rather more than I sympathize with Richard's open-source ideas, but the guy's a mortal human being and so is his social movement. Open-source is a means of production.

The frontiers of the future will be the ruins of the unsustainable.

Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and ull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.

Every passing year brings us more past futures.

The past is a kind of future that has already happened.