The human propensity is to believe that flukes of good fortune will never come to an end.

The embrace of a new technology by ordinary people leads inevitably to its embrace by people of malign intent.

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

The Japanese are great at inventing complex systems of rules, and not so great at explaining those rules to foreign visitors.

A whole bunch of big technological shocks occurred when Asian innovations - paper, gunpowder, the stirrup, the moldboard plow and so on - came to Europe via the Silk Road.

A world with a sudden limit on air travel would be tremendously different from the one we live in now.

The way I think of it, economics and ecology occupy two intellectual silos, isolated from each other. Even when they do take each other into consideration, it's not uncommon for ecologists to spout absolute nonsense about economics, and vice versa.