In politics, religion and other areas of culture, people disagree on the worth of competing ideas. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that can determine in a robust way which ideas match the real world, and which ones can be ruled out. So conflicting ideologies persist indefinitely.

The world has shown that if you provide capital and expertise to an area that is starved for capital and expertise, really good things will happen.

With cult foods, there is an underlying assumption that the best cooking ideas came generations ago. Yet culinary innovation is nothing to be ashamed of. When a chef tells me he is cooking with his grandmother's recipe, I always wonder why. Did talent skip the past two generations?

In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.

By burning nuclear waste as fuel, we believe we can power the United States cleanly for hundreds of years without ever touching new resources.

Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented - putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine.

If your kitchen smells good, your food lost something.