Most visions of extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional extraterrestrials of 'Star Trek' or a hundred other space operas are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men.

The new revolution in cooking can be viewed in two ways. One is that you can take any traditional food and apply modern techniques. The other approach is to create food that is quite different than anything that has existed before.

Among modern occupations, only cult leaders and TV weathermen rival the technological visionary's ability to retain credibility despite all evidence to the contrary.

One of the problems with posing a 'bold new plan' is that you can't just extrapolate from previous plans.

New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster.com, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free?

Why pay a fee for Internet content when a million free sites are just a click away? There's no incentive until people are too addicted to the Net to turn off their computers, yet are bored with what's available.

I was good at math and science, and I got lots of degrees in lots of things, but in a parallel universe, I probably became a chef.