There was a transition going on - Baghdad being the intellectual capital of the world where major advances were made in agriculture and mathematics and engineering and medicine and astronomy, and then that all sort of collapsed. And I was trying to understand how such a intellectually fertile environment can lose its compass bearing. Because I think about the creative centers today - countries, or even regions. Will Silicon Valley always be as innovative? Will the United States be innovative, or will we become complacent?

Not only do we live among the stars, the stars live within us.

We still refer to sunrise, sunset. That only has meaning if you think that Earth is in the center of things, and everything is moving around us. So even though we know intellectually Earth goes around the sun, the language is still pre-Copernican, as we would call it.

I'm fascinated by the deaths of stars and the havoc they wreak on their environments.

With automatic spell checkers running unleashed over what we compose, our era is that of correctly spelled typos.

What are you doing? Why are you concerning yourself with the meaning of meaning?

Space only becomes ordinary when the frontier is no longer being breached.