This coming Saturday September 5th I will be joined by an illustrious group of speakers (and friends) here in Linz to map a new framework to think about collective intelligence in the era of cloud computing. A schedule of the day’s events is available on the Ars Electronica website. All of the presentations will be [...]

Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn’t agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act. Sometimes I wonder how many miles – and in how many cities – I’ve run in the past 15 [...]

Wherever you may be reading this – at the kitchen table with a spoonful of cereal in your mouth, at the office while you should be working, on your cell phone as you wait for the bus – please stop and consider this: what if your doctor calls you in the next five minutes and [...]

“Sana’a(Yemen)” by eesti I am often asked what countries I’d like to travel to that I have yet to visit. Ethiopia and Lebanon have long been two standard answers (probably because I love the food and music from both). Victor Kaonga’s blog has convinced me to one day visit Malawi. But lately I am increasingly [...]

The following is my translation of Paula Gonzalo’s interview with Juan Arellano about the Lingua Project on Global Voices. Links have been changed to their English-language equivalents when possible. Juan Arellano is one of the bloggers who, beginning in 2007, has been working as an editor for the Global Voices Lingua project, one of the [...]

George Dyson asks us this most reasonable question: if biologic life derived organically from the basic elements, then is it such a stretch to believe that biologic life will also one day derive from mechanical elements? After all, as Paul Romer asks, what is technology but the re-arrangement of that which already exists in the [...]

It took me a while, but I finally got the hang of producing a QuickTime Virtual Reality 360 degree panorama. To have a look around hover your mouse over the image above, click, and drag it to the right or left. It’s far from perfect – I have to get better at maintaining the same [...]

On my run yesterday I came across two of the most interesting stories I’ve ever heard. The first came from Petra Bartosiewicz, a Brooklyn-based freelance writer who is working on a book about the Justice Department’s terrorism trials since 9/11. She followed the case of the US government against Hemant Lakhani, a British-Indian rice trader [...]

There are those uttered phrases that stay with us for longer than they ought to. They rise to the surface of our thoughts while we are cooking and echo inaudibly during long walks in solitude. One of those persistent utterances came to me a few weeks ago from Sunil Abraham, the director of India’s Centre [...]

[A few very minor plot spoilers in this one.] There are a few reasons I’m looking forward to watching The Time Traveler’s Wife when it hits theaters later this month, the most obvious of which is that the members of Broken Social Scene make a guest appearance as the wedding band. I am also curious [...]