Live TV died in the late 1950s, electronic bulletin boards came along in the mid-1980s, meaning there was about a read more

Live TV died in the late 1950s, electronic bulletin boards came along in the mid-1980s, meaning there was about a 25-year gap when it was difficult to put your foot in your mouth and have people all across the country know about it.

In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." read more

In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find read more

There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be.

If unix is the face of the future I wanna go back to quill pens.

If unix is the face of the future I wanna go back to quill pens.

Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked.

Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked.

The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. read more

The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century's escalation of imaginary need. We didn't need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills.

In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the 3.6 million read more

In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the 3.6 million year old fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the read more

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.