The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the read more

The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the way it spread and, above all, democratized knowledge. Provide you could pay and read, what was on the shelves in the new bookshops was yours for the taking. The speed with which printing presses and their operators fanned out across Europe is extraordinary. From the single Mainz press of 1457, it took only twenty-three years to establish presses in 110 towns: 50 in Ita!0 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 in Spain, 8 in Holland, 4 in England, and so on.

For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I read more

For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.

Hardly a year passes that fails to find a new, oft-times exotic, research method or technique added to the armamentarium read more

Hardly a year passes that fails to find a new, oft-times exotic, research method or technique added to the armamentarium of political inquiry. Anyone who cannot negotiate Chi squares, assess randomization, statistical significance, and standard deviations is less than illiterate; he is preconscious.

...there is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap. read more

...there is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap. But the difference is that once you've made the intuitive leap you have to justify it by filling in the intermediate steps. In my case, it often happens that I have an idea, but then I try to fill in the intermediate steps and find that they don't work, so I have to give it up.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one.

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. read more

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be read more

It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.

We're making a major move of the Internet, and runway.polo.com is a natural extension of both polo.com and our collection read more

We're making a major move of the Internet, and runway.polo.com is a natural extension of both polo.com and our collection business.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of read more

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.