For the last few years (with the exception of one I missed, IIRC), I’ve been writing New Years posts that have explicitly pushed back against the grouchy gloom and pessimism that seems to obtain everywhere, left right and center. Why would I do this? First, because it’s true. The world …
There Are Some Things You Can’t Change It’s the New Year again, well, almost. You can’t begrudge me a couple of days late (I had to do a bit of research for this one). 2015 is opening up in front of us like the maw of a giant sarlacc that …
Think of this for a moment: Everything you know–your science, your technology, your popular art and culture, and your politics–are the result of thousands of years of technological failure. That failure? The fact that only a few people could read and write and communicate. Books were expensive to produce and …
Rather than a retrospective on the past year, I thought I’d kick off the new year in its wee hours with a look forward at the wider world. In The Princess Bride, Fezzik the Giant says to Inigo: “I hope we win.” It’s my favorite line from that movie. A …
If you’re not the kind of obsessive geek I am, you might have missed that yesterday the first major accomplishment in de novo life extension through gene therapy got published. This project has been going on for a while, but up until yesterday, all therapies and attempted engineering have either …