The video business is learning what those of us in the news business learned two decades ago. You can’t beat free. Newspapers and most magazines died because they chose to put their content behind paywalls, broken only through subscriptions, which require enormous consumer permission to obtain. The papers never even considered an idea I suggested […]

I have been covering renewable energy since 2010. One thing I know for certain is that equipment suppliers haven’t made much money from it. Solar panels and windmills are the engines of renewable energy. They harvest electricity from the Sun and the wind, just like car engines harvest the energy of fossil fuels. But with […]

The Internet has evolved as a Tower of Babel. The Tower is collapsing. It’s doing so in two ways. The first is geographic collapse. Many nation states want to control not only what people do, but what they think, within their territories. This isn’t just an issue of censorship. Every society has boundaries of acceptable […]

I last published an update to my book on Moore’s Law in 2021.  Bad news. It’s obsolete. I didn’t do a bad job. I even pointed toward some important future trends like the end of oil and DNA editing. But there’s a lot that I missed and that’s inevitable. As I begin work on a […]

If you hit something with the heat of the Sun, even for a second, it will break down into its most basic components. That’s the idea behind Flash Joule Heating, which the folks at my alma mater have been using for almost 4 years now. It’s the biggest breakthrough at Rice since the Buckyball, and […]

If we’ve learned anything over the last half century it is that when people get some prosperity and hope they have fewer kids. The population bomb has been defused throughout the west. Populations are shrinking in some places. Just not in the global south. If you lack hope, if you’re living hand to mouth and […]

A few thoughts from an armchair technology analyst follow. War has utterly changed in this decade. Individuals and smaller groups are gaining power. Nations are losing it. Genocide has become a strategy. Thanks to technology, the Ukraine War has devolved from one fought by people in tanks to one fought by people behind screens. Suicide […]

Maybe I am wrong. I’ve been wrong before. But I am beginning to believe the refusal of Americans to get excited about 2024 may be…a sign of maturity? Journalists, pollsters, reporters, Republicans and Democrats are all screaming the same thing these days. “Look at me! Look at this! Be horrified! Be Angry! Be scared!” To […]

If you don’t own Cloud Czars like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, I suspect you’ll be able to get them on sale a month from now. My spidey sense tells me their third quarter earnings are going to be bad. The biggest reason is on the cost side. Nvidia is holding everyone up for what it […]

Kariko was demoted in 1995 because, her colleagues insisted, mRNA could not be turned into therapies.