Category: Uncategorized

I was raised as a Methodist and I was a believer until the age of eleven. Then I lost faith and became an annoying atheist for decades. In recent years I’ve come to see religion as a valid user interface to reality. The so-called “truth” of the universe is irrelevant…

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley for my day job at CalendarTree.  I feel like an embedded journalist. You might be interested in some of the things I’ve discovered. The most fascinating phenomenon in the start-up world is called the pivot. That word has been used…

In a thousand years, assuming humans survive, it looks as if we might know how to make a human embryo using nothing but a 3D printer. Scientists can already grow ears, print blood and print teeth. I don’t see why future humans won’t someday be printing DNA. In order to…

Some have asked about my goal in producing Robots Read News on this blog. I don’t have a goal. Goals are limiting. I prefer systems (as I describe more fully in my latest book.) A system is something you do on a regular basis to improve your odds of success –…

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy for one sort of unpleasantness or another. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or…

Most of you are familiar with A-B testing for websites. You randomly display one of two website designs and track which design gets the most clicks. People do A-B testing because it works. But where else does it work? When I asked for opinions about why anyone would NOT buy…

A growing number of futurists are speculating that someday human minds will be transferred to computers. Let’s assume that will happen, whether in a hundred years or a thousand. Futurists say that all we’ll need is fairly normal advances in technology to get there. At the moment, the best minds…

Next week (Dec 16– 20) I’ll be doing interviews on Skype and phone about my new book (How to Fail almost Every time and Still Win Big…). But I’m adding a twist to the process, just to see what happens. I’ll do the interviews in the priority order of biggest…

I hope my father dies soon. And while I’m at it, I might want you to die a painful death too. I’m entirely serious on both counts. My father, age 86, is on the final approach to the long dirt nap (to use his own phrase). His mind is 98%…

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy for one sort of unpleasantness or another. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or…

In my new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, I talk about using systems instead of goals. For example, losing ten pounds is a goal (that most people can’t maintain), whereas learning to eat right is a system that…

I don’t know anything about Obamacare except that it’s so complicated there’s no point in an ordinary person trying to understand how it will all turn out. And evidently the people who try to understand Obamacare come to different conclusions about whether it will destroy civilization or simply help some…

I’m starting to wonder if the era of super-big problems is over. Wars are trending smaller. Economic meltdowns aren’t quite so deep or lasting. Israel has become so skilled at managing its local threats that a peace treaty would feel like a step backwards. The Gates Foundation is chipping away…

My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I’ll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways that sociopaths and terrorists couldn’t duplicate. Anyone can post fake photos and acquire lots of friends who are actually…

I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher the other day. He had a professor on the show who said climate change can be fixed by making well-understood adjustments to how farmers raise cattle plus some other fairly ordinary changes. Apparently this is all explained in a documentary called Carbon Nation….