An Imaginary Garden

When we win at computer solitaire – the version that comes loaded with Windows, anyway – the cards jump all over the screen until the entire field of view is obscured.  In a similar way, the concepts that determine our view of the world seem to play leapfrog with one another, jumping all over the [...]

Since long before the computer revolution, too much data has streamed into our lives. We perceive much more than we “see.” The French philosopher, Henri Bergson, suggested that the brain might be  a filter that screened out nearly all reality so we could pay attention to the mundane tasks of daily life. One definition of [...]

I recall the panic on my aunt’s face when we took her to the airport shortly after her husband died. Her task was to board an airplane and return home from visiting our family. That sounds simple enough, except that she had been protected by her husband from having to perform such tasks. Her anxiety [...]

When one of my children could not find the major he wanted at college, he made it up. His “ad hoc” major combined courses from five disciplines into a single program. Because he was enrolled in a traditional university – one with buildings, degrees, accreditation – he worked within the system, stretching it to the [...]

Some of the freedom-fighters of cyberspace that homesteaded the electronic frontier continue to decry the commercialization of the Internet. Maybe it was the rush of that first headlong plunge into cyberspace that made us forget ourselves, made us think that the fractal mountains we explored somehow floated above the earth like a sky city. Reminds [...]

A lawyer from the Department of Justice just described why law enforcement does not want strong cryptography available to Americans. Then an advocate for international human rights described the loss of life that would be prevented if citizens terrorized by oppressive governments have access to strong cryptography. The debate was a jousting match between two [...]

Now that the century is drawing to a close, we can say that James Joyce was probably the best. The man did things with language that no one has matched. So when we turn to his works for a definition of love, we’re surprised that the best Leopold Bloom (“Ulysses”) can say is: “Love is [...]

Ultimately, that’s the question — do people and things show up out of nowhere or somewhere? Online life brackets our experience at the top level. We have prolonged periods of interacting with others through digital images alone, often people we have never met. Sometimes we suspect they are not what they seem, while other times [...]

One standard of excellence is how well we afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted — including ourselves. When we grow complacent, we are likely to skew toward arrogance. We can’t help it. Egos get confused when things go well and take a little too much credit. Then we need what Robert Frost called “the [...]

The lag time between dream and reality seems to be growing shorter. Leonardo da Vinci drew sketches for devices around 1500 that were not realized for 450 years. Jules Verne wrote “From the Earth to the Moon” in 1860 and a hundred years later we were there. Aldous Huxley wrote “Brave New World” in 1932 [...]

A Jew survived the gas chambers, having lost every one of his relatives. The resettlement officer asked him where he would like to go. “Australia,” he replied. “But that is so far,” said the officer. “From where?” asked the Jew – Rabbi Joseph Telushkin The trajectory from youth to maturity includes a growing detachment from [...]

It was just a small thing, the kind of small thing that explodes like an opening rose and reveals a universe inside. Breakfast with a friend and a playful waitress who tells me when I arrive a little late that my friend has already ordered hot fudge sundaes. A little laughter, then she goes to [...]

When I established myself as a speaker, writer, and consultant focused on the human dimensions of technology and the work place, I was strongly advised not to use a home office. “You won’t have credibility,” I was told, “without a downtown address.” The speaker didn’t realize how things had changed, that we can live anywhere [...]

I was looking through this morning’s newspaper for the labor section. Couldn’t find it. There was a business section, so I thought there might be a labor section too. This is a blue-collar town, after all. But — of course — there isn’t. It’s “down-sizing” time. That local newspaper recently fired a lot of good [...]

There are a thousand ways to stay asleep; there is one way to wake up. The movie is “Wag the Dog,” a film about a war staged by cynical political operatives using digital technology to con the public. The defining metaphor of the film is the clip from the Iraqi War of a smart bomb [...]

Donald Ingher of Harvard Medical School is fascinated by tensegrity, an architectural system in which complex structures achieve balance by playing off the forces of compression against tension. This results in familiar geometric shapes that are found everywhere in nature. In our organizations too we play off compression against tension, aiming for an optimal state [...]

The irony of a friend’s e-mail statement (how DO you spell e- mail? email? Email?) struck me as so ironic that I replied: If this were Greece, and there were gods in every snow bank or grove of bare trees, and they heard you say that … they would be rolling in the ice and [...]

Those odd jottings on the edges of things contain the emotions of the moment in a code we all understand. Marginalia carry our real feelings. So historians are alarmed by the computerization of records. What will happen to Nixonian scrawls, one asked, like “muzzle those jerks,” the epiphanies that disclose the soul? An unknown scribe, [...]

Sounds obvious, I know, but one of the consequences of an overload of information is that we forget what’s obvious. The pressure of expectations is responsible for lots of it. Executives tell me they don’t have time to reflect; the perceived need for an immediate response to email or voice mail or during a meeting [...]

Watching Bladerunner (again) last night, I noticed how commonplace many of the futuristic features of the film have become. Iris scanning and biometrics, nanotechnology, genetic engineering are no longer the stuff of science fiction but the stuff of our lives. The issues they raise about human identity and how we choose to evolve are not [...]

Now that we know that the uterus produces a marijuana-like compound called anadamide (Science News), we can understand why human beings hate to forsake the darkness for the bright light of life. Not only are fetuses nourished and protected, they’re sustained in a mellow high that makes the chaos and cacophony of birth a sobering [...]

The paradigm or model of reality according to which we operate determines the questions we can ask and therefore the answers we can hear. Since my extended family includes people from four or five major religious traditions (depends on how we count) and many denominational flavors, I don’t have the luxury of forgetting how religious [...]

Fifty years ago, scientists at Bell Labs developed the first transistor. (I don’t THINK they had help from extraterrestrials, but you never know). The telephone company had been looking for a replacement for cumbersome switches and vacuum tubes, and they found it. As often happens, however, the greatest uses for the transistor have not been [...]

I love it when my children connect me to a different way of framing things. And it IS different. Consider that college freshmen have always lived with AIDS, 32-cent stamps, and MTV. They have never seen TVs with dials or rotary telephones. The Iranian hostage crisis occurred before they were conceived, and they have no [...]