“Plastic Animal Chess”: My daughter’s chess game

I just wrote a piece for Wired UK on creativity and child-like irreverence, and I talk about the game my daughter invented, a variant on chess. I had taken some photos, though, that did not make it into the story. The first is this one here at the top, an animal-level view of the game [...]

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From Forbes: Could Social Media hurt or help your creativity?

Meghan Casserly recently wrote a piece at Forbes on the role of social media for creativity, and specifically about one’s ability to have more than one identity. Does this help or hurt? Read her piece here. She discusses a piece I wrote on this issue last year, and which I have put below… === Multiple [...]

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What Is Wrong With Academia?

Why I left academia.

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Carl Sagan’s Secret Sauce: Tapping Into Our Religious Sense?

What’s Carl Sagan Got That Michio Kaku’s not?

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Why We Have Aha Moments

“My plan for today: 1. Pick up dry cleaning. 2. Go to dentist. 3. Think up brilliant idea.” Good luck with that third bullet. Big ideas can’t be planned like growing tomatoes in one’s garden. We stumble upon ideas, and although we can sometimes recall how we got there, we could not have anticipated the [...]

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What I Learned from John Brockman, Book Agent to the Stars

The hardback of The Vision Revolution has been out for one year, and I couldn’t be happier with the reaction it has received, including reviews in fantastic places like the Wall Street Journal and Sciam Mind and mentions in places like the New York Times. It even made New Scientist’s “best books of 2009″ story! [...]

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The Idea-Monger: No Genius Required

You are an idea-monger. Science, art, technology – it doesn’t matter which. What matters is that you’re all about the idea. You live for it. You’re the one who wakes your spouse at 3 AM to describe your new inspiration. You’re the person who suddenly veers the car to the shoulder to scribble some thoughts [...]

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Avant-Garde Science: Toward Unconstrained Scientific Craziness

As I lay inside the box in the pitch blackness waiting for the show to begin, I wonder if the operator forgot to start it. Nothing is happening – no sound, no sights…nothing at all. Ah, wait, did I just hear something? Maybe, although perhaps that was just part of the box’s machinery I am [...]

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Multiple Personality Social Media

For those who have not entered the world of Twitter, it is hard to fathom why people feel compelled to stream their lives to strangers 140 characters at a time. And such non-Twitter folk are also unlikely to fathom the purpose of blogging, especially in a world with more than 170 million blogs. Imagine the [...]

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A New Kind of Science Communication: Can Market Mechanisms More Closely Connect the Public and Scientists?

Markets work well when there’s a chain from wholesaler to retailer to customer…and back. If none of the customer payments makes it back to the wholesaler, soon there may be few to no wholesalers producing anything worth buying. That’s bad for wholesalers, bad for retailers, and bad for customers. That’s why, for example, Napster, Youtube [...]

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