Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent. The fraction of people who are mobile phone users is the kind of fact you might read in a magazine and quote at a cocktail party. But years later the number you would be quoting would not just be inaccurate, it would be seriously wrong. The difference between a tiny fraction of the world and half the globe is startling, and completely changes our view on global interconnectivity.

Introducing the mesofact originally appeared on Portable Learner on March 2nd, 2010

Atoms to bits originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 29th, 2010

Tech Law Crystal Ball originally appeared on Portable Learner on January 6th, 2009

Set in Our Ways: Why Change Is So Hard originally appeared on Portable Learner on December 29th, 2008

… it’s not so much that, say, Hadrosaurus walked on four legs, but more that this new knowledge reflects a better understanding of the world as it was before we appeared in it. We’re compelled by improved understandings of those environments that have yet to open themselves to human occupation — Mars, the deep sea, the past. Understanding life in a way that either spatially or temporally transcends the presence of humans builds a context that helps us understand that presence. The fact that we have a better idea of what the Hadrosaurus’ skull looked like, that we can replace some of the bones Hawkins used to fill in the blanks, so to speak, suggests that an image of the past is fully constructible if only we’re given the right parts.

Skeletal Remains originally appeared on Portable Learner on December 21st, 2008

EEGs Show Brain Differences Between Poor and Rich Kids originally appeared on Portable Learner on December 14th, 2008

Procrastinating Again? originally appeared on Portable Learner on December 9th, 2008

All of the world’s knowledge is in the air to be plucked down by our telephone. Of course it’s also all the world’s disinformation, misinformation, spam, porn, Nigerian frauds, urban legends, hoaxes. So how do you find what you want and how do you know that it’s true? Those seem like to me both extremely important questions today .…

The answer, says Judy Breck, is nothing less than to change both where we look and the way we ascertain truthfulness.

How do you find what you want and how do you know it is true? originally appeared on Portable Learner on October 28th, 2008

After a day or two, I found myself reading this anthology as if it were a series of reports from a distant planet in a distant time—as an appendix, perhaps, to Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos novels. Reading American Earth in that light helped make several things clear. First, each document in the volume is a minority report—sometimes a minority of one. The assumptions, the hopes, the arguments in nearly every one of these pieces, no matter when they were written, are contradicted by the way the vast majority of Americans live and by the political and economic structures that determine that lifestyle. Second, the fundamental environmentalist arguments—the fundamental perceptions—are unchanging over time; only the details vary. We are still catching up to Thoreau, still coming to terms with the outrage George Perkins Marsh expressed in 1864, his worries about “climatic excess” and our “restless love of change.” Third, writers in every generation take a crack at finding the crystalline argument that will induce an epiphany in skeptical readers—for nothing less than an epiphany will do to persuade them to change the way they go about living. Yet every generation fails, in part because skeptical readers so seldom pick up this kind of writing or submit to its evidence.

Her conclusion is also worth noting. She reaches for Kafka (There is infinite hope, but not for us.) and writes regretfully: I would say something different if I could. I have every faith in nature’s recuperative powers.…What I doubt is our ability, as a species, to see and, having seen, to continue to pay attention.

No Heaven on Earth originally appeared on Portable Learner on September 30th, 2008

If Obama is indeed elected the first truly Internet-enabled candidate, we should take him at his word. He does not offer himself as the agent of change, but as an advocate of the change that could be enacted by people. It is not for government to create solar power, for example, but to get out of the way of all those people who are ready to implement solar power, themselves. Responding to the willingness of people to act, he can remove regulations developed on behalf of the oil industry to restrict its proliferation.

The Next Renaissance originally appeared on Portable Learner on July 15th, 2008