Mike Pilewski writes about life, politics and culture in the United States
I was one of two kids at my school who entered the first grade already knowing how to read. When the teachers realized this, they excused me from reading class and allowed me to spend that hour in the library. Before long, I discovered one of its greatest treasures: a thin pictorial volume about the solar system. Each double page … >>
Imagine that the basic needs of everyone on Earth were taken care of. What would society be like? American futurist Jacque Fresco, who turned 98 last week, has spent his life thinking about this. Needs are at the root of capitalism. You have something that somebody else needs; that person has something that you need; you trade these things directly … >>
Recently in the comments section of this column, a loyal reader asked: “What is the next big, bleeding-edge thing?” We are confronted with bleeding-edge things all the time that are changing our lives in one way or another. Mobile phones and the Internet — and the combination of the two — are good examples. Robotic assistants are helping out on … >>
You’ve got to love Michio Kaku. The smiling American physicist knows the answer to everything, and because he does, he appears in every single science documentary these days — at least those produced by the Discovery Channel. Kaku’s 2009–10 series Sci-Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, currently showing on German TV, underscores the extent to which science fiction inspires today’s … >>
Suppose you wanted to send a message to someone living thousands of years in the future. How would you do it? We can forget about trying to express it in electronic form. Personal computers have been around for only 30 years, but already quite a number of file formats have become obsolete — and replaced by others that are much … >>
This column was meant for September, but as fate would have it, a few other things got in the way — the presidential election, various school shootings, the demise of Twinkies — that deserved some commentary. However, the start of a new year is just as good a time to talk about this subject: the future. What was special about … >>
At some point, it happens to all of us. The computer fails to save that important document we’ve been working on so long. A computer crash, a faulty hard drive, a USB stick pulled out too quickly, or just plain human error: the reason hardly matters when you’ve just seen your data disappear. For journalists, this is a particular hazard. … >>
If you tried to read the English-language Wikipedia last Wednesday, you couldn’t. Every page was replaced with a black screen explaining that, as part of a protest, the content of the free online encyclopedia was being hidden for 24 hours. (A banner appeared at the top of Wikipedia’s Spanish- and German-language pages, but this was hardly more distracting than the … >>
Fifty-six is too young an age for anyone to die at, let alone a pioneer and visionary. I call him that with some reluctance, because in certain ways, Steve Jobs has made my life more difficult. But his contributions to the advancement of human society cannot be overlooked. As computers go, I live in both worlds. At home, I use … >>
Well, the iPad’s been on sale — depending on where you live — for a couple of weeks now. Much has been made of the things it can do (such as be operated by cats and two-year-olds) and the things it can’t (such as multitask and display countless websites that use Flash). But only now are we hearing the question … >>