I had a vivid dream last night. Strangely, many of my dreams have the same setting, the way different movies from the same studio reuse the same backlot sets. In my dream, I am an employee of a large and nameless company, and I work at a desk facing out the window of the 21st floor of an office tower. Continue reading “Dreams of children” »

I’m a writer and a computer programmer by profession, and my only hobbies are reading and bicycling, so I spend a lot of time alone. I can’t say whether all those solitary pursuits are the cause of my solitary nature, or just a consequence. Continue reading “Solitary Man” »

In an 1998, the then-Enron adviser and future Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman wrote article for Red Herring magazine, titled, apparently without irony, “Why most economists’ predictions are wrong.”  After mocking the already-late Herman Kahn’s book The Year 2000 for only getting most things right (cell-phones, VCRs, satellite dishes) but not everything, Krugman then went on to make a string of utterly risible predictions of his own, concluding with, and I quote:

• The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.
  
• As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.
  
• Sometime in the next 20 years, maybe sooner, there will be another ’70s-style raw-material crunch: a disruption of oil supplies, a sharp run-up in agricultural prices, or both. And suddenly people will remember that we are still living in the material world and that natural resources matter.
  

Read the whole thing.  And laugh and laugh and laugh.

This article originally appeared on FIVETHôT.

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine
(From the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord)
Psalm 130

Funny how even in the egalitarian US, we assort ourselves by rank. Tony, the oldest of us and most senior with the company, was driving; the next most senior, Oppy — David Oppenheimer — was shotgun. The two youngest were in the back, me and David Garfield, inevitably called Garf by analogy.

The little car wended up the mountain road, and we came to a high metal gate. An armed guard came out of the shack and stuck his head in the window. “You have any cameras or recording equipment?” No, we chorused — this was long before cell-phones. “You have any fire-arms or narcotics?”

Another chorus of no. but I muttered “What do you need?” under my breath, Continue reading “Remembering The End Of The World As We Know It.” »