How NOT to have a debate — “All I want is some intellectual intercourse.” — Alanis Morrissette. All I really want. “If you have an argument with an older person, you should listen to them. It doesn’t mean they’re right. It means their wrongness is rooted in more information than you have.” — Louis C.K. Anyone who…

The surprising source of the (in)famous quote — “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. … But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history…

A plea for a culture of “six pagers” — “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.” — Robin Williams. Dead Poets Society. “There’s a time for daring and there’s a time for caution, and a wise man understands which is called for.” — Robin Williams. Dead Poets Society. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No…

An architectural approach to cloud scalability “Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” — Napoleon Hill. “Of course the market fluctuates. I just got fluctuated out of four thousand bucks!” — Jerry Seinfeld. Full disclosure: I’m a stockholder. Five or six years ago, right before I retired…

A short catastrophic foray into community activism — “People invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the whole issue more fully and evenhandedly.” — David Perkins. Learning to reason: The influence of instruction, prompts and scaffolding, metacognitive knowledge, and general intelligence on informal reasoning about everyday social and political issues. “The restrictions were…

How many do you recognize in your own projects? — “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken. 1880–1956. I retired from the computer industry four years ago. I’ve continued to advise a few startups but, truth be told, I’ve spent more hours on a bicycle than behind a desk…

It’s time to move our elections online — As we live through one of the most historic elections in US history, I can’t help but return to a theme that has occupied me recently, namely that we are trying to keep this 250-year-old “house” up on its creaky stilts and we insist on doing so using not just…

A New Team of Rivals — Leaked transcript of upcoming Biden speech, copied from one of his rehearsals. Video forthcoming. This is big! Pass it around. [Biden speaking to the camera] Folks, here’s the thing. This is not a normal election year. We’re not going to be able to do things the way we’ve done them…

“We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on…