Technopolis

Widespread attempts by Teabagger healthcare reform protestors to completely disrupt the congressional town hall meetings raise an interestin...

At the wonderful, but lamentably very wet, Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, I visited a porta-potty. On the wall was a printed message: "Y...

At Obama's press conference last Wednesday, the main headline concerned an ugly racial incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts involving th...

An interesting post in Daily Kos , "WORDS YOU'LL NEVER HEAR IN THE CANADIAN HEALTHCARE SYSTEM," describes understandings and p...

Insurance companies are to today's health, as leeches were to medieval medicine. Just one example .

The Apollo 11 Moon landing: a hollow anniversary It’s fully predictable that the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission would be caus...

Orwellian Tweets It's high time. The North Korean government is using Twitter to get its message out. Short URLs take you to longer stor...

Sarah Palin and Reactionary Politics While Sarah Palin's resignation may a way to dodge personal and political scandals, it seems likely...

New Chinese Software: protecting youth from objectionable online material During my recent travels in China, it was fascinating to notice wh...

Free marketeers in the toilet in Iceland These are evidently pictures of bankers who fled Iceland after leading the country into bankruptcy....

$1.5 billion wind tunnel? In the first three games at the new Yankee Stadium, there have been seventeen home runs. Yesterdays score was 22-4...

After watching Obama’s first “Open for Questions” session Old political communications model: Elect a “conservative” president who mai...

Langdon's visit to the Obama inauguration: Some photos here.

Again in the forefront of every backward step: U.S. refuses to sign ban on cluster bombs OSLO, Norway (AP) — An Afghan teenager who lost bo...

Human flesh search engines -- another dark side of the internet The Obama campaign's use of the internet to mobilize positive, political...

China's plans to bailout Detroit Chinese carmakers SAIC and Dongfeng have plans to acquire GM and Chrysler, China’s 21st Century Busines...

Vroom-Vro0m!! -- Detroit in crisis, no surprise From my vantage point, what’s happening to Detroit is the culminationof a slowly developing...

American power fantasies today: Housing The above photo shows unfinished McMansions in Las Vegas, construction halted by the mortgage crisis...

Green technology updates GM chief admits failure to develop hybrid auto. Detroit has long dragged its heels in energy saving, planet saving...

Confronting Tyranny and Stupidity: What Works? -- My talk at the Democracy Teach-in Below are links to the edited YouTube version of the tal...

Welcome to Troy -- Home of Banned Art Right up there with...OH, NO!! The history of banned art is truly an ignoble one, ranging from silly g...

Joseph Weizenbaum, computer scientist and social critic, is dead at 85 He was a good friend. I learned a great deal from him and appreciate...

University tramples free speech and artistic liberty: some lingering questions Yielding to pressure from right wing political groups, Shirl...

Art Police: the saga continues Things are heating up around the censorship of artist Waffa Bilal at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (see my...

Art Police Shut Down Exhibit at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Invade Classroom Stories in the Washington Post , Newsday and Times Union ...

(Sorry to have been away for a while. I'll be posting fairly frequently from now on.)

Better than building a tech park? What a surprise. Here all these years I've been hanging out with people who think that closer ties b...

Among peaceful nations: We're the number one! ...err, uh, make that number 96 !!! On several ranking of nation states previously quoted ...

More "Support the Troops" It was the best of armies. It was the worst of armies. Two news stories paint a picture of the way the...

Support the troops with censorship: military brass unplugs MySpace and YouTube The military has taken another brilliant move in Iraq. From...

Wally Shirra, astronaut, dies at 84 From an article in the Guardian ``Mostly it's lousy out there,'' Schirra said in 1981 on the...

Bush spying on the citizenry continues (without warrant) From the New York Times story: "Senior Bush administration officials told Co...

Duty, Honor, Country: The long grey line gets smart! From the Boston Globe comes an interesting story about the mass exodus from military ...

The demise of community radio It has been sad to watch the demise of WRPI, the once great college/community radio station. The Albany Times...

Bogus news for an increasingly fake medium The Independent reports (evidently you have to read the press in the UK to learn these things) t...

Automatic Professor Machine lecture restored L.C. Winner's " Introducing the Automatic Professor Machine " lecture has been of...

Political tsunami: the election of 2006 I'm beginning to look at the analysis of the 2006 election results. This story in the NYT cont...

Call Center: the movie If you've got ten minutes and want a good chuckle, check out "Call Center," a film about global inform...

It can't happen here? (Look again) From the very beginning of this blog I've covered the not-so-slow movement of the U.S.A. from a d...