From the category archives:

On the reading stand

My next book: Radical Abundance, 2012

July 21, 2011

I’m now working on a new book, Radical Abundance, scheduled for publication in 2012 by PublicAffairs. The book has a wide scope in both its content and intended audience, addressing scientists, a general reading audience, and thought leaders in the policy arena.
Radical Abundance will integrate and extend several themes that I’ve touched on in Metamodern, [...]

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Nanosystems for India

May 6, 2011

Wiley India publishes textbooks “catering to the needs of Indian students”, and now offers Nanosystems:  Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, the book I wrote on the principles and potential components, architectures, and implementation pathways for high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing systems.
Here’s a list of Indian distributors.
Wiley India, a branch of John Wiley & Sons, the original [...]

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For the next Nobel Prize in Medicine,
I nominate…

November 3, 2010

During a three-month test across eight hospitals, several continents, and almost 4,000 patients, a new technology reduced serious surgical complications by 36% and deaths by almost 50% — in raw numbers, over 150 cases of severe harm and nearly 30 patient deaths.
This performance was demonstrated in the spring of 2008 with the prototype [...]

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Incentive engineering v. Econ 101
   (creativity, criminality, etc.)

April 7, 2010

About a book and a paper…
The economics I encountered (in what were considered to be humanities courses) at MIT presented theories of productive behavior illustrated with graphs of relationships between supply and demand, prices, utilities, consumer surpluses, deadweight losses, and so on. These are elementary parts of the apparatus of neoclassical economics, a soaring [...]

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How many minds produce knowledge
(and how they don’t)

December 11, 2009

A review of Infotopia
I’ve been discussing problems with public information and ways to improve it with Michael Nielsen, and on this topic, he recommended Infotopia: how many minds produce knowledge by Cass Sunstein. Having just finished reading it, I recommend it too.
With a solid grounding in experiments and studies of group behavior (and enlightened common [...]

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An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

October 24, 2009

This week, with the help of Viking Press, Stewart Brand has offered the world an important book on the collision between humanity and the Earth’s limits — on the facts, the problems, the passions, the politics, and the realistic possibilities for better outcomes.
After Whole Earth Discipline appeared in my mail, I opened it and skimmed [...]

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Total Recall:
How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything

September 20, 2009

Gordon Bell, a long-time leader and innovator in the world of computation, has immersed himself in a life-changing experiment. Bits and pieces of news about it have been circulating for years, and his new book, just published, gives a full picture. In brief, Gordon records and indexes what he sees, hears, and more — [...]

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The Paradox of Choice

June 3, 2009

In standard theories of rationality, it is practically axiomatic that having more choices is always better. It should come as no surprise that this isn’t true of real human beings: Too much choice can make us miserable.
In The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Barry Schwartz unfolds a broad picture of the perversities of [...]

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Nanotechnology in Science Fiction
(and vice versa)

April 9, 2009

Advanced nanotechnology concepts and science fiction have been intertwined almost from the beginning. In the early years, critics often declared that the idea of molecular manufacturing “Sounds like science fiction” (like Moon rockets, perhaps?). They were right about the similarity, of course, because science fiction writers had pounced on the ideas almost immediately.
There was a [...]

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Predictably Irrational

February 5, 2009

If you’ve read Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, you’ve probably recommended it to a friend. I you haven’t read it, then I think you’ll like it provided that:

You like to learn strange facts about how the human world really works, and
You sometimes enjoy well-written books on science by scientists who know [...]

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Ocean Acidification: The Other CO2 Problem

February 1, 2009

There’s recently been another ripple of media attention to the other CO2 problem: Not climate change, but ocean acidification. In brief: The oceans absorb a portion of CO2 emissions; this mitigates greenhouse warming, but forms carbonic acid, lowering ocean pH. Acidification of the oceans impedes the formation of coral and shells, and within decades, if [...]

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Nudging Toward a Better Future

January 9, 2009

A new book, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe surprising opportunities to improve the world today, and in doing so, they show how to make a future of accelerating change more livable for poorly informed human beings. The information and concepts have changed my way of thinking about some important issues.

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