It has been demonstrated, time and time again, that the human race is truly bad at estimating its own rate of consumption.  A friend recently emailed me an article about the rapid depletion of phosphates for fertilizers[1], something I truly did not care about before but which disturbs me deeply now. And it's the same story all around, with the ( Read more... )

I was on my way to Makati this morning for a 9am interview.  I don't usually go to Makati on weekday mornings (because I don't need to, and with the legendary rush hour traffic, who would want to?) but such was the situation I found myself in.

Let me just say that for a suburban girl such as myself, going to Makati in the morning is a daunting ( Read more... )

I find that reading the classic papers from a particular field gives me a quaint and vaguely disorienting feeling.  Take the 1974 Cerf and Kahn paper for example, describing what essentially became TCP/IP and the mammoth that is the Internet.  It could not be more different from the 1953 Watson and Crick paper proposing DNA as a double helix.  And ( Read more... )