You may be thinking of Neal Stephenson, not William Gibson. In Stephenson’s brilliant Snow Crash (1992), the main character, Hiro Protagonist (yes really), gets a side job doing pizza delivery for some company just as sinister as Domino’s. Pizza is one of the last things made in America, along with music and software,…

A wonderful tribute! I loved the movie too, but was less enamored by the Kevin Costner character. It turns out that the white manager who did perhaps the most for blacks at NASA was Wernher von Braun. Yes, the ex-Nazi Helped Desegregate Alabama. He helped black colleges write grant proposals, encouraged contractors…

Isn’t Hyperloop One pushing the maglev tech that has been tried for the last 40 years? Putting it in a tube and running it faster just makes it more expensive, not better. One of the reasons why we don’t have supersonic passenger aircraft is because it doesn’t actually cut that much off the total trip time, and…

I first heard of Project Pluto in the great SF story A Colder War (2000) by Charles Stross, where the US and the USSR are exploiting Lovecraftian horrors as part of the Cold War. The US is building it basically in case the Soviets unleash Cthuhlu. Oliver North figures into it too, but gets radiation sickness from…

The best take I’ve seen on this interview came from the comment thread here, which plays on both Lovecraft and the King in Yellow:

Art Garfunkel did walk across America. Not in one go, of course, since he had stuff to do, but a few days at a time. He would put in a hundred miles, leave off, and take it up again. It took 40 segments and 12 years, but he did get an album out of it. It’s also a lot better way to Look For America than on a Greyhound.

It’s worse than just these burned-out columnists. Look at the headlines right now: “GOP Health Plan Would Sub Mandates With Incentives”. Sounds pretty good, right? Carrots instead of sticks. Then you read it and find that they want to give tax credits to encourage people to buy insurance. But if you’re poor, you’re…

Absolutely. Ever since Christopher Lee died, Shannon has been the most intimidating actor in the world.

Yes, we went to Iceland too. One other feature to add - the people are impossibly handsome. We were sitting in a restaurant looking around and wondering “Are all of these people actors?”

If that top picture is accurate, I would pay to see a young Bruce Springsteen hitting the road on a bike, looking for the heart of ... well anything really.

Who invented this and when?

Sounds like a modern version of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”! Do they reference that story?

There sure looks like a lot of custom tooling on those lines. There are a lot of specialized robots and custom-designed molds and fixtures. That’s good work for the people who design production lines like this! I wonder, though, how much more expensive it is than just having a lot of dextrous low-wage workers. The…

One thing in their favor is that they’ve picked a better role model for the name of their company than Elon Musk did with Tesla. David Faraday made far greater contributions to physics than Nikola Tesla did to electrical engineering. That’s why he gets a basic unit named after him, the farad of capacitance, instead of…

The DMCA takedown bots were just responding to the copyright troll bots. No human beings were involved in this process at all. The takedown bots were particularly stupid in this case since they removed videos made long before the one they’re supposed to be infringing on, but that’s AI for you. Just wait until the…

It’s amazing that this works at all. I had thought that aircraft would be the last refuge of fossil fuels, and that we’d have to do something like algae-derived diesel to compensate for their emissions. Ten years ago this wouldn’t have been possible, but the composites have gotten better, the batteries and their…

So the DoE loan really did save this company? They wouldn’t have even gotten that far without it. The poster child for heroic entrepreneurship got his bacon saved by the government?

The number of cars per person has gone up a lot in the last 30 years, so I would expect that the number of registered-vehicle-years has gone up a lot too. It could be that cars aren't getting as much use as they used to when the entire family had to make do with one.

Telekinesis? Always clumsier than using your own hands. And if you want to lift something heavy, rent a crane.

No love for 1965's "Crack in the World"? The usual well-meant but fantastically-dangerous experiment goes wrong, and an earthquake fissure starts propagating around the earth. If it makes it all the way around The Earth Will Break In Half. The earth is held together by its shell, who knew? The only way to stop…