Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: A little boy throws stones into a pond and discovers a principle that may explain how the whole universe comes to exist.
Date: 2004-2-10
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: What's the difference between knowing something and just knowing the name of it? Some of the rifts that still exist decades after the Scopes Monkey Trial would be healed if only the faithful understood that scientists aren't out to get them, and their methods didn't come from the Devil.
Date: 2003-7-1
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Spam in the Twilight Zone: how the agents of junk email want pushbutton simplicity like the commodities markets.
Date: 2003-5-20
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Imagine if the Koala invented the airplane, but then landed someplace with no eucalyptus trees. Could man invent something that carries him too far from his ecological niche?
Date: 2003-3-25
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Once it seemed like technology would slowly replace humans at whatever it was they did. Now a once-advocate of replacing humans with machines has changed his mind, and put humans back where they belong.
Date: 2003-2-11
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Secure web sites, encrypted email, even bank transfers all use ciphers that rely on an unproven mathematical assumption: that big numbers are, like, hard.
Date: 2003-1-21
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: The Internet first made class distinctions invisible, providing for all kinds of social upward mobility. Now the upper classes are fighting to keep the riff-raff separate, and they're using technology to do it.
Date: 2003-1-14
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Martin Phillip had a vision on Christmas Eve, 2002. By 2026, he'd changed the world, and seriously buggered up Christmas.
Date: 2002-12-24
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Abstractions are leaky, but leaks can be useful at times. Engineering taken in the spirit of Harry Tuttle, and "Mel"
Date: 2002-11-26
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Ray Kurzweil thinks that interest in chess will wane once regular computers can beat even the best human masters. Yet for people in another line of work, being "solved" can actually increase interest in a game.
Date: 2002-11-05
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: A robotic descendant of an ancient library's servants forces a new generation to learn some skills that they just don't teach in school, these days.
Date: 2002-10-15
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: When Gary Krier test piloted the F-8 thirty years ago, he ushered in a world of computer mediated experiences, with a slight disconnection from reality being the price.
Date: 2002-9-24
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Lessons from building tank simulators in Israel, and the fault-recovery strategies of Starbucks, Amazon, and world governments.
Date: 2002-9-17
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Push didn't work, pull is too hard, but now there's ambient user interfaces where you just absorb information from the background. A look at the pros and cons of a technology that hides in your peripheral vision.
Date: 2002-9-4
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: An old technique for connecting simple computer programs together in a pipeline struggles to make a transition to graphical environments, possibly leading to a world of "living" software.
Date: 2002-8-6
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Some corporate execs get their hands on a censored letter that reveals a sinister new technique for taking the movie-going experience and kicking it up a notch. Was this just a new special effect, or mass hypnosis?
Date: 2002-7-16
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Intel's Andy Grove figured the television was important for the power it dispensed, and that's why he wen't cuckoo for ways to put TV-like entertainment on the PC. But the television isn't going to be marginalized this time.
Date: 2002-6-25
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Have all the witch-doctors left the Internet, yet? Not by far. Last week's article spawns a closer look at the three biggest e-commerce myths, and why Jakob Nielsen should stay the hell out of economics.
Date: 2002-6-11
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Poor Jakob Nielsen could be reaching the point of diminishing returns. How the story of the Qwerty keyboard can tell us how far people are willing to go to be efficient.
Date: 2002-6-4
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: The good guys are losing the arms race against hackers and virus authors. Could the reason why computers are such an irresistible target for malice help us come up with a better line of defense?
Date: 2002-5-28
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: The two-way link was one of Ted Nelson's dreams, and now a crude approximation of it has been popularized by non other than Disenchanted. But taking the humble referrer up to the next level may mean a smarter web
Date: 2002-5-7
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: The secret to big civilization and big organisms is standardization, and a world made of pre-fabricated components
Date: 2002-4-16
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Someone might be reading your email by listening to the noise coming from your computer monitor. Maybe this calls for some security through obscurity.
Date: 2002-4-2
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Your ovaries (or your sperm) encode an almost unlimited number of potential offspring. What if you could pick-and-choose which of those potentials should grow into a child?
Date: 2002-3-5
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Calling the next breed of computers a "quantum leap" wouldn't be an inappropriate use of the word. Maybe this will bring machines up to par with human minds, which may have quantum computers of their own. Last in a five-part series on machine intelligence.
Date: 2002-2-5
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: In a decade, affordable hard drives will have so much capacity they'll be able to store the sum of human culture. Makes you wonder what will be done with the capacity still to come
Date: 2002-1-29
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: What happened to the master-and-apprentice relationship that pre-dated schools, and could it be ressurected and modernized with a new revenue model for the Internet?
Date: 2002-1-15
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Pain might be the most confounding human sensation to understand: why is it unpleasant? The unique human experience is discussed in the fourth in a series on machine intelligence.
Date: 2002-1-8
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: I can tell you what'll happen a century from now and all the years inbetween, but don't bother asking me the most useful question of all.
Date: 2002-1-1
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: When you give a computer multiple senses and let the universe become your co-programmer, expect bizarre emergent behavior. Third in a series exploring machine intelligence.
Date: 2001-12-11
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Some AI developers give up on the whole and concentrate on useful parts, making machines that are somewhat smart, but have a distorted, and pre-interpreted view of the world. Second of a five-part series investigating Artificial Intelligence.
Date: 2001-11-13
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Our traditional milestones of civilization have always included inventions and discoveries such as fire, the wheel, and soap. But how about convenience stores?
Date: 2001-10-30
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: The term __ldq__Artificial Intelligence__rdq__ is so abused it's impossible to properly define what it is anymore. Disenchanted takes on the problem by splitting it up into five categories, with the first__em__conversational machines__em__being the topic of this first article in the series.
Date: 2001-10-16
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: A cheezy pop-song provides the story that unravels the method behind the madness of the modern consumer electronics industry.
Date: 2001-9-25
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Wiretapping as we know it is rapidly coming to an end, so a couple of interesting new laws are trying to hitch a ride on recent tragedy
Date: 2001-9-18
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: It's like junk-food for the mind. The pre-digested form of education found in passive media, combined with hot blooded debate, conspire to provide an education which rivals formal schooling.
Date: 2001-8-21
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Larry Niven said that technology changes ethics, which is the situation being forced on content authors today as browsers and other client-side tools - most controversially Microsoft Smart Tags - promise to permamently contaminate the reading experience. What would Ayn Rand have thought about that?
Date: 2001-7-3
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Without discipline, a web log is a total waste of time. 'Blogs are typically confusing, directionless, and tiring to read. What they need is a role and a re-orientation.
Date: 2001-6-19
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: How do we deal with deception when the fabrications are so well made? Our inventions have been making it easier to practice the art of telling a fib. Sometimes there's a technical fix, and sometimes the problem is a bit more organic than that.
Date: 2001-6-12
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Frustrated web designers have cried into their beer long enough and have now begun a browser upgrade campaign - operating under the false pretense of standards support - as their way of dealing with the impotency that comes with the job. Isn't this just another manifestation of the dreaded 'Netscape Now!' button we learned to hate in 1995?
Date: 2001-5-8
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Reboot and be happy, the PC is still just a prototype after all these years, prone to crash and burn as often as the old days. But that's actually a good thing.
Date: 2001-4-17
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Some ideas are just too obvious not to think of, which doesn't bode well for institutions such as patents and censorship. Are both doomed, and could someone else already be exploiting your best ideas?
Date: 2001-4-10
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Advertising is the sole reason your browser is still a throw-back of user-interface design. Find out why the ubiquitous, but failing sponsorship model of the Internet is keeping Mozilla's wings clipped.
Date: 2001-3-13
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: Why Free Software's strategy of copying Microsoft as fast as its tiny little legs can carry it is a dumb idea.
Date: 2001-1-23
Author: Chris Wenham
Summary: The new class of computers aren't for editing movies or playing MP3 files, they're for finding patterns and exploiting them.
Date: 2000-12-19
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