Archimedes’ Hot Tub

My latest Prototype column in the New York Times, Making Fast Food Even Faster, looks at the problem that faces innovators when their ideas run into market inertia.

Xconomy.com, the hyperlocal Boston blog run by Bob Buderi, published a piece I wrote on Virtual Ubiquity, which was recently purchased by Adobe. The piece, Buzzword Brings Beauty, Flash to Word Processing for Adobe
, looks in part at the counter-intuitive aspect of a company started by entrepreneurs in their 40s and 50s. It obviously didn’t bother Adobe!

My latest Prototype column in the New York Times looks at a new wave of personal organizing tools, and suggests that sharing will become a new challenge for business. See A Tool to Organize Our Many Organizers.

Inc. has posted my article on Windows Vista, which it titled Nice View, Rough Terrain. It’s also posted my latest technology guide, a look at social networking tools with a business bent.

The patent system exists to encourage innovation. It may now be discouraging innovation. Read my latest New York Times column,

A Patent Is Worth Having, Right? Well, Maybe Not

One can look at Thursday’s Supreme Court decision on school integration as a mockery of the Civil Rights movement and unjust on its face. As Hendrik Hertzberg put it in the New Yorker, the Supreme Court just ruled “…that conscious racial integration is the moral equivalent of conscious racial segregation.”

The Court does seem to be saying that race no longer matters. It’s as if 40 years of Civil Rights and affirmative action (which was instituted by Richard Nixon, who cannot be called a liberal, despite efforts by revisionist conservatives to do so) have wiped out more than 200 years of the effects of slavery.

I disagree with the Court’s decision. But I wonder whether the Court was influenced by a nation where race relations have become ambiguous and less polarized than in the past. This is the unspoken theme of my piece Seeing Family in Black and White, which ran in Sunday’s Boston Globe magazine’s parenting issue. I wrote about my own experiences as the white father of children who are multiracial, but may well be identified as black. My kids are still young, but the black-white issue seems less stark now than it did when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, and I know from talking with friends that they, too, feel that the race question is more ambiguous now. There is certainly far more racial diversity in the U.S. now than there was even 20 years ago, and immigration patterns mean that’s likely to continue.

Race certainly hasn’t gone away, and what the Court did may not help. But perhaps towns and cities and school boards and parents will respond with creative ways to boost educational facilities in all their neighborhoods, so that parents don’t care so much where their kids go to school.

Before search engine marketing, there was just search. It turns out that just search makes for a really valuable way to do e-commerce, especially as the cost of Google AdWords rises. My piece Organic Chemistry in Inc.’s July issue looks at the return of ‘organic’ search as a marketing tool.

My latest technology guide for Inc. magazine just came out. It’s on printers, not normally something to shout about. But one of the printers, from Dimatix, can print with a wide variety of fluids and outputs (it can even print human skin for burn victims).

Beyond Words

I’m back from Cambridge, England, where I obviously did not blog on what I was hearing every day in a series of generally excellent seminars (perhaps more on those later, though).

I got back to the U.S. in time to see my article on scholastic chess in Massachusetts, Young Knights, arrive on newsstands in the Boston Globe magazine. I liked a lot of things about this piece, not least the boys I wrote about themselves, all of whom must make their parents very proud. One of my favorite lines put chess in context with hockey:

Chess is a blood sport, but all the bloodshed happens in the brain – which may explain why chess players always seem to be holding their heads in their hands. Think of it as the intellectual version of hockey: You bash each other’s brains out, and when you’re done, you shake hands and go home.

It also gave me a chance to look at the academic benefits of playing chess, which turn out to be more anecdotal than hard scientific fact, in part because it turns out there hasn’t been all that much research.

My latest Prototype column in the New York Times, To Find the Danger, This Software Poses As The Bad Guys, looks at some efforts to build automated hacking tools, in hopes that they might help reduce the number of opportunities for hackers to break into systems.