Technology

I think it was my grandmother who once said, “Nobody buys the cow, if they can get the milk for free.”

I thought about Grandma in the context of the Wikipedia protest of the SOPA bill.

In full disclosure, one of my clients is a content company that care deeply that they are being forced to give their milk away for free, thanks to the vagaries of the Internet.

Over the past decade there's been much excitement about the potential of stem-cell transplantation as effective treatment of various medical conditions. Unfortunately, most of it has been hype and fantasy. More recently, researchers have found ways to inject stem cells into the bloodstream and various other parts of the body in a way that does not produce uncontrolled growth or attempts by the body to reject those stem cells.

The popular narrative today is that there is a “crisis” of women in math and science — or, more accurately, an under-representation of women in these disciplines. So naturally I was drawn to the headline this morning that IBM has named Virginia Rometty the new chief executive of the computer technology company.   

Rometty joins the ranks of a host of other women serving in leadership positions in the computer/technology/Internet world, including Meg Whitman (formerly of eBay) at Hewlett-Packard; Carly Fiorina, formerly of HP; Ursula Burns at Xerox; and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook, to name a few.  

When I heard of Steve Jobs’s death, the thought came to my mind of John Lennon’s death; the circumstances were different but the times — Lennon died Dec. 8, 1980 — remarkably the same. And both found symbolism in the apple. Drudge had a picture of Steve Jobs from the beginning, dressed in a business suit, holding an apple. Actually, offering us an apple. The apple appeared as well in Virginia Postrel’s remembrance of Jobs in Bloomberg, illustrated by Leif Parson’s rendition of the iconic Magritte painting of the Englishman in bowler hat with an apple obscuring his face. But the apple is sky blue, like the company’s logo, and the sky gray, in mourning.

Will Einstein join Marx and Freud now as a god that failed? One of the “three visitors” who came to us at the turning, that is, at the end of the world and the beginning?

Einstein was Monkey God as the century opened to the new creation. His picture today hangs on the classroom walls everywhere where Jesus, Washington or Ganesh once did.

Even Franklin D. Roosevelt borrowed from his cosmic observations and made with them an atom bomb.

“My biggest mistake,” Einstein said later.

Hey, the good news is that Steven's taken the job held recently by Vivek Kundra, who's done a really good job of making Federal IT more effective and saved a lot of taxpayer dollars.

Steven comes from the FCC, where I saw firsthand that he's really good at the same, bringing with him a lot of real-life private industry experience.

There'll be a lot more news on this really soon, but the deal is that I wanted to let people know the good news: I bear witness that Steven's the real deal.

The pope does it. Obama does it. So last week I finally decided to open a personal Twitter account to “join the conversation,” as friends had urged. I signed up to follow some of them, and others in the foreign-policy community¸ and then waited for something to happen.

It soon did. It was a tweet on Friday that first alerted the world to the killings in Norway. It did not take long before thousands of #Norway and #Oslo tweets were voicing their thoughts and spreading the views of the experts from the mainstream media and the blogs across the twittersphere. From the Washington Post and New York Times to the BBC, the working theory was that there was a link to the Muslim extremists of al Qaeda. I retweeted to my 17 followers a piece by Max Fisher from The Atlantic on “Al Qaeda’s problem with Norway,” despite my better judgment and the caution of the local police, who would later announce that the suspect was a Norwegian.

As Washington, Wall Street and virtually every other major institution in this country remained engrossed this week in the ongoing debt-ceiling negotiations, another federal feat occurred that received very little fanfare even though it has broad implications for our country.

I’m referring to the landing of NASA’s final mission of the shuttle Atlantis following its last 13-day mission.

That’s right, folks, after yesterday, there will not be another human spaceflight for at least four to five years, according to industry experts.

Few women are unaware of the proverbial biological clock. As a result, girls often have their educational and professional “plan” in place at an early age to ensure they can enjoy both a career and a family. On the flip side, men, who have the ability to have children late in life, often don’t feel the same pressure. While young women are busy advancing their plans under the loud tick-tock reminder of their biological limitations, many men are enjoying a bromance, video games, the social scene, and slowly getting around to a career.

It seems this difference in family-planning pressures might help explain the increasingly cavernous maturity gap between the genders. If so, recent studies about male fertility could start to change that.

Say what you like about Whitey and Catherine, but they went in the right direction, to southern California. And in the end they made a handsome couple in that excellent and iconic courtroom drawing, their final portrait together; Whitey Bulger with that distinguished beard, like a South Boston white-trash Lawrence Ferlinghetti, his handsome mistress framed slightly behind and to his creative left side. The west is the best, and the best final destination for those of us who, like Whitey’s family and mine and Tip O’Neill’s and five generation of Kennedys, lived virtually on the same block since we arrived from Ireland these last 150 years.

Whitey’s epic journey might well be the last for the Southie Irish and all of Europe’s “huddled masses” who made the Atlantic crossing. It might even mark the end of Europe, as long-term economic forecasters have been suggesting; the final death cough of life as we learned it in Europe: 500 years, described by Jacques Barzun from “Dawn to Decadence,” with Whitey and Catherine at the very end sunning in Santa Monica.