McGee's Musings - "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no...

One of my professors, Warren McFarlan, made an observation about the choice of questions that has stuck with me. He argued that you could either ask questions that would get you published or you could ask questions that mattered.
He might have been a bit more diplomatic in his phrasing but that was the essence. Were you going to be driven by safety or by curiosity?...

I just gobbled up Charles Stross’s The Labyrinth Index, which is the 9th book in his Laundry Files series. The series is the hybrid that might result if you threw Ian Fleming’s, Robert Heinlein’s, and H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction into a blender. I love it...

The place where technology, organizations, and people come together has been a continuing focus of my work. That interest was birthed in stories of the wonders and dangers of fantastic new inventions. Like a lot of future scientists and engineers I was...

The short version of the story I tell about why I decided to leave work to get a Ph.D. is that I needed to figure out why those stupid users weren’t taking advantage of the clever systems I was designing. That turns out to be a midpoint in a longer thread...