Chekhov put it best. He said every happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet, with a hammer, to remind him that not everyone is happy.

The Stuff of Fiction

Having conquered the world made of bits, you need to reform the world made of atoms. Not the simulated image on the screen, but corporeal, physical reality. Not meshes and splines, but big hefty skull-crackingly solid things that you can pick up and throw. That's the world that needs conquering. Because that world can't manage on its own. It is not sustainable, it has no future, and it needs one.

It is going to get one from you.

Now let me briefly tell you how I think this process will play out.

Bruce Sterling SIGGRAPH 2004 speech

The technical, ethical and emotional dialogue over stem cell research can be confusing and even contradictory at times. Yet the science is racing forward. Learning more about all kinds of stem cell research will help everyone make better choices.

Stem Cells, Explained and Explored

"Shaping Things is about created objects and the environment, which is to say, it's about everything," writes Bruce Sterling in this addition to the Mediawork Pamphlet series. He adds, "Seen from sufficient distance, this is a small topic."

Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object -- we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable -- that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won't be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences.

The vision of Shaping Things is given material form by the intricate design of Lorraine Wild. Shaping Things is for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and financiers -- and anyone who wants to understand and be part of the process of technosocial transformation.

Shaping Things, by Bruce Sterling

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In the ongoing battle of the nerds between Caltech and MIT, the latest volley has been fired from a 130-year-old cannon.

Actually, the latest volley is a cannon.

Massachusetts pranksters, posing as professional movers, stole the beloved Fleming Cannon — traditionally fired at each year's commencement — from the Pasadena campus last week.

MIT Pranksters Nab Caltech Cannon

I've covered murders, grisly accidents, airplanes falling out of the sky and, occasionally, dirty politics.

But in nearly two decades of journalism, nothing has made my insides churn like seeing what my 13-year-old daughter and her friends are up to on MySpace.com.

Testing the Bounds of MySpace

More than one critic has offered "Cache" as a nifty companion piece to Steven Spielberg's "Munich." The way both films consider personal responsibility makes that true enough. But the recent opus that came to mind was David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence," a movie also about a man, his family, and the vagaries in his past. Cronenberg turned a commentary on the proverbial sins of the father into an action movie. With his cheesy-satirical smokescreens, however, Cronenberg wanted us to laugh with him. Haneke is determined to haunt us. Maybe Georges's ghosts are ours, too.

Cache (Hidden) Movie Review

It is, as I have said, a small movie, and there will be those who'll think it's little ado about even less. Others will find in it a reminder that everything can change even when nothing seems to be happening. "Duck Season" hits every one of its modest marks and then some. It's the kind of movie to send you out looking at strangers on the street with newfound appreciation and something close to love.

Duck Season (Temporada de patos) Movie Review

THE 20 WARNING SIGNS YOU ARE IN DANGER OF BECOMING A BUREAUCRAT

10. You are too busy to experiment.
14. You avoid making decisions because it might get you noticed.
16. You find yourself looking forward to meetings.

Recognizing warning signs that you're becoming a bureaucrat