Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
We don't make the investments we need to make, the sector fails to innovate, and then we conclude that it can't innovate.
In the months after George W. Bush's reelection, a lot of liberals and environmentalists were ready to take a hard look at their political agenda, the Democratic Party, and the interest groups they supported.
Skepticism about the potential to achieve the kinds of breakthroughs we need has been a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The levels of technology investment in the energy sciences pales compared to the kinds of investment we make in the computer and bio-sciences.
After a brief couple of years in the late '70s, public funding for clean energy technologies dried up and has been on the decline ever since.
It is worth noting that virtually every alternative energy source we have - solar, wind, nuclear, and battery and fuel cell technologies for storage - resulted from public innovation and R&D, not private. The problem is that we haven't done enough of it, and we have done it inconsistently.
I'm not going to throw up or over-exercise myself into oblivion to look like a model. People tell me, 'You'd work all the time if you just lost twenty pounds. ' What am I going to do, cut off my head?!
When I was a kid looking at pictures of the Sphynx, and the Pyramids, and different tribes in Africa, all of that stuck with me, and I always wanted to see those things and meet those people.
If they left you, you didn't need them. If they walked away, they weren't part of your DESTINY.
Dad always said that he had enough trouble sorting the fiction out of so-called facts, without reading fiction. He always said that science was already too muddled without trying to make it jibe with religion. He said those things, but he also said that science itself could be a religion, that a broad mind was always in danger of becoming narrow.