Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans, plodding as we are, will astonish ourselves. We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we'll assemble small machines that will ent...
While my grandmother was crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was...
At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage--figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but...
As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially Days of our Lives. My grandparents belonged to a Caravan...
If my Dad was alive today, the thing I think he would be most happy about is that Lucy and I have a baby in the hopper. I think he would been annoyed that I hadn't gotten my Ph. D yet (thanks, Michigan!). Dad was so full of insights, of excitement ab...
My Dad had difficulty breathing his whole life, and the complications of Polio are what took him from us too soon. He would have been very upset that Polio still persists even though we have a vaccine. He would have been equally upset that back in In...
In late March 1996, soon after I had moved to Stanford for grad school, my Dad had difficultly breathing and was driven to the hospital. Two months later, he died. I was completely devastated. Many years later, after a startup, after falling in love,...
As a Ph. D. student, I actually had three projects I wanted to work on. Thank goodness my advisor said, why don't you work on the web for a while. He gave me some seriously good advice because the web was really growing with people and activity, even...
It was a futuristic way of solving our transportation problem. I still think a lot about transportation--you never loose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby. Many things that people labor hard to do now, like cooking, cleaning, and driving will req...
Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web , and just keep the links and... I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreami...
