Like the Elizabethan Merchants of Light, my work is to track down, contexualize and share unusual cultural, scientific, technological wares (even occasional genius) & tools from many varied worlds, for your pleasure and profitable use.

I speak, research, tinker, teach on evolving systems.
Learn more, by heading to 'Who?'

intelligent life
Let's build a *#!!% Starship already!

Let’s build a *#!!% Starship already!

Cranking the limits is The 100 Year Starship, a jointly funded project of DARPA (the good folks who birthed the Internet) and NASA. It's a call to our collective ingenuity and utterly bonkers audacity: interstellar flight!
Go Follow Yourself

Go Follow Yourself

It’s been going on quietly for years; the brains and bodies of nerds and athletes have been coupled to all manner of sensors and data-netting gizmos (voluntarily and without medical intervention) from heart-rate monitors, biofeedback fingerware, sleep trackers, wearable cameras, oximeters, accelerometers, blood-pressure cuffs, GPS to old-fashioned stopwatches employed to track and map the data...
When thinking gets too expensive

When thinking gets too expensive

What luck for rulers, that men do not think. – Adolph Hitler The Internet is a copy machine.  At a fundamental distribution level, but also at the human content level. Copying what we see and like, or realise gets results, is one of the keys to how humans have been such a successful species. What...
Astronomy quick.fixes for starry.eyed wannabes

Astronomy quick.fixes for starry.eyed wannabes

One of the delights of living in the Southern Hemisphere has to be its dense, dazzling night sky. Meandering to open spaces where the urban light veil falls away, yields a blaze of stars, the Milky Way (the Galactic Centre and magellanic clouds, a southern sky speciality), even man.made space objects twinkling back at us....
new social currency ATM : the Maverick mojo is back

new social currency ATM : the Maverick mojo is back

It’s hard to quantify the small dizzy delight we find in discovering something out in the world that simply makes us happy, no explanation needed. Julie Andrews floods the mental stereo like peach-sugar (what, you have no idea what I mean? see the video at the end to absorb the culture young weedhopper).. Maverick magazine...