I'm currently reading Gordon MacKenzie's delightful book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball. Chapter 19 is the shortest, most insightful chapter I have read in some time. I will repeat it in its entirety for your reading pleasure: Orville Wright did not have a pilot's license.
To Unlearn, Try Boarding an Airplane Differently
November 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment
We have all been there at some time—standing in line at the airport waiting to board a plane and thinking to ourselves that “there has to be a better way.” Well, apparently, there is now. According to this informative articlea researcher at Fermilab has figured out the optimal way to board an airplane. His findings [...]
An Unlearning Strategy: Training Your Mind to See What Isn’t There
September 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Unlearn By Dispelling Old and New Ignorance
July 22, 2009 By Leave a Comment
In his famous speech at Rice University where he declared that it was America’s intention to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, President Kennedy said “the greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds,” adding that “the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished [...]
The Air Force Needs to Unlearn
July 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment
The Wall Street Journal had an interesting review of the book, Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel, a while back. It is a history of the world’s first machine gun. Interestingly, although the gun was patented during the Civil War and Mr. Gatling urged the Union Army to adopt it—arguing that it would "save lives, wounds and [...]
Get Prepared to Unlearn at Warp Speed
June 10, 2008 By Leave a Comment
IBM recently announced that it has developed a new supercomputer capable of performing 1,000 trillion calculations per second. It is a little hard to wrap your brain around such mind-boggling numbers, but last year I wrote an article discussing an IBM supercomputer that was capable of performing 70 trillion calculations per second. In the piece, [...]
The Unlearning Vortex
June 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Marcel Proust once said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” I was reminded to this quote yesterday after reading John Markoff’s insightful article on Pax Scientific — a company that has applied biomimicry to create new industrial designs for everything from aerospace designs to parts [...]
