If national safety – the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes – depends on the execution of explicit plans, on soldierly obedience, and on showy security drills, then a decentralized security scheme is useless. Gary Wolf Read Quote
Being a 911 operator means balancing seemingly contradictory skills. On one hand, operators have to be fanatically precise and well-organized. On the other, they must be able to establish rapport with panicky callers. Gary Wolf Read Quote
During a large disaster, like Hurricane Katrina, warnings get hopelessly jumbled. The truth is that, for warnings to work, it’s not enough for them to be delivered. They must also overcome that human tendency to pause; they must trigger a series of effective actions, mobilizing the informal networks that we depend on in a crisis. Gary Wolf Read Quote
Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web. On the other hand, we still want them to be books. Gary Wolf Read Quote
The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC. Gary Wolf Read Quote
Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we’ve learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we’ll get a cure by fixing the gene. Gary Wolf Read Quote
The history of using mice to stand in for humans in medical experiments is replete with failures. Gary Wolf Read Quote
Sometimes entire categories of craigslist are rendered nearly unusable by spam. Con artists prowl the listings, paying sellers with fake cashier’s checks and luring buyers to share their credit card numbers. Gary Wolf Read Quote
Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free. Gary Wolf Read Quote
