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I remember my first experience visiting the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland when I was a teenager. I had always been fascinated with sciences. So a playground of interactive exhibits with hands-on experiments was just my kind of thing. I particularly recall my first meeting a conversational chat-bot that they had installed which could output considerate responses to questions the user typed in. Dr. Know, as it was affectionately named, was an instantiation of the Eliza program from MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was an example of a Turing test, an idea put forward by Alan Turing , an early pioneer in computer programming. He theorized that computers would eventually be indistinguishable from humans once their logic structures matched those we form through socialization processes. The Turing test is a process of inquiry followed between a human and a robot that would be used to figure out if the robot was sentient or not. (Ironically, on the internet, se...

In 1978, BBC radio ran a satirical exposé about a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who were trying to get inside the brain of a human named Arthur Dent, who was a fugitive from the planet Earth. The radio show was so popular that it went on to become a book, a TV series, a movie and recently has been re-released on CD for future generations in its original audio format.  The story, called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was told from the perspective of Arthur, who had no idea the importance of his former home, Earth, which had been destroyed shortly after he escaped. Neither did Arthur have an understanding of the tremendous significance of his own brain. The pan-dimensional beings, which appeared to him as mice, were actually the administrators of a massive planet-sized computer. They regarded Arthur as just a circuit in the computer that they managed. The mice had been conducting experiments on humans from inside Skinner boxes in the laboratories of human p...

Over the past few decades, the concepts of quantum mechanics have been sprinkled into our common lingo and news headlines in a gradual crescendo. Concepts that were mere theories at the beginning of the last century are now demonstrable facts. As uneasily as we sit with their implications, we carry about their applied technologies daily in our pockets. These concepts have been fascinating for me to study. Though they may seem a bit esoteric to most people, they are becoming ever more personally relevant to our common experiences.  Some concepts that are astounding, but that are increasingly ordinary in our daily lives: We control the quantum jumps of electrons to emit photons of the exact spectrum we want to light our living rooms with. Vice-versa, we use photons of specific spectra to control where we want electrons to go and how we want them to behave. (Photovoltaic effects, common in our technology as the light-emitting diode, also used to detect perturbations caused by the pres...

Back when I first moved to Silicon Valley in 1998, I tried to understand how capital markets made the valley such a unique place for inventors and entrepreneurs.  Corporate stocks, real estate, international currency and commodities markets were concepts I was well familiar with from my time working at a financial news service in the nation's capital in the mid 1990's.  However, crowdfunding and angel investing were new concepts to me 20 years ago.  Crowdfunding platforms seemed to be more to the advantage of the funding recipient than the balanced two-sided exchanges of the commercial financial system.  I often wondered what motivated generosity-driven models that was different from reward-driven sponsorships. When trying to grasp the way angel investors think about entrepreneurship, my friend Willy, a serial entrepreneur and investor, said: “If you want to see something succeed, throw money at it!”  The idea behind the "angel" is that they are the riskiest...

(Update: Because this post is exceedingly long, I have decided to make it available as a printed book: Momentum of Openness  It will remain free to read here.) Insider story behind the cover image: Mozilla's mascot derived from the name of the Mosaic browser and the trademarked name of a large mythical beast from Japanese culture which would rise from the oceans to protect mankind against peril. You may see this mythical creature in Bugzilla, or featured in popular web browsers like Chrome when they are having issues addressing your requests. I like to call it "The Mozilla" because it serves as a protector of all that's good. When I first came to the headquarters of Mozilla, I had to get a picture being bitten by the Mozilla. You'll understand why we feel so affectionately about this symbolic icon as you read the story of my journey to web development below. Foreword Shepard Fairey's Dino Working at Mozilla has been a very educational experience over the past...