Steve Smith

Commented on Trapped in the wrong trouser-leg of time
A couple of issues for Dan H: "Taxation" and "Government spending" and "national income" are slippery concepts, connected by a lot of poorly-understood feedback loops. Anything that assumes simple linear relationships is, quite simply, wrong. And check out how much...
Commented on Paging Agent 007
Nobody is suggesting getting rid of all petroleum products. If all we use it for is plastics, etc, we'll use a (relatively) tiny amount; a few wells should provide plenty. Interestingly, the biggest problem I see would be asphalt. Right...
Commented on Paging Agent 007
There's also the little problem of the Van Allen radiation belts. Electronics don't like radiation and people like it even less. The way we deal with it now is to get through them as quickly as possible. And then there's...

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)