Mesofacts, facts that change slowly over times, so slow that to most they seem unchangeable.  This is the subject of Samuel Arbesman piece, Warning: Your reality is out of date.

The ideas and examples in this piece are thought provoking and carry some serious implications for how we view world event and the natural world in general.

Climate change is a mesofact, man made or not, it does not happen over night.  For a culture that has grow accustomed to instant gratification, consequences delivered decades later can present a real challenge.

Arbesman’s examples on how our understanding of dinosaurs lived and were like has changed, feathered dinosaurs instead of scaled ones, within a generation or two have a low impact on our society.  It will be interesting to see if he will address more high impact examples on his blog: mesofacts.org

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Column by Jean-Francois Dupuis

Back in November of 2005, Penn was asked to contribute to National Public Radio’s series, This I Believe.  Below is his piece on God and life.  Five years later I still find this inspiring and truthful to the spirit of what it means to be a human.

I came across this bit of information via the video below. It is a conversation with Garry Wills on his new book, Bomb Power.

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Image via CrunchBase

Venture Beat discusses how Google scrambles to fix some of the privacy concernes raised by gmailers regarding the deployment of Buzz.

To be honest, Facebook’s approach has been one of get the product out there and then tweak it.  And while traditionally this has been frowned upon, for them it works.

This might actually be a shift in how we practice business and develop and deploy products.  You can actually learn more, faster by having folks work with it and tear it apart than by having your internal brain trust figure everything out before the release and then having a flopped product cause the brain trust got things wrong.

One point of caution might be that this approach might only work with behemoth brands like Facebook or Google, though. Regardless, the approach is agressive and clever in my opinion.

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