An earlier, more visionary NASA, thank goodness, sent probes into deep space. Some of them continue to ping us from far beyond the domestic reaches of the Solar System. But even they have not penetrated as far from Washington as I did last month. I made it all the way to the West Coast.

I have yet to meet one American who is opposed to innovation. Which does not mean that we all know what it means, or what is required to get it to happen. Michael Bloomberg, who knows a thing or two about business, is energizing New York City to get a major university to center a cluster of efforts and turn NYC into the new Silicon Valley (kid you not) - recently critiqued, err, savagely, by innovation guru Vivek Wadhwa in the Washington Post and elsewhere (he argues that clusters are really great for pols).

Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

As the Arab spring continues to unravel into an Arab summer, the most important lesson is that hardly anyone knew it was coming. Much like the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Wall Street could it be that as much as conventional wisdom may be conventional it is not always reliably wise?

Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

"Depend upon it, sir," quoth the inimitable dictionographer and wit Samuel Johnson, "when a man is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies
Washington, DC

Pretty much all of hip and would-be hip America has been lolling, partying, festooning, and tweeting in an alternate universe these past days. Woodstock for the geeks? Neverland of the digerati? Or (ouch) a retreat into a new Century 21 Fundamentalism, a bolt-hole from the realtime world into a might-have-been America?

Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies
Washington, DC

These past weeks, C-PET's Network on Innovation has been hosting conversations at the fateful meeting-point of past and future - and the witching word of Century 21. The I-word. The word that, at the end of the day, will open or close America's future.

Meantime, Washington has been both enthusing about it - and seeking perversely to slash federal R and D spending.

Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

When teens say TMI it means they don’t want embarrassing details. But Eric Schmidt, Mr. Google, has the ultimate TMI facts: until 2003, he states with customary Delphic authority, the world had cre¬ated 5 exabytes of data. By 2010, we do it every two days.