I am worried about climate change, but I started out as a skeptic. Today I am like the reformed smoker, evangelizing about the need to control methane in particular and CO2 as well. My journey began when I noticed that the climate record showed that we are due for another…

Scientists have updated the definition of “life” many times, and with increasing frequency. Philosophers have debated what “life” is for millennia — it is one of the cornerstone topics in philosophy. I claim that those debates are destined to lead nowhere, because there is no such thing as “life”. But…

Hundreds of passwords. Misogynistic and other toxic trolls poisoning online discussions. A few dominant e-commerce providers and a decimated small retail landscape. We celebrate the Web — England even knighted its creator, a lowly non-physicist programmer at CERN. Yet the “Web” that he created was a primitive and haphazard application…

Agile has changed. In the words of Jeff Patton, “When people say Agile today, they mean something different today than they did in 2001…it’s come to mean something else.” Unfortunately, some members of the Agile community are stuck in the past. …

Why do we in the West celebrate democracy? The reason is that democracy is how we unshackled ourselves from kings and lords who subjugated us, stole from us, raped us, and squeezed us into the subsistence margins while they lived with excess and privilege. Indeed, anything is better than that…

Have you noticed that Google search results have been getting worse and worse? That now they seem to be mostly product ads? …

Most Agile transformations struggle. According to an Allied Market Research study, “63% of respondents stated the failure of agile implementation in their organizations.” This is despite the fact that Agile is increasingly seen as a strategic enabler. …

In the September 2018 issue of Nature, two physicists, Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner, describe a thought experiment in which two different “observers” — say two people — each perform an experiment, independently — but on the same thing, which is a system that is in a “quantum state”. A…

It is true that many people expend too much energy on story estimation. Your are right - they don't measure value. They do have a use: to enable a PO to trade off projected effort versus value, and historical velocity informs one in projecting what might get done by a…