What common elements made science, markets, democracy and justice so successful? Here are some net-accessible articles, interviews, and essays examining such questions.

SETTLING DISPUTES: For a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see the lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition for Society's Benefit."

"Our neo-western civilization throngs with "human T Cells" -- educated, skeptical, independent-minded and ego-driven to pounce on some terrible mistake or nefarious scheme."

ONE GENIUS OF THE 20TH CENTURY: Read my year 2000 essay nominating my own choice for "Person of the Twentieth Century," along with follow-up discussion that took place on Slashdot.

"Only a handful of the top twenty made a decisively positive difference to world history, instigating profound and universally recognized changes for the better. People like Dr. King, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and Henry Ford certainly deserve mention. But in my opinion, none of the flamboyant top candidates altered the course of human civilization as much as one quiet man who was never an entertainer, religious figure, or chief of state."

A NEW VENTURE IN COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE: Here's a hint at something to come... I've begun a new venture in web/internet software!

Yes, the e-bubble finally burst. All right, many high-riding venture capitalists are now looking for day jobs. So what am I doing filing for a software patent?

Well, countercyclical theory suggests that now's the time to create the fundamentals for the next wave of internet excitement, when people start to realize that it's a genuine part of life in a new century -- not a fad, but a zone of public life as important as phones became in the Twentieth.

What's it all about? A new and vastly better approach to online real-time text/voice/video communications... a realm that nowadays is all-too-often dismissed with the derisive term "chat" -- partly because the clunky teletype-based interface convention is almost unchanged from when I first used a version at Caltech, in 1970!

The only substantial reform that's been attempted so far has been to set up silly cartoon "avatars" that add nothing to functionality or efficiency of human-to-human communications. It occurred to me that current systems don't take any advantage of the many techniques that people naturally use in complex conversational spaces, like cocktail parties or business meetings. Take for example the easy way we compress, sift, correlate and remember things that other people say-- skills we've had ever since the Holocene Era began, tens of thousands of years ago. Skills that haven't yet been translated to the Internet.

So I came up with a new approach -- and a tiny startup company to implement it. If my partners and I are right, many people will want to host using this new approach. A demo will be available online soon!

Of course, software is NOT my area of professional expertise! And yes, the timing may be bad, with the e-bubble bust so fresh in memory. Still, I was once an engineer. And this concept appears to be so much better than the present interface. But I suppose the market will be the final judge of that!

See also "The Future" and "An Opinionated World."