In the airport

I'm in the airport waiting for the inflatable slide to be replaced on my plane to Chicago -- watching the failure of the bailout bill and thinking of the old saying, 'may you live in interesting times'. Bad mortgage lending practices have created a real monster, but personally I was not eager to see the feds hand the keys to the US treasury over ... (you may disagree!).

These things will work themselves out over however long it takes -- seeing Wamu go down, AIG and the rest is shocking, but the one thing that I do know is that there's a difference between markets, which exist as 'the madness of crowds', (see tulip mania and all the rest) and technology, that really does grow exponentially, and rushes ever onward because it truly is a force of nature.

It seems that something is worth what you can get someone to pay you for it, but change and progress are fundamental and ongoing.

Tell the biotech scientist to stop decoding genomes because there's bad mortgage debt -- it doesn't compute. And at MVIS, we'll keep innovating and driving our platform forward because that's what we're here to do -- change the way people visualize information.

So, in the face of dire warnings of great depressions and everything else, you just have to stick to your knitting. Science and technology are part of the fabric of life, just like banks -- but there is comfort (for me anyway) to know that the wheel doesn't stop, and in reality the ever-more intimate connection of people and technology can't stop.

Should be interesting to be at WiMAX World and AUSA over the next few days -- all these guys are going to show off awesome technology, and it'll be clear as day that in the long run, we are going to see incredible technologically driven change in our lifetimes.

'May you live in interesting times', indeed!

Best wishes,
Ben