Roger Bourke White Jr.

Contact information

Summary

• Published author: three technical how-to books, three business insight books, five science fiction books, technical magazine columnist, blogger
• MIT graduate
• Web publishing since 1997
• Extensive knowledge of history, science, technology, business, and how these interact
• Advanced Toastmaster (public speaking award)
• Radio talk show guest

What's distinctive about Roger's outlook?

Roger's view of the world is distinct. Roger is a careful observer, and what he watches for is how science and technology change our world.

For example:

Q: How did Columbus finding America change our world?

A: The answer is that Europeans ultimately got cigarettes, french fries and pizzas, and South Americans got Spanish and Portugese as their native tongues.

Q: And why didn't Americans learn Norse instead of Spanish?

A: Because the Vikings didn't have the ship technology or social unrest to follow up their discovery with millions of immigrants.

This is how Roger views the world and talks about it.

The result: Roger's viewpoints are very fun, but very solidly based in contemporary science. They are fresh and valuable!

What is available now

Roger has his opinions posted on his White World web site. They are broken into sections. Here are the more interesting ones:

• Nonfiction Essays -- Science essays about wide ranging topics. These range from Why Humans Like Soft Drinks to How Much Hotter is Venus than Earth? Roger is an evolutionist who thinks a lot about the role of religion in human society, so many of the topics here have an anthropological bent.
• Editorials -- Roger keeps up on current events. When he sees something wacky happening, he tries to explain why it is wacky, and why it is happening anyway.
• Cyreenik Says -- Closely related to the Editorial section, Cyreenik says deals with a specific set of wackiness -- that caused by Panic and Blunder, a Roger Theory explained in this section.
• Technofiction -- Roger's version of science fiction. Roger loves story telling, but when he tells a story, he loves it best when it is internally consistent and closely matches our real world. He feels that science fiction should explore what differences technology makes to how we live our lives.

If you would like to hear what Roger has to say, please contact him.

Other Fun Facts about Roger

• nephew of Margaret Bourke-White, photographer for Life magazine, and an accomplished photographer himself
• helped engineer the Space Shuttle
• climbed 14,000 foot peaks in the Colorado Rockies, and bicycled from Boston to Minnesota
• has a commercial pilot's licence with an IFR rating
• one of the first one hundred people to play Dungeons and Dragons

History

Roger is a careful observer of the human condition, technology and history, and this is what he writes and talks about.

He paid his dues, but he paid them in interesting ways.

• He never drove big rigs, but he drove the creation of the PC-LAN industry by working for Novell as it created that industry.
• He was never a waiter, but he served people as a computer store owner.
• He never "did time", but he did talk personally to J. Edgar Hoover.

Roger's current interest is exploring why people think the way they do. This interest lead him to develop his Panic and Blunder Thinking model, which can explain when a person, or a community, is likely to make a big, expensive mistake -- a blunder.

Roger's model is based on long thinking about how evolution has molded human thinking. Roger's basic premise is that human beings are a very good fit for living on earth. But, the lifestyle that humans are best adapted to living in is being in a Stone Age village, not a modern civilized city with all its conveniences.

So, how does this affect our thinking?

This is the question that Roger works hard at answering.

Here is a select list of Roger's publications.

Here is more information on Roger's formal education, professional experience, and certifications.

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