After my mother died, I learned that she'd had a scholarship to the University of Nebraska, but - in kind of a tradition that females don't do things like that - her father prevented her from going. She always said that she wasn't allowed to go to college, but until she died, I never knew that she'd had this scholarship.

A lot of missions for NASA or experiments on accelerators happen through a whole process of scientific retreats, long-range planning, forming collaborations to do studies - all this kind of stuff. It's very democratic.

It seems kind of nutty to send up something new when there's something already there that can do the job.

When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.

Despite my emphasis on technology, I do not view laws as inherently evil. My goals are political ones, even if my techniques are not. The only way to fundamentally succeed is by changing existing laws. If I rejected all help from the political arena I would inevitably fail.

Technology and the Internet are not just changing politics here in the U.S. It's also happening abroad. In the Philippines, where I grew up, grassroots organizers used text messaging to help overthrow a president.

Technology has to be invented or adopted.

The Internet seems to have killed American fashion in the sense that everybody has good style, but they also look vaguely the same.