Freeman Dyson Answers Questions

The unfortunate part about an interview is if everyone asks questions about stuff he's not interested in or doesn't want to talk about, you can't really get much out of the interview. So you're stuck with anecdotes about post WWII immigration policy and apparently a philosophical aversion to the existence of 70s era DSP technology and/or neural network technology and "You're not an expert on plasma physics so I'd like to ask you about plasma physics".

I don't know if distributed interviews is a startup worthy app idea, because I don't have a solution to this problem. Maybe that makes it a good, hard problem to solve. There's gotta be a better idea for audience feedback than academic clickers and twitter hashtags.

When I used to /., I always asked interview victims to simply tell a cool story. Some of them totally sucked or were obvious filler PR plants, but some were pretty awesome stories.

The benefit of a real human interviewer like Leo Laporte's Triangulation videocast/podcast is the back and forth discussion drags more out of the victim than "I was never a RAF pilot" "I'm not a plasma physicist" and so forth.

Frankly the "hand dryer and vacuum cleaner" Qs getting a laugh is about the best you can get out of this interview. He strikes me as the cantankerous type who would Probably enjoy telling those people off to great hilarity, so they missed an opportunity there. Or maybe not.

did anyone ask him when he's improving the hand dryer?