Fortune Cookies

[Commentary] One of the many challenges of creating a National Broadband Plan is dinner: it's hard to get it when you're working late into the evening to meet Congress's Feb. 17, 2010 deadline to reboot broadband deployment and usage in the U.S. So maybe there was some kind of karmic reward in two fortune cookies that staff cracked open at the end of our team's break for Chinese one night. John Horrigan, a data guy we stole from the Pew Internet Project, pulled out a fortune that read "Statistics are no substitute for judgment." Steve Rosenberg, a former McKinsey analyst who is helping on modeling and mapping, opened one that said "No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking." Both fortunes—unusual topics in my many years of opening such cookies-bode well, I think, for the National Broadband Plan.