WELCOME
Thanks for coming to visit my website. I write about science, technology, foreign affairs, and other subjects.
Follow me on Twitter: @kkakaesDrones and Aerial Observation
I edited and wrote part of a short book published by New America in July 2015 and freely available online, about how drones are being used in new ways around the world. It's meant to be useful to people who want to fly drones.The Pioneer Detectives
I published a short book with The Millions.
It's the story of the Pioneer Anomaly, a long-standing mystery. The book is short and fun—the length of a novella—but also, in the words of Amazon's reviewer, "powerful and sad". If you've got any curiosity about how NASA works behind the scenes or why scientists believe what they do, I think you'll enjoy the book.
It is available on Amazon as a Kindle Single and also on Apple's iBooks.Drone Wars
I wrote a chapter on the long history of drone technology going back to the early 20th century in this edited Cambridge University Press volume.
Artificial Intelligence Didn’t Deserve the Physics Nobel Prize
11 October 2024
Why the 2024 Physics Nobel shouldn’t have gone to computer science research, however impactful it has been.
[Better Mouse Trap]
The Year In Math 2023
24 December 2023
A retrospective of 2023’s mathematical discoveries.
[Quanta Magazine]
The Year in Math 2022
24 December 2022
A retrospective of 2022’s mathematical discoveries.
[Quanta Magazine]
A brief history of artificial intelligence
30 August 2021
In the summer of 1956, a group of researchers set out to try to reproduce human intelligence in a machine. More than sixty years later and despite enormous progress, that goal is still out of reach. Just how far, nobody knows.
An introduction to artificial intelligence for a new publication series put out by Aventine, a non-profit research institute that studies how rapid technological advancements and disruptive change will affect life in the decades to come.
[Aventine]
What Justin Trudeau got wrong about Quantum Computing
18 April 2016
A video of the Canadian Prime Minister giving an apparently impromptu riff on quantum computing had a few mistakes in it.
This is a critique not so much of his minor errors, but of the media storm which treated his lecture as a sign of genius.
[Washington Post]
Responding to the New York Times off-base math education editorial
10 December 2013
Math doesn’t have to be boring, but it does have to be math
The New York Times editorial board doesn’t understand the first thing about mathematics, and this is a big problem.
[Slate]
The end of the “La-Z-Boy era” of sequential programming
20 March 2013
What comes after Moore’s law?
The challenge of parallelism.
[Zocalo Public Square]
Can We Teach Computers What “Truth” Means?
26 February 2013
It’s harder than it sounds
How artificial intelligence can inform ideas about logic.
[Slate]
The book of primes
5 February 2013
A new largest prime number
And the significance of primes to mathematics.
[Slate]
CAPTCHA and the alternatives
31 January 2013
May it not rest in peace
Combatting spam and what it means to be human.
[Slate]
Learning Math From Software Is Like Learning Parenting
Skills From Second Life 29 June 2012
Skills From Second Life 29 June 2012
Math education technology does not promote real understanding.
A follow-up.
[Slate]
clips, Computer Science and Mathematics, Science, Science and Technology, Science Policy and Technological Culture, Technology
tags: Calculators, Conrad Wolfram, constructivism, Education, Evan Weinberg, Graphing Calculators, Math Education, Mathematica, Paul Karafiol, pedagogy, Promethean, Robert Talbert, Science Education, Stephen Wolfram, TIMSS
Why Johnny Can’t Add Without a Calculator
25 June 2012
Technology is doing to math education what industrial agriculture did to food: making it efficient, monotonous, and low-quality.
How and why graphing calculators, educational software, interactive whiteboards and the like undermine actual learning in elementary, middle and high schools.
[Slate]
clips, Computer Science and Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy and Space, Science, Science and Technology, Science Policy and Technological Culture, Technology
tags: Calculators, constructivism, Education, Graphing Calculators, HH Wu, Longfellow Middle School, Math Education, NCTM, pedagogy, Promethean, Science Education, Slate, Smart Board
Why Computers Still Can’t Translate Languages Automatically
11 May 2012
DARPA’s search for meaning
How researchers are trying to use semantic information in machine translation.
[Slate]
The Nucleus of the Digital Age
3 March 2012
A review of George Dyson’s “Turing’s Cathedral”
In pursuit of hydrogen bombs, a math genius and a brilliant tinkerer in Princeton developed the modern computer.
[Wall Street Journal]