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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.
New York Times
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 fallacy of constant numbers
9 March 2011
Apropos of the New York Times article about a lawsuit in Brooklyn over bicycle lanes, John Cassidy writes in support of the lawsuit, which claims that the city’s addition of bike lanes is “arbitrary and unfair”. Cassidy’s argument is that the bicycle lanes make it easier to bike, and harder to drive (and park). Well, yes. That’s precisely the point! He takes us on an idyll of youthful hungover bicycling, returning to his house shaking. Now, he says dismissively, “cyclists want it easy.” Again, is it evidence of some slothful decline of the west that bicyclists lobby to make cycling easier? Continue reading