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.
Washington Post
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]
Civil disobedience in the air
15 April 2015
A man landed a gyrocopter on the Capitol lawn
Some thoughts on why this sort of thing shouldn’t be prevented by computer software.
[Washington Post]
Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, from Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity by Rogers Wiens
12 May 2013
A Review
When does NASA take risks? How it’s still possible to improvise, and what it’s like to run a scientific instrument on Mars.
[Washington Post]
Found in translation
22 February 2011
Translation by the numbers
How statistical machine translation evolved to work as well as it does
[Washington Post]