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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.
The Year in Math
24 December 2022
A retrospective of 2022’s mathematical discoveries.
[Quanta Magazine]
How Elon Musk sped up the future
19 July 2022
An interview with Lori Garver, former deputy administrator of NASA.
“Time and time again, things that came up that typically would take an organization weeks or months to work through that SpaceX could do in hours or days,” she said.
[POLITICO]
clips, Science and Technology
tags: POLITICO
Elon Musk’s Biggest Worry
26 April 2022
‘Don’t Leave the Space Open’ — How the West Can Defeat Putin
26 March 2022
An interview with Molly McKew, a former adviser to the Georgian government.
She lays out an argument for aggressively combatting Russian disinformation without compromising free speech.
[POLITICO]
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]
Room-temperature superconductivity has been achieved for the first time
15 October 2020
It was in a tiny sample under extremely high pressure, so don’t start dismantling the world’s energy infrastructure quite yet.
Room-temperature superconductors—materials that conduct electricity with zero resistance without needing special cooling—are the sort of technological miracle that would upend daily life. This is a short news story about the first announcement of their fabrication.
[MIT Technology Review]
The limits of Chinese Military Power
24 October 2019
The US military is without peer in its ability to project power around the world, and that’s not about to change.
The United States spends more money on the military than any other nation on Earth—far more. This enormous budget— $649 billion—pays for the only global fighting force in the history of the world. But in the last 30 years, China has gone from spending about $20 billion each year on its military to spending about $250 billion each year.
[MIT Technology Review]
NASA announces plans to send a drone to explore Titan for signs of life
27 June 2019
Get ready for Dragonfly’s autonomous flight on Saturn’s largest moon.
Is there now, or has there ever been, life on Titan? Dragonfly will carry a suite of scientific instruments meant to address this question.
[MIT Technology Review]
What Neil Armstrong got wrong
26 June 2019
Space technology has changed the world—but not in the way the dreamers of the 1960s imagined it would
Even though humanity hasn’t returned to the moon since 1972, there has been slow and steady progress in human spaceflight, remarkable robotic exploration of the solar system, and—perhaps most important—a profound reordering of life on Earth by satellites orbiting it.
[MIT Technology Review]
The write stuff: ten of the best astronaut memoirs
26 June 2019
Very short excerpts from books about space by people who have been there
At the time of writing, 558 people have orbited the Earth. Approximately 10% of them have written books about the experience.
[MIT Technology Review]
A European mission will intercept an unknown comet for the first time
20 June 2019
The “Comet Interceptor” will launch in 2028 and loiter a million miles away until an interesting and accessible comet is found.
Examining comets from the outer reaches of the solar system could help figure out how much of the water on Earth originated from comets.
[MIT Technology Review]
clips, Science, Technology
tags: Comet, ESA, MIT Technology Review, space
Scientists didn’t just “reverse time” with a quantum computer
14 March 2019
Amazing headlines about time machines are a long way off the mark.
Debunking some bunk science journalism.
[MIT Technology Review]
Zuckerberg’s new privacy essay shows why Facebook needs to be broken up
7 March 2019
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand what privacy means—and he can’t be trusted to define it for the rest of us.
Why his claims to be re-orienting Facebook towards the protection of privacy don’t add up.
[MIT Technology Review]
It’s only a matter of time before a drone takes down a passenger plane
21 December 2018
And no, technology can’t fix the problem.
Why swarms of drones pose a threat to commercial air traffic.
[MIT Technology Review]
Robots at the Front
26 June 2018
“Army of None” Review
Autonomous weapons are becoming a common feature of modern war, raising practical and philosophical issues that remain to be solved. This book doesn’t do much to help solve them.
[Wall Street Journal]
The Future of the International Space Station
12 June 2018
NASA’s leader wants to privatize it. That’s a remarkably terrible idea.
There’s a case for killing the space station. There’s no case for turning over the keys to a private company.
[Vox]
In order to better serve you
24 May 2018
Updates to My Privacy Policy
In advance of the new General Data Protection Regulation.
[Slate]
The Saudi prince who took a joyride on the space shuttle
and other space misadventures 30 March 2017
and other space misadventures 30 March 2017
International Collaborations in Space Always
Reflect Politics on Earth
A brief history of the countries that send people to space, and why.
[Slate]
clips, Physics, Astronomy and Space, Science, Science and Technology, Science Policy and Technological Culture, Technology
tags: Gagarin, Interkosmos, International Space Station, ISS, NASA, Rodrigo Neri-Vela, Slate, Soyuz, Space Shuttle, Spacelab, SpaceX, Sputnik, Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, USSR, Virgin Galactic
Bad Math Props Up Border Wall
18 October 2016
Estimating the cost (in dollars) of Donald Trump’s proposed border wall
It would be many times more expensive than he claims.
[MIT Technology Review]
clips, Mexico, Technology
tags: Border Wall, Donald Trump, mexico, Tech Review