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.
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]
Found in translation
22 February 2011
Translation by the numbers
How statistical machine translation evolved to work as well as it does
[Washington Post]
The trouble with software
25 November 2004
Managing complexity
Most software projects fail to meet their goals. Can this be fixed by giving developers better tools?
Anatomy of a search engine
16 September 2004
How Google works
A brief history of the world’s most revolutionary search engine. Plus, an interview with me about that brief history.
Profile: Dennis Ritchie, Unix pioneer
10 June 2004
Unix’s founding fathers
A profile of Dennis Ritchie and his colleaugues who first developed C, the programming language, and Unix.
Novel computational techniques
1 April 2004
Bit by bit
Developments in quantum computing and chaotic computing
The chase for artificial intelligence
9 October 2003
Agents of creation
A report from the first International Workshop on Complex Agent-Based Dynamic Networks, in Oxford, England; the latest in computer modelling of complex systems.
Talking about ourselves
2 October 2003
This headline is (half) false
A new way to analyse self-referential and contradictory statements.
If and only if
3 April 2003
Dream code
Programming languages for quantum computers are now being written
No more secrets
27 March 2003
Primed to go
Mathematicians are discussing ways to make code-breaking easier.
Complexity
31 October 2002
NP or not NP?
Tetris, a popular computer game, turns out to be hard for a reason.
Real-world Topology
3 October 2002
What does the Internet look like?
It is less random than people thought.