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.
Robot helicopters coming to a town near you | NY Times
27 August 2010
In which a robot helicopter wanders around Washington DC. The tough question is what happens when these things become deliberately autonomous.
Navy Drone Wanders Into Restricted Airspace Around Washington – NYTimes.com.
Thank god for the colon dept
16 August 2010
Not that this is a good thing, but would’ve been much worse news with different punctuation….
Reykjavik’s mayor is the Best mayor
16 August 2010
“The odds of you being in Reykjavik are not great,” says its new mayor. Continue reading
weblog
tags: Best party, Iceland, Rejkjavik
The remains of the day | NY Times
14 August 2010
This is very sad, but also very interesting. There’s something touching about the earnestness of the government’s reaction. And a 111-year old mummy, upstairs for the sake of fraud, is too strange for words.
Japan, Checking On Its Oldest, Finds Many Gone – NYTimes.com
Amazing photographs | NY Times
14 August 2010
Sobering & unsentimental..
A Global Graveyard for Dead Computers in Ghana – Slide Show – NYTimes.com.
Fog of war: What are we missing? USATODAY.com
13 August 2010
Kind of interesting musings on how journalists assimilate information. Michaels suggests we “widen our aperture”, which would of course lead to narrower depth of field, rather than wider. He’s maybe optimistic in supposing that journalism can do much to anticipate events, rather than capture them in retrospect. But his central point that 24/7 news doesn’t necessarily bring timeliness is a good observation…
Phosphorescent “I Wish I Was in Heaven Sittin’ Down” live at Paste
11 August 2010
Saw him sing this on Monday, and thought it was very good. Hope you like it also…
Re: Design
10 August 2010
Yes, that’s right, this site has at long last been updated. Expect a steady stream of thoughts, and a less steady stream of articles. Thanks for coming to visit!
Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty | Mother Jones
4 August 2010
On the difficulties of being sane in the Republican Party:
(Mother Jones)
Obama’s Legacy: Afghanistan | The New York Review of Books
30 July 2010
It’s often plain old self-aggrandizing when people come clean about what they told the president in an off-the-record meeting, but Garry Wills does a pretty good job of it here.
Can’t remember what this story was about | NY Times
26 July 2010
Services like Date Check, Zittrain said, could soon become even more
sophisticated, rating a person’s social desirability based on minute
social measurements — like how often he or she was approached or avoided
by others at parties (a ranking that would be easy to calibrate under
existing technology using cellphones a…nd Bluetooth).”
The Web Means the End of Forgetting
Okay so the question of forgetting is of course on many people’s minds, including mine, but this story doesn’t do much more than ponder it, raising both unrealizable techno-fixes and unrealizable techno-fears, like the above. Really? Easy to use bluetooth and cell phones to figure out what people are doing at parties? Gimme a break.
On “on the Washington Post’s Top Secret America”
23 July 2010
This guy makes some insightful and sympathetic critiques of the post series…
On the Washington Post’s ‘Top Secret America’
Now that it’s all out there, here are a few thoughts on the Washington Post’s Top Secret America project. Having done newspaper projects myself, I’m a little reluctant to critique, because I know how much work goes into them; the reporting (especially in this case, where the much of the subject […]
Looking for ET
25 February 2010
Signs of life
As the search for alien life turns 50, its practitioners find new methods