I’ve spent the past seven (wow.) years officially training as an engineer. Technically, I’m shooting for a Doctorate of Philosophy in Engineering, so I think I’m allowed to muse on these things. During the course of literally dozens of classes, I’ve encountered the same concepts repeatedly (this is a good... [Read More]

The director of JPL, Charles Elachi, gave a great talk at Cornell today. I was impressed by his use of intuitively and emotionally resonant examples like pointing out how long it would take to drive to Mars to illustrate the distance from here to there. What really got me thinking... [Read More]

  The National Research Council inadvertently illustrated the bipolarity in how we talk about science and communicate ideas in general (especially on the internet.) The NRC solicited ideas for the future of human space flight in one of two ways: white papers and tweets.  That seems to be the no-win... [Read More]

After a talk with my ever-insightful PhD advisor, I need to amend my model of robust design.  I had conceived of robustness as a spectrum with hard-to-break on the end close to fragility and easy-to-fix on the end close to antifragility.  I think the picture is actually two-dimensional and more... [Read More]

The MIT Tech Review recently published a detailed, well-balanced look at the state of driverless cars. I’ve heard opinions on driverless cars that are extremely optimistic (‘we have all the technology ready to go – any day now!) and pessimistic (‘legal quagmires will keep them off the roads for a... [Read More]