For Inktober I did a drawing each day illustrating something that is useful/interesting to know more about. The topics were (Click name to jump to the image): Risk vs Uncertainty Four Research Quadrants Nebulosity Vikings Spaceship Battle over Jupiter Some Laws Good Maps A dragon X-Punk Cooperation and Hierarchies Competition... [Read More]

Note: this is the expanded prose form of a talk I did recently on bottlenecks in telerobotics. [Read More]

Most predictions suck. When airplanes were sold to the US Army in 1909 the common idea of the time was “With the perfect development of the airplane, wars will be only an incident of past ages.”1 Most predictions look like this. To be fair to the people who predicted this... [Read More]

When an elder preeminent scientist says that something is impossible, he’s probably wrong. When a elder preeminent scientist says something might be possible, he’s probably right. [Read More]

Note to the reader: I wrote these notes mostly because I found the paper confusing the first two times I read it and I think it’s important to have a precise handle on different arguments around the state of technology and research. [Read More]