Before you even undertake the work to create a thing, there’s some assessment of whether it’s possible and how valuable it will be.1 (For some extremely nebulous definition of value — I’ll talk about that later). Some ideas take a large chunk of resources to assess (‘fat’ ideas).2 In other... [Read More]

I’ll be blunt: I’m worried that because of how easy and humble grants are, enabling research through grants will crowd out enabling research through more definite ways. [Read More]

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]