The opening statement of this NPR blog really struck a chord with me. The rest of the article does a nice job explaining the exciting science behind the recent voyager news, but doesn’t pursue the opening idea as far as I wanted. “Science at its most fundamental level is not... [Read More]

Some thoughts about the appearance of progress (especially in technology) sometimes as discrete quantized jumps and sometimes as continuous trends. Perhaps the difference between discrete and continuous technology depends on how much of the tinkering occurs ‘in house’ or ‘in the lab’ vs. in the public eye. Computer and software... [Read More]

I saw a great talk today from Nisar Ahmed as part of the weekly MAE colloquium.  He gave an overview of his research that focuses on fusing information from humans and robots. It’s extremely cool – providing robust frameworks for humans to use their insight or pattern recognition and tell... [Read More]

Some insightful comments from my advisor have got me thinking about innovation tools. His thought was that many more kids would want to go into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields if we separated out the creation parts from the grungy math and/or fabrication parts. I’d bet that any... [Read More]

Today I wrote a quick post over on my lab blog about a modeling tool I'm working with. The program ties in with a bigger idea that my advisor put in my head (and I want to write more about later) - that we need to lower the barriers between... [Read More]