One of my favorite Ditch Day traditions never occurs on Ditch Day. You see, on Ditch Day, the seniors arrange dinner for their stacks: taking them to a restaurant, hosting a picnic, etc. Something that never happens is a normal house dinner. Each Caltech house has its own dining hall... [Read More]

What comes to mind when you see the above image? It’s from a CS research paper in which a computer used millions of images to automatically remove the roof from the foreground and fill in the image so that you would never suspect there was a roof in the first... [Read More]

Sunday’s post has me thinking about other ways my outlook on technology has changed as I’ve been exposed to more of its underbelly. In particular, how I’ve softened my derision towards technology that doesn’t actually allow us to do anything new. From what I can tell, there are two main... [Read More]

I had an excellent conversation a few weeks ago about how current patent law produces ‘chilling effects’ on software innovations. This got me thinking about what sort of things have these same chilling effects on space innovations and what can be done to reduce them (space is cold enough already.)... [Read More]

While looking at the job market for mechanical engineers during my senior year, I often lamented that nobody did cool purely mechanical things anymore. Back in the day, my complaint went, mechanical engineers came up with brilliantly clever things like Reuleaux mechanisms and farther back in time, world changing things... [Read More]