Specialization: the concept, in the context of trade from the excellent EconTalk Monologue hit me very personally.  Trade (in ideas and goods) both benefits from and encourages us to become even more intensely specialized. I wondered ‘where do I fit into this? Am I in trouble?’  I’m not intensely specialized... [Read More]

Saturday (Space) Stories! My sentiments exactly. Can I have induced hibernation until we have the technology to go to Alpha Centauri? And now someone (hackers, the government, businesses) will be able to control people like puppets through their internet-brain connections. Possible paradigm shifts for cubesat launches - something to watch I... [Read More]

As you might know, I’m a devoted listener of the EconTalk podcast. Since one a week isn’t nearly enough to fill all the walking that I do, I have also been listening through five years of archived episodes. While they are consistently high quality, this episode blew me away. In... [Read More]

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]