Jun 29
Eric Klein and I have a spirited discussion about how tech reporting and VCs fail to do proper due diligence when it comes to basic science as it pertains to technology topics. We bring up Theranos, crowdfunded artificial gills, UBeam, and other products and companies which fail at basic science. As a VC, Eric agrees, …
Apr 08
This morning I walked into my office and said, “Alexa, turn on the lights.” And lo, there was light. When I first took a programming class in college, waiting 24 hours for decks of punch cards to be returned seemed perfectly normal. When I first programmed an HP-85 for work a few years later, interactively …
Mar 07
The lady in white appeared on the snowy slope, maybe 30 feet away, maybe 300 feet. The swirling snow and fog brought contrast down to almost zero, which made distance estimation chancy at best. Despite losing my glasses in the snowy wasteland behind me, I could make her out perfectly: a woman, dressed in a …
Jan 29
I can be pedantic on occasion. When I watched the movie The Martian, something the Mark Watney character said stood out to me: “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.” That bit of dialog bugged me at the time, but I wasn’t sure why. I realize now, however, that Watney wasn’t talking …
Nov 16
From Woo to Science
In the early 1970s, a skinny kid in Washington State discovered J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Like many nerdy kids at the time, this kid became obsessed with the Trilogy. He became relatively proficient using the runes defined in the Trilogy, even marking up gear he owned with said runes. That kid, of course, was …
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