February 18, 2021
Edgy Science Roundup
The lifeworld and deathworld meeting and overlapping; viruses evolving into unique protective bodily organs; ethical questions raised by VR communication “with the dead”; a nation’s official insistence that it isn’t building a time machine. In this…
January 27, 2021
Minecraft and Statecraft
Outschool, a supplemental class service for ambitious kids from k-12, is offering a course called Metrocraft. In it, students collectively design and build (in Minecraft) a city that they then govern. The class combines architecture, public…
January 27, 2021
Going-Where-No-One-Has-Gone-Before Roundup
Human flight is an iconic preoccupation throughout human history. Journey into inner space is lesser-known but still well-established in speculative science and literature. And human augmentation is part of both outward and inward super-travel…
December 27, 2020
Weird Musical Instrument Roundup
Have you ever heard of the Katzenklavier, or cat piano? It’s exactly what it sounds like: a design (and thankfully only a design) for a keyboard that sits “in front of a line of cages, each of which has a cat trapped inside.” Pressing a particular…
December 26, 2020
Why Did Facebook Lift Its Ban on Political Ads for the Georgia Senate Runoff?
Political advertising is both the greatest celebration of democracy and, presently, one of democracy’s most strained relationships. The courts scrutinize government regulation of political advertising more tightly than they do commercial…
November 24, 2020
Who or What Was the First Robot? A Debate
The definition of “robot” is quite controversial. The most common definition is that a robot is a machine capable of carrying out complex tasks or series of tasks based on programming from a human. But culturally, and in the science fiction…
November 17, 2020
Time Travel Roundup
Fittingly, for a year that many of us would like to fast-forward past or, alternatively, rewind and start different, 2020 has ushered in a massive shift in time travel discourse. Time travel into the past, once thought to be theoretically…
October 27, 2020
Will Ransomware Threaten Municipal Election Security?
Lucas Ropek put up a moderately long piece on Governing last week on the threat of ransomware attacks on state and local government websites, and the specific threat such attacks may pose for elections. Ransomware comes from the world of…
October 27, 2020
Could Better Communication Fix Tesla’s Troubles?
Public communication is vital to business maintenance, and this importance only increases when a company’s products are on the cutting edge of its field’s technology. Why? Because edgy tech is . . . edgy. It doesn’t always work perfectly the first…
September 16, 2020
Using High-Speed Rail to Help the Poor
It’s no secret that the U.S. is way behind the rest of the world in scaling its infrastructure. Now, recent news from China seems to have relegated the U.S. even further back. The South China Morning Post reported last month that “China’s…