ON MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHIES
A CENTURY AGO, MATHEMATICIANS DEBATED THE EXISTENCE of numbers. “You’d think, after millenniums, we’d have gotten that straight,” writes Jordan Ellenberg in The New York Times Book Review, November 23, … Continue reading
FAKE IT TILL IT MAKES IT
HALLUCINATIONS MADE BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE are rooted in the adage above. Celina Zhao recounts, “A.I. Hallucinates Because It’s Trained to Fake Answers It Doesn’t Know,” AAAS Science, October 28, 2025. … Continue reading
SCIENCE AND OUR WORLD
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, ENGLISH MATHEMATICIAN ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD delivered a series of Lowell Lectures titled Science and the Modern World. In a “Classics Revisited” essay, Science, October 16, 2025, … Continue reading
ONE BRILLIANT HELMET
MADELINE COLEMAN REPORTS IN THE ATHLETIC, The New York Times, October 9, 2025, “Isack Hadjar’s F1 Helmet is a Tribute to Physics, Fatherhood, and a Decade of Racing.” Coleman observes … Continue reading
INTERACTIVE MEDIA & GAME DEVELOPMENT—WPI AMONG THE LEADERS
COMPUTATIONAL ADVANCEMENTS—ROBOTICS, EDUCATION, HEALTHCARE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AND EDUCATION—are a significant driver of modern culture. And Worcester Polytechnic Institute, my undergraduate school, is among those leading the way in Interactive Media … Continue reading
THE 35TH FIRST ANNUAL IG NOBEL PRIZES
HANNAH RICHTER REPORTS “The Ig Nobels Are Science’s Most Lighthearted Event. This Year Is ‘Not Typical,’ ” AAAS Science, September 19, 2025. Not typical, of course, because of Trump’s autocratically … Continue reading
A GREEN IDEA HOUSE
JEFF BRADY DESCRIBES “5 LESSONS FROM A HOUSE That Generates More Energy Than It Uses,” NPR, September 20, 2025. Brady recounts, “Robert Fortunato’s ‘Green Idea House‘ has been doing that … Continue reading
A.I. PRIMERS
HERE I MEAN “PRIMERS” in the short-i sense; Merriam-Webster: small books for teaching children to read. And, in the fast-developing world of artificial intelligence, we’re all children needing to learn … Continue reading
MARS—AS TIMELY AS TODAY’S HEADLINES, OR THOSE OF THE LATE 19TH CENTURY, OR THOSE OF MAR’S ORIGIN PART 2
YESTERDAY WE STARTED ANALYZING a cornucopia of things Martian appearing in AAAS Science. We continue today in Part 2 with assessment of Mars’ elemental structure—and, though lacking canals, any signs … Continue reading
MARS—AS TIMELY AS TODAY’S HEADLINES, OR THOSE OF THE LATE 19TH CENTURY, OR THOSE OF MAR’S ORIGIN PART 1
I PLANNED THIS AS A BOOK REVIEW of David Baron’s The Martians, with tidbits gleaned from Dov Greenbaum’s “Mars Mania and the Making of Scientific Authority,” AAAS Science, August 28, … Continue reading
