A Case for Spaceships

There are awesome things happening and changing around how science is done and communicated, so I thought I'd put them in a list thingy. Let's go! Code Ocean 🌊When I first saw it used, linked from a Nature paper, I thought it was a demo and not a real, living…

First let’s take a step back and think about the definition of science: The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. Now, when we think about what kind of experimentation goes on in…

TL;DR: Over the previous hundred years, a lot of work has gone into standardizing the way scientific data is presented. All of this knowledge has been largely forgotten. I want us to bring it back to life. Before we talk about science, let’s take a short but scenic…

TL;DR: I’ve started building a distributed search engine for scholarly literature, which is completely contained within a browser extension: install it from the Chrome Web Store. It uses WebRTC and magic, and is currently, like, right now, used by 0 people. It’s you who can be number…

Years ago (yes, it’s been years, don’t remind me), I wrote an application for modeling the laser ablation ICP-MS mapping process. This is a thing where you make microscopic explosions with a laser and then the little bits of the stuff get blown into a blazing torch, which…