Cognition Switch: An Artefact for the Transmission of New IdeasIssue #4: March 2019Featuring Ideas by: James Q Whitman, Costica Bradatan, Angela Kennedy, Matthew Francis, David Munns, Chris Kempes, Van Savage, Neil Levy, Stefani Engelstein, Walter Vannini, Tom Winterbottom, Lori Miller Kase, Matthew Karp, Philip Goff, and Scott Aaronson

The little-known history of nuclear reactors in American life, and the role of public colleges in the Atomic Age.In The Atom Goes to College, David Munns explores the creation and forgotten prominence of “teaching reactors,” nuclear reactors dedicated to education during the golden age of American atomic ambitions. From the 1950s to the 1970s, a generation took the science of the atom and made it into the engineering of the reactor. Across two dozen teachi...

From the beginning of the space age, scientists and engineers have worked on systems to help humans survive for the astounding 28,500 days (78 years) needed to reach another planet. They’ve imagined and tried to create a little piece of Earth in a bubble travelling through space, inside of which people could live for decades, centuries, or even millennia. Far Beyond the Moon tells the dramatic story of engineering efforts by astronauts and scientists to create artificial habitats ...

How radio astronomers challenged national borders, disciplinary boundaries, and the constraints of vision to create an international scientific community.For more than three thousand years, the science of astronomy depended on visible light. In just the last sixty years, radio technology has fundamentally altered how astronomers see the universe. Combining the wartime innovation of radar and the established standards of traditional optical telescopes, the “radio te...

Promising an end to global hunger and political instability, huge climate-controlled laboratories known as phytotrons spread around the world to thirty countries after the Second World War. The United States built nearly a dozen, including the first at Caltech in 1949. Made possible by computers and other novel greenhouse technologies of the early Cold War, phytotrons enabled plant scientists to experiment on the environmental causes of growth and development of living organisms. Subsequen...

Most intermediate-level machine learning books focus on how to optimize models by increasing accuracy or decreasing prediction error. But this approach often overlooks the importance of understanding why and how your ML model makes the predictions that it does.Explainability methods provide an essential toolkit for better understanding model behavior, and this practical guide brings together best-in-class techniques for model explainability. Experienced machine learning engineers a...

The Hanford History Project held the “Legacies of the Manhattan Project at 75 Years” conference in March 2017. Its Richland, Washington, meeting venue was a stone’s throw from the southern-most edge of the Hanford Nuclear Site--the place where workers produced the plutonium that fueled the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.The symposium’s appeal extended well beyond local interest. Professionals from a broad array of backgrounds--working scientists, gover...

'Tell me the old, old story…'I can still remember listening to this age-old hymn being sung by lovely but warbling old ladies at the home league. The poet calls to others to tell them the story of faith, the one that has inspired countless millions to surrender their lives for the sake of the King and His Kingdom; the story of life and hope that has brought salvation to the world, the story of Jesus doing what He does best—changing people's lives, working through His people, to tra...

A collection of eight short stories written between May - August 2014. The Candy-Filled Fleshlight - The tale of Jimmy Stamper, the man who purchased a fleshlight that spits out candy. Bag - A killer present lies under the tree this Christmas. Food - A voyeur spies on couples at their most intimate moment: Eating Food. Samaritan - A jaded Samaritan has a chance at redemption. Upstairs - A man awakes each night with no memory, other than the knowledge that something lies upstairs. Something...

Q: Just what is the Godskin?A: Why, it's the most natural thing in the world.Max is one all-night panic attack away from a one-way trip to the deep south, a perennial worrier about what lies beyond, he spends his mornings giving people tattoos and his nights pondering why he even bothers.Enter Eloise, his savior, his everything, his canvas. She carries a book with the most detailed drawings Max has ever seen and wants a tattoo. Their friendship blossoms rapidly and t...

Q: What is the Godskin? A: Why, it's the most natural thing in the world.

Cognition Switch: An Artefact for the Transmission of New IdeasIssue #2: January 2019Featuring Ideas by:Michael Shermer, Peter Staudenmaier, Sabine Hossenfelder, Kate Raworth, Benjamin G Martin, Noah Charney, David Wengrow, Kimberley Brownlee, Tali Sharot, Robert Simpson, Thea Bechshoft, Martin Rees, Jon Butterworth, Bill Nye, Huw Price, and Henry Cowles