When a lot of people want something, they'll all race to get it. This "first in line" feedback loop, however, can end up causing a detrimental race to the bottom - all in the service of making it to the top.

The story of industrialization is very much the story of humankind's mastery over science and technology. In the post-industrial future we're moving towards, however, much of those gains seem to be slipping away.

Technology and innovation, for all the benefits they bring to society, are also frequently implicated in discussions around our society's "degeneration". An axiom of computer science, though, says the computer is never at fault when there's an error, its operator just programmed it wrong. Shouldn't the same thinking apply to technological advancement, writ large?

In the last Moment of Inertia, I discussed the detriments of STEM education as we know it today. In this edition, I'll put forward some of my own ideas on how we can ensure students (of all ages) are equipped with the technical tools they'll need to be empowered in the world of tomorrow.

We've never relied more on the data sent to our devices, but it's important to note that while the data and its distribution itself is digitized and automated, the collection of it rarely is.

Even when we've learned everything there is to know, many of us are convinced there's more we're not seeing. It's perhaps the most dangerous quality of modern society. 

It's been said that you can never step in the same stream twice. In a world where every action and reaction perpetuate more actions and reactions, how much can we really know?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the unintended consequences that can arise when our ability to measure, or detect, something increases, especially when that "something" is actually decreasing. Today, I'd like to revisit that concept from another angle: the source of the data.

When we think of programming, we usually think of software and computers, but there's a whole field of programming out there that uses nothing but inert materials and geometry.

The content for Magnitude & Direction and Moment of Inertia doesn't come out of nowhere; I find articles from all corners of the internet, social media, and very frequently these other newsletters that I love reading every week.

What happens when something decreases, but our ability to measure it increases? 

Last issue of Magnitude and Direction, we saw a repository of logos that looked uncannily like one another. In the age of the internet, when nothing is truly "forgotten" this is happening more than ever.

Yesterday's M&D featured an article about research identifying key gene locations that play a role in determining the physical characteristics we associate with beauty. Genetics is rarely that simple in actuality, though.

Unless science is your day job, you're probably not getting the majority of your science info directly from the source: peer-reviewed journals. As such, most of us rely on the secondhand reports from others that we trust to faithfully - and correctly - interpret scientific findings.

Out of Error Comes Innovation