All posts by Nicholas Gerbis

Not-so-Final Destination: Landing at the Wrong Airport

Airplane landing at sunset.“Uh, ladies and gentlemen, this is the flight deck. Thank you for choosing Airborne Airways, where your destination is always up in the air. If you’ll look out your window, you’ll see…well, we’re hoping you can tell us. Anything look familiar?”

Yes, it’s preposterous, embarrassing and more than a little dangerous, but flight crews touch down at the wrong airfield or runway more often than you might think. Which raises the question: If GPS navigation can direct any idiot with a car to his or her destination, how can a trained flight crew with state-of-the-art navigation screw up so badly? In other words…

How Can a Plane Land at the Wrong Airport?

The Future: At the Corner of Close and Soon

Aerocar 600 fantasy flying car
Not quite what we had in mind.
(Photo by Joe Mabel)

Somehow the future we get is never quite the one we were promised. Then again, sometimes the very ideas wrapped in the pages of sci-fi and Popular Science are right under our noses, in disguise. After all, we have hand-held sensor-communicators and miraculous supermaterials – they just take the rather mundane form of carbon-fiber-wrapped smartphones.

Maybe our blindness arises from our physical and electronic architecture. Has exchanging Googie buildings for Google caused us to overlook the flying-car equivalents that fill our everyday lives, or soon will? Read on.

Our 10 Favorite Replacements for ‘Where’s My Flying Car?’

The Causation-Correlation Conflation

Not equal signThe question of cause  has haunted science and philosophy from their earliest days, in part because humans are wired for pattern-matching and confirmation bias. For all our supposed rationality, we confuse coincidence with correlation and correlation with causality.

Consequently, scientists must carefully design and control their experiments to remove bias, circular reasoning, self-fulfilling prophecies and hidden variables. They must respect the requirements and limitations of their methods, draw from representative samples and not overstate their results. Sometimes, however, that’s easier said than done. Read on to hear about…

10 Correlations that are Not Causations

Tracking 2013’s Tastiest Tech

Detail of Google Glass
Photo by Antonio Zugaldia

Looking back on the tech trends, triumphs and tribulation of 2013, a few patterns emerge: Private projects took off even while privacy took a beating; robots and AI servants made great strides while their drone cousins stalked us with cameras and weapons; reality was simultaneously augmented and scrutinized, while 3-D-printing and private-sector space races seemingly brought the whole world into the realm of DIY.

2013’s Biggest Tech Moments

Laser Communications Gets a Zap(pa) from Moon Unit

Photo by ESO Photo Ambassador Yuri Beletsky. Unrelated to the NASA experiment but cool nonetheless.

Lasers rank among the most vital and widespread technologies in the industrialized world, but for years they were considered a solution looking for a problem. One possible application lay in communications: Lasers, being of higher frequency and energy than radio, held the potential to communicate more information per second.

Fast-forward to October 2013, when NASA pulled off one of the most impressive proofs-of-concept in history. That month, a spacecraft orbiting the moon sent data 239,000 miles to Earth via a pulsed laser beam at a download rate of 622 megabits per second (by comparison, high-speed consumer data plans are usually measured in the tens of megabits). Everyone from cryptographers to high-speed Wall Street traders sat up and took notice. Sound cool? Read on as I explain…

How Laser Communication Works