Last year, I began contributing to the Chinese magazine Front Vision. My first two articles came out in the May 2018 issue. Since then, I’ve written five more. You can see the first pages of each at the end of this post. Can you figure out which is which?
The Blade Jumper, July 2018
This article covers the ethics of using technology to enhance a person’s performance in sports. Should runners and jumpers with blade legs be allowed to compete against people with flesh-and-bone legs? Should swimmers be allowed to wear high-tech suits? These are tough questions.
How Language and Thought Intertwine, October 2018
I especially enjoyed writing this article. I completed a thesis project in college titled “thought made visible” that was all about linguistics and how thought gets formed from the world and then expressed in words and images. It was fascinating to revisit this topic, but if you want to read about this idea at all, you should skip what I wrote and see this brilliant article by Cormac McCarthy instead.
Becoming Better Cyborgs, January 2019
For this piece, I went back to some research I did a year ago for an article for Science News for Students about brain-machine interfaces. I was able to use some research materials over again, which is always nice. But the focus was different. I talked less about why we need these types of devices and more about how they work and what challenges scientists face in getting the human body to work together with foreign implants.
Doctor Robot and War of the Robots, February 2019
Hooray for robots! I write about robots all the time. At this point, I think I could do it in my sleep.
