About

Software engineering satiates my desire to solve problems with magic — symbols, semantics, circuitry, and a dash of electricity.

Occasionally, I write about software, programming, and technology. These are my writings on software.

Even more rarely, I create software. You can find some of my personal software projects here.

I focus on web technology and developer tools, but my pet-projects center around cognition as a service (CaaS)™, tools from applied formal semantic ontology, open knowledge bases, and robots and shit.

I stay sane by writing an even mix of fiction and non-fiction.

First, the fictional. Similar to reading, I enjoy writing all types of fiction. My work is consistently speculative — fantasy, comedy and satire, and counterfactual realities.

I believe there is power in thinking about what could be. Here are a few examples.

Possible worlds are used in the semantics of set theory. Possible outcomes help us plan future action. The way things could have been can be used to analyze the past. Imagined solutions to real problems are at the heart of invention. Much creativity and art is inspired by counter-realities. Political and social change is motivated by the way the world could (should) be.

In writing, we can explore these realities other than our own, at little expense other than our time and energy. Because the writing is fictional, the danger of drawing unjustified conclusions from counterfactual reasoning is mitigated. Just because something could be, doesn’t mean it should or will. Fiction offers me a medium for experimenting with these different worlds and the conclusions they offer. These experiments are cathartic, quickly testable, and bloodless.

Next, I write all types of non-fiction — academic, popular, and blog. Writing non-fiction fulfills my drive to theorize, popularize, teach, and explain. I have a penchant for connecting disparate ideas and concepts. If all I achieve with writing is to digest and regurgitate (explain) complex ideas and their implications, I will be content. I am more than happy to act as a function from the academic to the popular.

Finally, I pursue ‘brief habits’ (Nietzsche) — attempting both breadth and depth. The areas which I write about span morality and how to live, science, mathematics, philosophy, history, business, and society.

I philosophize across ethics, science, the mind, and the logical universe.

Metaphilosophically, my work is firmly entrenched in contemporary analytical methods. I blame my poor philosophical habits on the dead German dudes — Kant, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.

In the philosophy of science, I tend to think most about interpretative challenges in Physics, particularly Quantum Mechanics. However, I am also interested in biology, neuroscience, and computer science.

My metalogical pursuits focus on the construction of non-classical logical systems, particularly deontic, temporal, and modal logics — I would like to be able to formally specify normative discourse so that computers can capture the large amount of normative talk on the web and infer over it.

Relatedly, I work with different knowledge representation formats, particularly those based on predicate logic. I see the ability to construct bullet-proof semantic ontologies and apply them to our current data as foundational in creating large-scale machine learning and consistent inference. I am particularly enthralled by trying to specify and use large bodies of law, medical theory and record-data, and public knowledge. As a result, I sometimes write software libraries to facilitate application of web ontology, for example a parser of KIF (and SUO-KIF), with output in JavaScript.