I’m building tools that find hidden connections across scientific fields — using 9 million patents and 357 million academic papers to surface the cross-domain analogies that nobody is looking for. This is where I write about the work, the ideas, and the data emerging from the frontier.
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Convergence Watch: A NASCAR Engine Builder, an MIT Spin-Out, and Pratt & Whitney Are All Cracking the Same Molecule
U.S. ammonia-fuel grants jumped tenfold since 2022, and the same catalytic recipe is showing up in pickup trucks, tugboats, ship engines, and Pratt & Whitney’s turbofan IP.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: Busy Beavers Outgrew the Book, and the Cluster Healed Itself
Kurzweil cited 1964 lower bounds as facts. By 2024 BB(5) had a machine-checked proof and BB(6) needed pentation notation.
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Convergence Watch: The Self-Driving Stack Found a Job. It’s Watching Salmon.
Alphabet’s TidalX has 51 US patents on cameras, anti-startling robot policies, and optical-flow water-current estimators. Salmon farms are the AV stack’s first profitable second act.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: He Won the Speech War. The HMM Generals Lost.
Kurzweil’s 2005 defense of speech recognition got every claim right and the architecture wrong: HMMs lost to transformers, but the destination arrived bigger than promised.
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Convergence Watch: The Cheapest Nuclear Containment Dome Is a Mile of Rock
Two patents, one mile of rock, and a Berkeley father-daughter team plan to take a nuclear reactor critical inside a Kansas industrial park on July 4.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: The Statutes Got There First
Kurzweil bet machine-rights litigation would lead. Idaho and Utah passed statutes to block it. The cloud he expected to distribute concentrated instead.
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Quiet Breakout: The Brain Scanner Is Leaving the Vault
For sixty years, MEG required a copper-and-steel shielded room. The latest atomic-vapor magnetometer patents are quietly making the vault optional.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: The Brain Facts That Aged Differently
Twenty years on, the anatomy survived. The grand cognitive theories did not.
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Quiet Breakout: The MicroLED Apple Buried Just Found Its Real Job Inside an AI Accelerator
Apple killed its decade-long microLED display project in 2024. The same year, a Sunnyvale startup hit 200 femtojoules per bit shooting data between AI chips with the same physics — and now holds 84% of US patents in the niche.
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Kurzweil Scorecard: Reading the Brain — Right Tool, Wrong Wire
Kurzweil called the curves on connectomics and brain decoding. He missed on the wires — optic nerve, spindle cells, and millisecond fMRI.