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Thinking On Paper Deep tech for the deeply curious.
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Very good, important conversations on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, web3, humanoids, robotics and space manufacturing. Weekly Interviews with CEOS, founders, outliers, scientists, entrepreneurs, authors and whistleblowers. From startups and Silicon Valley wunderkinds to the biggest Tech Fortune 500 companies on the planet. Former guests include IBM, D-Wave, Coinbase, Kevin Kelly, Don Norman, Circle, Carissa Veliz, European Space Agency, NASA and more. Topics range from AI ethics, education, government, music, film, science, space industry and the philosophical impact of technology. In the tech book club there are book reviews and summaries of the most important technology books of the century. Books include: Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus; Federico Faggin, Irreducible; Quantum Supremacy, Clear Thinking, The Order of Time and more. Stay disruptive, be curious, keep thinking on paper.

22/10/2026

Rocket exhaust on the Moon sends dust further than rocks, the reverse of what happens on Earth, said former NASA scientist Philip Metzger.

Metzger, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, led NASA's work on rocket blast effects. With no air to slow it down, the dust can sandblast nearby equipment, including solar panels and telescopes, he said.

"Because the Moon is an airless body, there's nothing to slow down the dust.

Here on the Earth, if you took a handful of gravel and sand and, let's say, baby powder, talcum powder, and throw it, what you'll see is the rocks go the farthest, the sand goes intermediate distances, and the dust just stops as soon as you let go.

That's because they have different ballistic coefficients. It's the ratio of the inertial force to the atmospheric drag force.

Well, on the Earth, the atmospheric drag is slowing things down. But on the Moon, there is no atmosphere except for the rocket exhaust. And so it speeds everything up.

And because the drag force is more dominant on dust than it is on rocks, it turns out that on the Moon, the dust goes the fastest and the farthest. The sand still goes intermediate, and the rocks go the shortest."

22/10/2026

Democracy is slow and inefficient, but its injustices pale next to those of undemocratic states, said Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz.

Véliz, an associate professor at the University of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI, was drawing on George Orwell. In his 1941 essay Fascism and Democracy, Orwell wrote that attacking democracy was one of the easiest pastimes in the world, and that its critics treated a difference of degree as no difference at all.

"George Orwell made this point that it's easy to become dissatisfied with democracy.

Democracy is horrible. It's very inefficient. It's slow.

In every country you can find cases of corruption, cases of injustice, and sometimes really egregious injustice.

And George Orwell makes the point that it's not that in democracies those things doesn't happen, they do. It's how often they happen, and that makes a huge difference.

So even if in a very high-functioning liberal democracy you can find instances of injustice, it pales in comparison to the number and the gravity of injustice in a non-democratic country."

22/10/2026

Technology is evolving faster than our laws can keep up, creating a dangerous gap in protection. While companies argue for trade secrets, AI is a different beast entirely. We need to reach a level of public understanding that demands transparency before it is too late.

22/10/2026

Democracy will not survive if a handful of people control a space economy far larger than Earth's.

22/10/2026

On EeroQ's chip, running a quantum algorithm means shuttling single electrons around, said co-founder Johannes Pollanen.

EeroQ traps electrons just above a layer of helium and uses them as qubits. Pollanen, a physicist at Michigan State University, is the company's chief science officer and has a financial interest in it.

"It is quantum gates, and then at the very end you perform a measurement of all those qubits again, and that gives you a data point for your answer. And then you have to repeat that.

In that sequence of gates that you run, the quantum gates, you've encoded an algorithm. There's a process for moving information around. And then at the end, the measurement tells you what the final answer is.

That is what every quantum algorithm looks like.

That's the abstract level. And then for a given modality, a given kind of hardware, you have to realise how do you make that happen in reality on a chip.

For us, it involves moving electrons close to one another, far apart, close to wires that are on the chip to cause single electrons to change their state, and then to move them around to readout zones to do the readout.

So our algorithms look like shuttling electrons around."

22/10/2026

How do you go from I-phone to a quantum computer?

21/10/2026

Bruce Lee. Be like water is not the whole story.

21/10/2026

Bruce Lee made John Wick.

21/10/2026

Location data can show who you live with, where you work and whether you see a psychologist, said Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz.

Véliz is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI and the author of Privacy Is Power. She sits on the board of the Proton Foundation, the Swiss non-profit that is the main shareholder in tech firm Proton.

"I think a lot of us are aware that very abstract information is collected about us, like what we're purchasing or things like our music taste and maybe our location.

But that doesn't really show how vulnerable it makes us, because when you explain to people what location means in the sense of what can be inferred, it means that they know who you live with, where you live, where you work, whether you're going to a psychologist, whether you're going to a church, whether you're buying drugs.

All kinds of things can be inferred from location."

21/10/2026

Bureaucratic legal language often hides the core of complex rules, but the Martens Clause really boils down to one simple concept: don't be an as***le. While it sounds easy to define, applying that standard becomes complicated in the real world. Is it really that straightforward to you?

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