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Recreating Nature’s Flight Engine: Living Muscles, Biological Energy, and Neural Intelligence

A research project to build an insect-scale drone powered by living muscle and biological metabolism. Nutrients and atmospheric oxygen would sustain flapping flight without electrical conversion of propulsion energy. The project combines insect flight mechanics, biological neural control, and AI-assisted modeling and design, while exploring whether an active body or skin could contribute to propulsion. It reviews current research, quantifies energy and mass requirements, and outlines experimental milestones toward controlled flight, with potential applications in environmental sensing, inspection, and pollination.

Why the Human Jury Is Failing, and How AI Could Restore Its Purpose

In this podcast, I question one of the most respected assumptions of our judicial system: that the human jury, together with the presumption of innocence and Blackstone’s famous principle that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than convict one innocent, still serves justice as well today as it once did. My concern is not only with the innocent person wrongly convicted, but also with the innocent people who may become victims of those the system fails to hold accountable. From there, I ask whether a jury can still remain truly independent in a world saturated with media, politics, and public pressure, and whether AI may offer a way not to abolish the jury, but to rebuild it into something more transparent, more consistent, and perhaps closer to its original purpose.

A reply to a friend

A young friend studying AI asked me whether AGI is already here, and whether building something smarter than ourselves means building our own prison. My sense is that AGI has been here for a while, not as one gigantic brain announcing its arrival, but as a growing federation of specialized intelligences learning to work together. From there, we wander into robots moving with human grace, the possibilities of combining analog and digital computing, and AI’s inconvenient habit of bringing a power station to lunch. But what interests me most is not simply how smart a machine can become, it is whether anything could genuinely matter to it. That brings me to pain as a motivator: not a warning sensor or a numerical penalty, but an experience that could give an artificial entity something of its own to protect. Of course, an unfeeling machine can still be dangerous, and people hardly need help inventing bad uses for powerful tools. Still, I’m more excited than frightened by greater intelligence. What puzzles me is why we would deliberately add suffering to the package. My preference? Make it enormously intelligent. Just don’t make it hurt.

The WSJ, violent settlers, antisemitism, and the responsibility that comes with telling the truth

A troubling WSJ story about violent Israeli extremists pushed me into a question much broader than the article itself. I do not want ugly facts hidden, softened, or excused. But in an atmosphere already charged by antisemitism, Gaza, October 7, and the pro-Palestinian movement, what happens when a true story is framed in a way that allows the actions of a small radical group to spread into an accusation against settlers, Israelis, Jews, or Judaism itself? The essay looks for the line between censorship and sensationalism and asks what responsibility journalism has when truthful reporting can predictably become fuel for collective hatred. My conclusion is simple: when individual guilt can so easily become collective guilt, precision is not an addition to truth. It is part of the truth.

How Politicians Turn a Housing Shortage into Political Power - and What One New York Apartment Reveals

When a politician promises to freeze the rent, ask a second question. Who will build the next apartment? A rent can be frozen. Land, labor, debt, insurance, taxes, utilities, and repairs cannot. Before there is a tenant, a lease, or a landlord to condemn, someone must decide to put capital at risk. If the expected rent will not cover the building and produce a return worth the risk, the investor does not hold a press conference. The investor buys something else. The apartment disappears before anyone can photograph it, regulate it, or move into it. Housing pain deserves an honest solution.

How Politicians Turn Household Pain into Political Power - and What a $12.54 Chicken Package Reveals

When a politician promises to order prices down, do not applaud. Ask who will be forced to pay. The affordability crisis is real. The chicken package is only the illustration. Open its $12.54 price and the slogan collapses into one adult question: Which real cost will be removed, or who will be forced to pay it? Nobody gets a moral license to hide that answer because voters are angry. The choice is not between compassion and capitalism. It is between honest solutions and political manipulation. Lower the real cost. Strengthen the family. Or name the payer.

The Fukushima Effect in American Politics

The Fukushima nuclear disaster offers a warning far beyond nuclear power. The plant had protections against a major earthquake. It also had protections against a tsunami. But when the earthquake triggered the tsunami, the two dangers became one cascading event. I see a similar danger developing in American politics. A socialist movement capable of turning economic dissatisfaction into a demand for centralized political control and radical anti-Western religious ideology can amplify one another. Like Fukushima, the greatest danger may lie in the combination, and in our failure to imagine what that combination could do.

AI, the Energy Wall, and a Peek Beyond It

We do not need Tesla’s laboratory back. We need the scale of his questions. Look at the frenzy around AI data centers. What started as a fascinating technical race—bigger models, faster chips, better answers—has spilled out of the computer and entered the physical world. The cloud has come down to Earth, and it is much heavier than its name suggested. We can hide a building. We cannot hide thermodynamics. AI is developing on the time scale of software, while the electrical system grows on the time scale of power stations, permits, concrete, copper, and public patience.

The slowest car wins. But it must never stop.

I was admiring the SpaceX launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope the other day. What a gorgeous liftoff! The enormous rocket rose from the launchpad gently and smoothly, like a hot knife through butter. There was fire, smoke, tremendous noise and almost unimaginable power underneath it, but the motion itself looked beautifully controlled. The rocket simply lifted and climbed.

Enhancing Physical Therapy, Fitness, and Massage

IsoTone is a breakthrough in fitness, physical therapy, and therapeutic massage—a light, portable resistance device engineered for users of all ages and fitness levels. Unlike traditional weights or resistance bands, IsoTone automatically adjusts its resistance based on the user's applied force, offering a fully adaptive and dynamic workout experience. This self-regulating design ensures safe and effective strength training, flexibility improvement, and near-total aerobic engagement, with 360-degree resistance that activates multiple muscle groups during every movement.

A Terrifying Success

The article carried me back to the early 1980s, soon after my brother and I came to the United States from the Soviet Union. Almost casually, my brother noted that he could see Felix Dzerzhinsky’s hand in what America was already living through. The strength of the Soviet operation was not only secrecy, financing or professional discipline. It was the ability to join a powerful organization to genuine belief. It is easy to recognize propaganda when it comes from people we dislike. The test is whether we can recognize it when it flatters us, confirms us and promises victory to our side.

What American Jews Must Learn Before Warning Becomes History

Naumann’s followers represented less than 2 percent of Germany’s approximately half-million Jews. They did not elect Hitler. They did not cause the destruction that followed. The lesson is not collective Jewish guilt. Their failure was a failure to recognize what was directly in front of them. The Germany lesson is not that every contemporary danger will end in another Holocaust. It is that Jews cannot wait for another Holocaust before deciding that the danger was real. The clock did not begin at Auschwitz. It began when explicit threats were dismissed as rhetoric, when violence was excused as an excess, when unequal treatment became normal.