“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”
—
Kranzberg’s
First Law
I’m a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. I spend most of my time designing and building astrophysical data systems. Underpinning this work is my preoccupation with all of the ways that computers could be revolutionizing science and society — but aren’t yet.
Contact me on Mastodon as @pkgw@mastodon.world or over email at peter@newton.cx. Find out more on my About Me page, or by subscribing to my lightweight newsletter — I use it to send out links to the posts that I write here on this website:
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Latest post:
2024 July 17
Last week I wrote about how LaTeX might evolve to stay relevant to 21st-century technical writing. But technology has come a long way since the 1970’s. Should we even be encouraging people to create documents using the venerable TeX language, which was designed at a time when computers — and computing — were so different than they are today? This week I want to write a bit about why it’s worth the effort to build on TeX/LaTeX, instead of starting fresh.
Recently:
| 2024 July 9 | LaTeX Can Be The New LaTeX |
| 2024 June 26 | Reprocessing DASCH’s Astrometry |
| 2024 June 11 | The Software Citation Station (Wagg & Broekgaarden 2024) |
| 2024 June 5 | Software Indexing and Discoverability |