Writing

Books

Articles

TOR / Reactor Magazine

The Science of Future Past

The Science of Future Past is a series I wrote for TOR, which explores whether early science fiction writers were predicting the future or helping to define it.

Each article highlights a set of concepts invented or popularized in classic works of science fiction, and then explores how those concepts have taken shape in modern times.

The first part of the series focuses on Isaac Asimov’s classic book, Foundation, while the second part looks at the technology of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

• The Science of Future Past: Foundation - Did Asimov Predict Wikipedia?
• The Science of Future Past: Foundation - The Priesthood of Science
• The Science of Future Past: Foundation - DNA Steganography
• The Science of Future Past: Foundation - Spy Beams and Field Distorters
• The Science of Future Past: Foundation - Transmutation
• The Science of Future Past: Foundation - Food Preservation
• The Science of Future Past: Dune - The Box
• The Science of Future Past: Dune - Hunter-Seeker
• The Science of Future Past: Dune - Sandworms of Arrakis

The Science of Allomancy

The Science of Allomancy series applies real-world science to the question of how various metals and alloys might fuel the powers of the Allomancers in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series.

• The Science of Allomancy in Mistborn: Tin
• The Science of Allomancy in Mistborn: Copper
• The Science of Allomancy in Mistborn: Zinc and Brass
• The Science of Allomancy in Mistborn: Pewter
• The Science of Allomancy in Mistborn: Iron and Steel

One-Offs

My favorite, and most popular article for TOR was based on an observation one of my young daughters made while watching the movie, "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids". She noticed that the relative scale of various objects in the movie were inconsistent.

This led to my writing “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and the Science of Scale“.

Scientific American

Transcripts for some of the episodes of the Everyday Einstein science education podcast were also published in Scientific American.

• Why Do Apples Turn Brown?
• What is a Neural Network?
• Why Are Weather Forecasts Often Wrong?
• What’s a Capacitor?
• What Is “Supersonic”?
• Correlation vs. Causation
• What Is Gluten?
• Should You Worry about the Ebola Outbreak?
• Can Turmeric Prevent or Cure Disease?

Medium Publications

An eclectic collection of articles written for various publications hosted on Medium:

• Elemental: How I Used Video Gaming Research to Get Healthy
• The Writing Cooperative: Three Questions Every Writer Has To Answer To Be Successful
• Medium: The Crazy and Wonderful State of Web Development (This article is included in the list of readings for CompSci 290 at Duke University)

Podcasts

My Cousin Jane is a podcast produced by Jane Austen’s cousin, Lee Falin—well, her 8th cousin, 6 times removed—about the life and works of Jane Austen.

Rather than explore the “literary themes and ethos of Jane Austen”, or something else you might hear about in a graduate level English Lit class, My Cousin Jane presents a light hearted, chapter-by-chapter collection of segments that one could think of as the “Deleted Scenes” or “Bonus Features” of Austen’s works.

For just over two years, I was the writer and host of the Everyday Einstein science education podcast (since rebranded as Ask Science), part of Macmillan’s Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.

The podcast was regularly in the top 10 K-12 educational podcasts on iTunes, and transcripts of some episodes were featured in Scientific American.

Podchaser contains an archive of all of the episodes I hosted.

Research Papers

These days I write more science fiction than science fact, but over the years I have written or contributed to a few research papers and academic conferences:

• Ensembl Genomes 2016: more genomes, more complexity. Kersey, Paul; et al. – Nucl. Acids Res. (04 January 2016) 44 (D1): D574-D580

• Ensembl Genomes 2013: Scaling up access to genome-wide data. Kersey, Paul; et al. – Nucl. Acids Res. (1 January 2014) 42 (D1): D546-D552

• Using Interpolation to Estimate System Uncertainty in Gene Expression Experiments. Falin LJ, Tyler BM (2011) – PLoS ONE 6(7): e22071.

• Systems Uncertainty in Systems Biology & Gene Function Prediction Falin LJ (2011) – PhD Dissertation

• Adapting Teaching to the Needs of the Learner VT Hokie Stone Commemoration – 2010

• System Uncertainty in Gene Expression Data VT Graduate Research Symposium – 2010

• Microarray Data Inference ACC Interdisciplinary Forum for Discovery in the Life Sciences – 2010

• Microarray Data Inference ISCB Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology – 2010

• OpenCL – Now Everyone Has a Super Computer (Almost) Virginia Bioinformatics Institute – 2009

• Inference of Functional Modules in Regulatory Networks Virginia Bioinformatics Institute – 2007

University Courses

If you're interested in game design, software development, or machine learning, you may find the materials in some of my old university courses to be useful:

BYU-Idaho

• Machine Learning and Data Analytics

Southern Virginia University

• Game Design Patterns and Game Development
• Software Engineering & Software Project Management
• Database Systems
• Theory of Computation
• Software Engineering

University of the Cumberlands

• Essentials of Gamification
• Game for Learning and Simulation
• Advanced Multiplayer