Let’s be honest. The universe is a hot mess.

It’s a beautiful, wondrous, mind-bogglingly enormous place, and we’re just these teensy little creatures who can only see, hear, smell, taste, and feel a tiny jumbled fraction of what’s happening in our own insignificant corner of existence. But if we pay attention, take good notes, and question our assumptions, we’re somehow able to find the patterns that make a little bit more sense of it all.

That’s science, more or less, and it is awesome.

I’m not a scientist. I studied philosophy to get a handle on the Big Questions and how to think critically and analytically about ideas and systems. Then I studied journalism to learn how to ask the Right Questions, sort through the details, and share what I’d uncovered.

My work takes all kinds of forms—news reports, essays, video and audio documentaries, UX microcopy, content strategy proposals—and covers topics from the magnetic field of Jupiter to how to install your new WiFi router. I’ve written hundreds of articles about science and technology, hosted live radio shows, produced short films, blogged for NPR, and helped to shape the voice and design of software platforms used by millions of people… all with the goal of helping others make just a little more sense of the world.

We’ll never know it all. Science cannot give us The Full And Complete Truth Of Reality; only ever-closer approximations of How Reality Probably Works, As Best We Can Tell So Far. That means we can’t ever grok the patterns of the universe, in the Heinleinesque sense of comprehensive, holistic knowledge.

But we can combobulate the heck out of ’em.