I passed my A exam (yay!) and made it to California (yay!) and am utterly exhausted (boo!)

The reason I’m out here is to work at the NASA Ames Research Center. Few people realize there’s a NASA facility right next to Google. The Google culture seems to be infectious, from what I can tell (I haven’t actually started work yet.) Ames seems like some kind of bizarre hybrid between Silicon Valley culture (laid back and productivity oriented) and NASA culture (bureaucratic and goal/deliverable oriented.) Unfortunately, this probably isn’t an infection that will grow to an outbreak throughout NASA, but one can hope.

More detail later, but I’ll be working specifically with the SPHERES project, doing work on their 2-D and 3-D low friction test beds, and whatever awesome things come my way 

A random travel observation on efficiency and incentives:

Why isn’t the de-boarding process for planes faster? It seems like the incentives are aligned so that everybody involved would want it to go as quickly as possible: the passengers want to get out of their tube and the airline wants to turn the plane around as quickly as possible.  Where does all this inefficiency come in?