I'm really interested in opening the doors to the sausage factory that is research (at least a little.) Something I don't think I emphasized enough in the post or on this blog is how useful and important feedback is to research, writing, thinking ... and everything else. So if anything... [Read More]

Saturday Stories! It's amazing what you can see when you look. It seems laughable that people claimed only a few decades ago that stars with ANY planets were probably anomalies. *Sigh* competition between governments forces the reinvention of the space wheel repeatedly. In an intriguing move, Google implicitly admits that... [Read More]

I’ve spent the past seven (wow.) years officially training as an engineer. Technically, I’m shooting for a Doctorate of Philosophy in Engineering, so I think I’m allowed to muse on these things. During the course of literally dozens of classes, I’ve encountered the same concepts repeatedly (this is a good... [Read More]

The director of JPL, Charles Elachi, gave a great talk at Cornell today. I was impressed by his use of intuitively and emotionally resonant examples like pointing out how long it would take to drive to Mars to illustrate the distance from here to there. What really got me thinking... [Read More]

  The National Research Council inadvertently illustrated the bipolarity in how we talk about science and communicate ideas in general (especially on the internet.) The NRC solicited ideas for the future of human space flight in one of two ways: white papers and tweets.  That seems to be the no-win... [Read More]