Saturday (Mostly Space) Stories! Big Data in Spaaaaace I think it’s important to investigate the sausage factory of science…after the results have been declared satisfactory. Scrutiny during the process extends deadlines indefinitely – too much pressure to get it right on the first try. It’s not an experiment if there’s... [Read More]

I’m sure you couldn’t tell based on what you’re reading right now, but I’m a huge fan of stories. It’s great to be on either end: experiencing or telling. I loved immersing myself in the atmosphere of the stack when I was an undergraduate. On ditch day as a junior,... [Read More]

Due to moving and having my computer locked in my advisor’s office for the evening, a short post consisting mostly of the words of Freeman Dyson from Infinite in All Directions. The book is chock full of ideas that are still relevant today, 25 years after it was first published.... [Read More]

SPOILER ALERT. If you haven’t read or watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, you should probably stop now and reconsider your cultural literacy. A conversation last weekend ended up focusing on how the character HAL in 2001: ASO took the easy-to-fix spacecraft paradigm to an extreme when he tried to remove... [Read More]

I was was originally going to discuss the intersection of easy-to-fix spacecraft and human-robot task differentiation: the story of HAL 9000.  But then it went somewhere entirely different: I just realized that science fiction has a striking similarity to startups. Most Sci-Fi predictions look ridiculous and dated in retrospect. ‘How... [Read More]