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]

The economist Arnold Kling inadvertently did a great job of describing how we need to shift the paradigms of spacecraft design. I’ve replaced only one word in this quote:  “We tend to think of the task of engineering as one of making systems hard to break. An alternative to consider... [Read More]

On the lab blog, how to think about the difference between eddy-current actuators and traditional grippers. Would you rather pick up an egg with your fingers or a monkey wrench?