A few more thoughts on historiography following yesterday’s post:  I’ve come to realize that the history of anything, no matter how simple, never has just a single thread - it's a thickly bundled rope. Any one narrative can only observe a few threads of that rope at once. When you... [Read More]

An aside from historian-hat-wearing Ben:  Today on Quora I came across a thought-provoking paragraph. My reaction to it went something like this: “The idea that ‘history is written by the winners’ is a clichéd truism that isn't actually very true.” This could be insightful – go on…  “History is actually... [Read More]

Two news items today focus on the “privatization” of government space resources - parts of the ISS and Cape Canaveral. I feel like these developments fall into the category of “actions that have a label that sounds good in principle, but doesn't really have a benefit in practice.” It’s similar... [Read More]

I'm kind of rushed and sick but I wanted to leave this tidbit to brain-chew: People are terrible at comparing things that are greater than two orders of magnitude apart. You can visualize $1 vs $10 vs $100 but try thinking about how much bigger $2000 is than $1 and... [Read More]

Saturday Space Stories! People just don't hate the government like they used to  More inverted pendulum awesomness While actually returning something from Mars will be awesome, couldn’t a rover do something more useful for science and human space exploration than play the same old ‘life on mars’ tune?  I'm a... [Read More]