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]

Some big space news items this week are the NASA authorization bill from the House Space Subcommittee and subsequent debate over the proposed asteroid mission, as well as the political fallout from the Proton rocket crash. Both of these stories beg the question: is there a reason that space exploration... [Read More]

Inspired by a conversation at work today, here’s a line of space-exploration inquiry that’s both un-PC and probably over the tinfoil hat line, but nevertheless worth considering:  Amidst all of the many plans for future robotic and manned missions to Mars, there is no talk of sending some non-human critters... [Read More]

Is there a more effective way to communicate new developments in sci/tech? This is a question that has had me scratching my head for a while now. I feel like the incentives often aren’t there to really give the full picture to people with little or no prior knowledge of... [Read More]