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My take on the election
Instead of offering my comments, I’ll relay the words of those on the front lines today. From the President himself (that is, info@barackobama.org), 11:35 pm ET on election night: “…This wasn’t fate,...
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Coursera: hope it works!
This week I’ve started on my first class with Coursera – “Think Again: How to Reason and Argue.” My instructors, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong of Duke University and Ram Neta of the University of North...
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Take heed: good advice on climate-change communication
Listen up, scientists – check out the word from (gasp) a big-shot investor and asset manager on communicating the urgency of global climate change. In the November 15 issue of Nature, Jeremy Grantham...
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NASA’s strategic direction: in need of new ideas
Today the House Science, Space and Technology Committee held a hearing on the National Research Council’s new report on NASA’s strategic direction report on NASA’s strategic direction. I was not able...
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Failure to communicate? A tale about MSL…
“What we’ve got here is (a) failure to communicate.” While we all may not be sure about the origin of this quote, it rings a bell with pretty much everybody. In the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, a prison...
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Thinking about life in the universe…
I’d like to share some thoughts from a new book by my colleague in astrobiology, Milan Cirkovic – The Astrobiological Landscape: Philosophical Foundations of the Study of Cosmic Life. I’ve just begun...
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Never-ending mysteries of science
I’ve just discovered what promises to be a marvelous book, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generations Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by the “Romantic biographer” Richard Holmes...
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Another “asteroid mining” company? Really?
Deep Space Industries (DSI) claims “it is time to begin the harvest of space. The Earth is…floating in a sea of natural resources. The riches of the solar system offer humanity both unprecedented...
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Manifest destiny in space? A belief in need of ditching
In his book This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age, William Burrows writes of the space community’s intensive promotion of human space flight in the 1980s, the era of NASA’s Space Shuttle...
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Tacky and disturbing
Embedded in a story on space.com today, about solar system exploration, is an ad – see above – for an item your can purchase from the “Space.com Store.” The item – a T-shirt – is both tacky and...
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Manly Mars exploration
Since when did Mars exploration become such a manly thing? If one didn’t know better, one might think, in reading New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger’s recent epic take on the current era of Mars...
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Diversity at NASA: social reality, cultural challenge
February was Black History Month. March was Women’s History Month. They came and went at NASA with no big fanfare. Today I’m writing, again, about work done by the political appointees that President...
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Planetary defense: The white paper
While I’ve been dithering about how and what to blog about the fifth biennial Planetary Defense Conference (PDC), which I attended April 15-19, 2013, in Flagstaff, AZ, the conference organizers have...
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My notes on the 2013 Planetary Defense Conference
In my last post, I reported on a white paper summarizing the proceedings of the 2013 Planetary Defense Conference, which I attended April 15-19 in Flagstaff, Arizona. In this post I’ll offer some...
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More on nuking asteroids
About asteroid deflection concepts, following up on my last post I’m providing the following quotes from a March 2007 NASA report to Congress, “Near-Earth Object Survey and Deflection: Analysis of...
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Asteroid dreams, Part 4: an ARM revival meeting
At a NASA “industry and partner” briefing today on the Administration’s proposed Asteroid Retrieval/Redirect Mission (ARM – I’ll explain the forward-slash below), I felt as though I was witnessing an...
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Asteroid dreams, Part 5: what NASA wants to know
In my last post I offered my five cents worth on NASA’s June 18 Asteroid Initiative (it’s now capitalized) “industry and partners day.” In this post I’ll offer some details from NASA’s Asteroid...
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Asteroid dreams, Part 6: Target NEO
On February 21, 2011, an open global community workshop on near-Earth objects (NEOs) took place in Washington, D.C. Now known as the Target NEO I workshop, it was convened “to bring together experts...
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Life Underground: the lecture (and the game…)
I just listened to a talk about a new astrobiology research project, whose aim is to probe the deep-subsurface biosphere, and it (the talk and the project) was pretty darned interesting, so I thought...
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Incur debt in space! Paypal wants to help
Today’s news feed is regurgitating a press release about the launch of Paypal Galactic, an enterprise that will enable people to continue to dump money into corporate coffers even while they’re in...
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