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Toward a greater good: TMT & Starlink
[N.B. This post has been bouncing around in my head since I was in Hawaii for the American Astronomical Society Meeting several weeks ago. I haven't written it yet because I suspect I'm going to piss off everyone, and that is actually not a goal, but sometimes finding...
For every generation a hero: Remembering Apollo 1, Challenger, & Columbia
credit: Jaideep Khemani from Dubai, United Arab Emirates This morning my Google calendar of space history woke me to say that the space shuttle Challenger exploded 34 years ago today. If you are GenX like me, you remember exactly where you were in 1986 when the...
Will the Boeing / SpaceX space race be fair?
This Sunday, January 19, 2020, after multiple weather-related delays, SpaceX was able to launch a 3-time used Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center’s launch pad 39A. Atop this rocket was a Crew Dragon capsule containing two mannequins and a whole lot of sensors. This...
Astronomy conference economics
What feels like a million years ago, I attended my first American Astronomical Society meeting. It was my senior year at MSU and it was expected that I’d be presenting research to help me get into grad school. I can’t remember exactly what was in my poster, but I...
Counting rocks: Maybe it’s enough
[N.B. Yesterday I accepted the Issac Asimov Science Award from the American Humanist Society. This is my acceptance speech, which you can watch it over on YouTube. If my voice sounds off, it's because I'm still recovering from #@$!(*^!@% Bronchitis.] Memory is a...
Living in this body
Examining the Flowers (by Pamela Gay) Earlier today I ran by the post office to ship a package. It's full on spring & I decided it was time to pull out spring dresses. A women in line complemented me on my look & when I told her it was...
Big Data and our Humanity: A Talk
[Background: The week of March 11, 2018 I attended the "Computing Morality: Artificial Intelligence and 'Big Data' in Science and Faith" conference at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. This was a conference with talks ranging from how we train self-driving cars to handle...
The Unacknowledged Costs of Academic Travel
I travel a lot. I travel for conferences, for planning meetings, for NASA collaboration meetings, for filming, for launches… for a ton of things that are related to my work. I can't really complain about the travel; I get to see the world while being exposed to new...
Why I fly American
Today I’m flying from St Louis to San Diego on Southwest Air and I feel a bit like a traitor. For years, I’ve flown on American Airlines pretty exclusively. One of my only speaker requirements is that my travel gets booked on American. This isn’t because they have the...