an anthropology of creativity and freedom
In 1928, Virginia Woolf was asked to give two lectures on the topic of Women and Fiction at two women’s colleges in Cambridge. Her digressions over the title she had been given to lecture on resulted in her book “A Room of One’s Own” (Woolf 1929). Why is it, she pondered, that she was asked... Continue Reading →
Cislunar space is the name for the volume of space between Earth and Moon. This space is sparsely occupied, mainly by one international space station and a steady growth of satellites and space junk in orbit around Earth. Now and then, an asteroid passes by close enough to earn it the name near-Earth-object or –... Continue Reading →
I’ve been spending a couple of afternoons reading Marxism, or more specifically reading Marcuse and Kolakowski, because in the course of writing an article about how the utopian genre has changed over time, I’ve reached the phase (post world wars) where people start saying utopia is dead or has ended. Some of the people arguing... Continue Reading →
As I begin to acquaint myself with twitter in March and April 2020, I notice one of the big stories in the twitter community ‘during corona’ is whether or not Elon Musk has really given the ventilators he promised to a hospital. It seems to send ripples of joy through the community of tweeters (are... Continue Reading →
Excerpt from piece: "If left to my own devises, I will oscillate between short spurts of intense action followed by longer periods inclined to do nothing at all. Of course, between kids and work, that is not really an option, but what I’m saying is, I’d do it if I could. But what does it... Continue Reading →
Granted, I’ve been listening to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab’s latest podcast series on asteroids. This is what I learned: Asteroids are called thus because they looks ‘like Asters’ – stars – when you first see them in a telescope. But they are tiny and move and so may be identified by their movement and way... Continue Reading →
I signed up to join the ‘SuperShe community’ in August 2019. The idea of the island both attracted and repelled me. I was not sure if I wanted to go so bad that I wanted to blow all my travel funding. The price for a week on SuperShe at that point was reported by Lonely... Continue Reading →
When I wrote about ‘Government on Mars’ about a month ago, I wondered about the Moon Agreement. Unlike its parent treaty the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and its three sibling treaties concerning the rescue of astronauts, liability for damage caused by space objects, and the registration of objects launched into outer space, the Moon... Continue Reading →
On the second day of the International Space Station Research & Development Conference 2020 I sit in on a panel related to the new space economy. It is called Investing in Space: Trends, Opportunities, and Risks. After it finishes I'm convinced I need to start buying stocks. But apart from learning a lot about investment... Continue Reading →
A Friday in August 2020 a colleague from the Department of History sends me an email. Elon Musk has tweeted about bureaucracy which is our shared research topic (mine: contemporary; his: the middle ages). The gold nugget Musk offers us is this: "Bureaucracy is inherently Kafkaesque" (Musk on Twitter 20 August 2020). Someone replies: How... Continue Reading →
The Grandson of Milton Friedman, Patri Friedman, has written a book called Seasteading in collaboration with a guy called Joe Quirk. My point is the subtitle: “How floating nations will restore the environment, enrich the poor, cure the sick, and liberate humanity from politicians.” This is a serious case of what I (during a meeting... Continue Reading →
Mars: A Room of My Own 