an anthropology of creativity and freedom
On August 27 2020 I am scheduled to attend the annual European Astrobiology Network Association Conference. Yet on the same day, NASA is hosting the annual International Space Station Research and Development Conference. Because it is still ‘during the corona’ in the United States and in Europe both conferences have been moved online so I... 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 they move 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 →
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 →
As 2020 wears on, Mars is all over the news. There’s corona, there Black Lives Matter, there’s Beirut, there’s starvation, there’s Hong Kong, there's Trump & Biden, and now there’s Mars. SpaceX has successfully launched astronauts going to the International Space Station from the US for the first time since 2011. I had no idea... Continue Reading →
The great thing about industrious people is that things happen. I’m beginning to wonder if the bad thing about industrious people is the same. The night sky as we now know it is in the process of changing for good. I am talking about Starlink; Elon Musk’s fleet of satellites intended to revolutionize internet speed... Continue Reading →
The map-making angle seems for the longest time to be a dead end. ‘During the corona’ I get the fantastic idea one day that I can interview WASD20 through Zoom. WASD20, whose name it turns out is Nathan, teaches American history at a high school. I quiz him about the economy of youtube channels and... Continue Reading →
In January 2017, the number one grocery product sold through Amazon was a meal replacement drink called Soylent (Watson 2018). Soylent is, according to the company website, an engineered nutrition drink consisting of soyprotein, slow-burning carbs from beets, oleic sunflower oil, and 26 vitamins and minerals. The composition of the drink has been engineered so... Continue Reading →
