Monthly Archives: September 2022
A monkish existence
In addition to others featured here, Oliver Sacks is one of my favorite authors. For most of his life he was known as a respected neurologist and passionate storyteller who took a wholistic view of his patients, not seeing them as diseases that need to be titrated away, but instead as complex individuals. Although Sacks…
Scientific Progress
It occurs to me that much of scientific progress, at least in the realm of astronomy and our understanding of the universe, since the enlightenment can be described as a regression of the importance of human beings relative to the universe. Of course, it used to be obvious that the Earth was at the center…
Preparation
I’ve accepted that I can’t control much about Mars. When you start a new day as a rover driver the terrain is what it is, sometimes rocky, sometimes sandy, rarely amenable to remote robotic activities. Science describes what they want and sometimes we can do it, sometimes we can’t. There are power constraints, data constraints,…