An astute reader, who I very much respect, called me out on the “why Mars” question. His question: “why this, over feeding the hungry, curing cancer, or stopping AIDS?” First, if his argument is to have any merit, it has to apply to all basic science. Astronomy, geology, archaeology, paleontology, etc., all have the same …
Continue reading ‘AIDS, Astronauts and Federal Science Spending’ »
I don’t have a lot of patience, frankly, with the “Why Mars” question. If someone doesn’t get it when you say, “because it’s cool”, then there’s little hope for a deeper conversation. “Because it’s cool” isn’t really the complete answer, of course, just a shorthand for the richness of of the human experience of gathering …
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I just noticed an accidental joke I left in the GNOME dictionary docs. To personalize the screenshot, I took an image of the dictionary looking up the definition of Albuquerque. It’s been this way through several generations of GNOME releases: This evening when I was checking docs for the 2.6 release I noticed what the …
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A team of Russian archaeologists has found a site in far northern Siberia that?s all kinds of interesting. For starters, there?s the age. Radiocarbon dating puts the age at about 30,000 years old. That?s Pleistocene, ice age times. That?s the oldest human occupations north of the Arctic Circle yet found. This is key, because for …
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