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Day of Action

The internet is perhaps the single greatest tool humans have ever created. It has rapidly changed our lives over the past two decades and will continue to do so for as long as we allow it. 

We can decide to make it clear now that access to the internet should be unfettered. We can also decide that allowing internet providers to limit users' degrees of freedom in the name of profit is acceptable. I vote for the former. If we discard net neutrality, we will shut the door on many innovators and content-creators who cannot afford to pay to compete with the data transfer rates of large companies. In my opinion, this would undermine the fundamental strengths of the internet.  

Let's stand for net-neutrality now. Any compromise is one which may cause incalculable harm to progress.

Let the FCC know that net neutrality is important: 

https://www.battleforthenet.com/july12/ 

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Congrats to #NYstate for leading the way and investing in higher education! They are setting a good example.

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Let’s go SpaceX... This is a historical launch and they’ve been working toward this for a long time

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Let’s keep this in mind as we fight for the future. The Demon Haunted World, along with Sagan’s other work, remains insightful and relevant today.

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Photo by Erik Olson

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Thoreau’s writing remains incredibly relevant today.     “But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.... It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience.” You can read the full text here: http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/thoreau/civil/ 

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He spits the truth.

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This is a critical time for members of the scientific community and informed public to speak up and combat ignorance.

Misinformation, denial of empirical facts, and pseudoscience cannot go unchecked in this age of high-impact technology. We have the tools to deal with these threats. Now is the time to put them to use.

Two very alarming changes have already been made on the White House website. Reason, empathy and progress must be fought for. I hope this isn’t indicative of upcoming policies but fear it obviously is.

Also I just edited this post to add my own screenshot: the White House’s website for combating antibiotic resistant bacteria is gone too.

I want to note that most of the great steps of social progress in American history were *not* made by presidents or politicians acting of their own accord. America thrives in a state of constant *peaceful* revolt. Protest, political dissent and civil disobedience are what change things.

Voting is great and we need more to do it, but the women’s suffrage movement didn’t get voted into victory. Republican President Nixon (Nixon!) didn’t create the Environmental Protection Agency because he had an environmentalist’s stance on the Earth.

It’s important to always remember that when people wield their concerns and press power to answer for itself, they change the world.

(Images courtesy of screenshots from a friend and from myself)

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Graphic by Janina A. Larenas. January, 2017.

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SpaceX continuing to make history. Stage 1 successfully landed and Stage 2 is now in low Earth orbit *hopefully* deploying satellites successfully as planned. From the press kit: “The payloads for this launch are the first 10 Iridium NEXT satellites. Iridium NEXT will replace the world's largest commercial satellite network of low-earth orbit satellites in what will be one of the largest "tech upgrades" in history. Iridium has partnered with Thales Alenia Space for the manufacturing, assembly and testing of 81 Iridium NEXT satellites, at least 70 of which will be launched by SpaceX. The process of replacing the satellites one-by-one in a constellation of this size and scale has never been completed before. Iridium NEXT will enable the development of new and innovative products and solutions across Iridium's vast partner ecosystem. Additionally, Iridium Certus, the next-generation multi-service communications platform enabled by Iridium NEXT, will deliver faster speeds and higher throughputs across multiple industry verticals. A service of this quality and value is unprecedented in the industry, and is poised to disrupt the current market status quo. Currently, the service is set to be commercially available in 2017 and is undergoing testing on Iridium's existing network. Iridium's primary launch campaign consists of seven SpaceX Falcon 9 launches, deploying ten Iridium NEXT satellites at a time. These 70 Iridium NEXT satellites are scheduled to be deployed by early 2018. Iridium is the only mobile voice and data satellite communications network that spans the entire globe. Iridium enables real time connections between people, organizations and assets to and from anywhere.”

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A Lab Culture Grown From the Handprint of an Eight-Year-Old After Playing Outside

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Walking around Charlottesville, VA and found this beautiful rosy maple moth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryocampa_rubicunda) resting on the side of a tree.

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This past weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the University of Virginia’s L. Starling Reid Undergraduate Psychology Conference to share some research. Dr. Geoffrey Cohen, a social psychologist from Stanford University, gave an amazing keynote lecture about how social psychological processes (such as stereotype threat) propagate through time and have lasting consequences. He highlighted some incredible research about how “wise interventions” at critical times of vulnerability may dramatically change the trajectory of someone’s life. This research gives a unique insight into the shortcomings of our institutions and highlights techniques to address these shortcomings. The video above is a very similar lecture which I would recommend to anyone interested in the fields of psychology and education or concerned about achievement gaps between demographic groups. If you can’t make it through the whole video, skip to ~31:50 for some specific studies and results.

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Our First Podcast - The Downlink 0

We don’t have all of our mics set up correctly yet. But if you want to check out our very first podcast and get a more detailed listen into how we build spacecraft. We’ll have a better setup next time!

We talk about:

Our Lab

Our Satellites

Some CubeSat News

Some NASA News

Some Spacestation News

Some Cooking Advice

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This is fantastic news! @carolynporco is currently sowing the seeds of exploration.

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When NPR reported Bob Ebeling’s story on the 30th anniversary of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, hundreds of listeners and readers expressed distress and sympathy in letters and emails.

On Jan. 27, 1986, the former engineer for shuttle contractor Morton Thiokol had joined four colleagues in trying to keep Challenger grounded. They argued for hours that the launch the next morning would be the coldest ever. Freezing temperatures, their data showed, stiffened rubber O-rings that keep burning rocket fuel from leaking out of the joints in the shuttle’s boosters.

But NASA officials rejected that data, and Thiokol executives overruled Ebeling and the other engineers.

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I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him. I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all... ..Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood. That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of presidency in which I believe — a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group, nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation, or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

John F. Kennedy 

Full audio and transcript: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16920600