Education

Last week I wrote a post that referred to the satellite I worked on for my PhD. Writing it led looking up the satellite on Wikipedia. I do so every now and then. It's called XMM-Newton. XMM stands for X-ray Multimirror Misson. It was launched in December 1999, designed for a ten-year life. It's still going, so it outperformed its mission. For some reason, this time looking on the Wikipedia page I noticed footnote 44, which linked to a paper "The Reflection Grating Spectrometer on board XMM-Newton". The reflection grating spectrometer is the component I worked on. The authors listed in the footnote include my advisor. If you click the link, you'll see my name on the author list. The paper shows calibration results. A…

I've been reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as part of the online course at Hillsdale College. I should say rereading, since I read it in college as part of Columbia's Core Curriculum, but that was the late 1980s. As long ago as the 80s were, it was recent compared to when Aristotle wrote them. I should also say reading selections from it, not the whole book. A section on what he calls a good person versus a corrupt one resonated with how I'm choosing to live. Avoiding polluting and depleting seem beautiful to me. It takes work. It doesn't make money or honors. I do it for others, not just myself. I was pleasantly surprised at how accurately this over-two-thousand year old book resonated with the…

When people become corrupted---that is, when they act against their values---they come up with what I call cockamamie schemes. They create elaborate plans that a moment's reflection would show are impossible. Before the Civil War, for example, people created schemes to colonize Liberia, Nova Scotia, and other places with freed slaves as a way to solve the problem of slavery. People then also came up with the "Diffusion Argument," which said that by extending slavery over more territory it would become diffuse and end. Is it obvious how self-serving and nonsensical they are? Today we come up with cockamamie schemes that if we use more solar and wind power we will use less fossil fuel power. We come up with schemes that recycling will clean…