Lawrence Krauss has written an excellent defense of the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble which is currently under threat of cancellation. I was really down on the space shuttle the other day, but that's because I think it was a failure at doing its job of enabling exploration and discovery — the Space Telescope is a fabulous tool that works, and I want NASA to focus more on cost-effective, powerful methods of exploring the universe.
Lawrence Krauss also criticized the space shuttle, and urges us to send more robots into space. Uh-oh. Cue ominous music as Neil deGrasse Tyson emerges from the wings, carrying a folding chair.
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After spending all last weekend preparing our income tax return, I must have money on my mind. So this week's Casual Fridays study is about money. I don't want to tell you much more about it before you participate in the survey because it may affect the results, so just go ahead and click.
It's been a while since I've written a topology post. Rest assured - there's plenty more topology
Topology usually starts with the idea of a *metric space*. A metric space is a set of values with some concept of *distance*. We need to define that first, before we can get into anything really interesting.
Metric Spaces and Distance
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In the mid-1970s, the U.S. State Department prohibited the internal use of the term "space colony," due to the global bad reputation of colonialism.