Hopefully Interesting

Recently I finished reading, well, starting three books in a row that were about consciousness.  Which, of course, it quite enough to do a blog post. The first was  Consciousness and the Brain  by Stanislas Dehaene.  It was excellent.  Often when we talk about consciousness philosophically we get lost in depths of abstraction.  This was about consciousness as a scientifically observable phenomenon.  How to tell if someone is conscious of something?  Ask them if they saw it.  People are conscious of things when they notice them but not when they're asleep or not paying attention to them or in various other circumstances.  Insects can't report what they see so we'll get back to the problem of insect consciousness later. It turns out there's a lot of investigation you can do within that framework that's still very interesting.  And all the philosophical debate about whether qualia are separable from observations is neatly sidestepped for now. Investigations you c

This is an exciting time to be someone interested in spaceflight.  Not as exciting as the original space race, of course, but hopefully we'll get close within the coming decade.  SpaceX has been making a lot of news with its landings of the first stages of its rockets after using them and its big plans for future Mars missions h and sending people around the moon . The United Launch Alliance, which handles most of the government's launches and has a very good reliability record , also has some fairly ambitions plans it's announced involving the development of the space near Earth and it's next generation upper stage .  But probably the most exciting competitor to SpaceX right now (besides NASA) is Blue Origin. SpaceX has its Falcon 9 which is launching satellites now and its more ambitious and out there ITS.  Blue Origin has until now had its New Shepard rocket for shuttling tourists up to space briefly but recently its been talking more about the New Glenn, a vehi