Keep on Keepin' on.
I've been staying busy with various things, some astronomy, some writing related, but late July and early August have, understandably, been pretty quiet.
On July 15, I attended a meeting of the Austin Forum on Technology and Society to hear a talk by Eric Salwan of Austin area rocket company Firefly Aerospace. Firefly just scored a coup by nailing the first successful commercial mission to the Moon, their Blue Ghost lander. Eric was an original founder of Firefly, but they went broke and got resurrected by others. He is still deeply engrained in the Firefly operation and gave a great presentation. I had met the first founder of Firefly, Tom Markusic, at a previous Austin Forum presentation years ago and was sufficiently taken with his story that I wrote about it in The Path to Singularity. I had a mild hope that I might get Firefly to bulk order some copies of the book to give to employees and customers. I gave Eric an autographed copy before his talk. I'm not sure he managed to retain it through the evening and the meet-and-greet at a local pub afterwards (which I skipped).
For decades I have written little summaries of my travels around the world. These stories try to capture the ironies and cultural differences one finds that make life interesting. On Monday July 28, I sent a proposal for this travel memoir tentatively entitled Tales from a Small Planet to the University of Texas Press. I got a prompt reply saying my chosen acquisition editor went on vacation the previous Monday and won't be back for two weeks. Great timing.
On July 30, I attended a Zoom call with the Austin Forum book discussion group. The topic was Measure What Matters by venture capitalist John Doerr on the business goal-setting technique of Objectives and Key Results, OKR, espoused by Andy Grove of Intel and employed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as they built Google. As it so happened, the prospective leader of the discussion, Austin Forum Director Jay Boisseau, was out of pocket and the group just self-organized. Many of the attendees were very familiar with the OKR technique, and we had a rousing discussion.
On August 7, I attended yet another Austin Forum presentation on robotics by UT's Peter Stone. He's the Director of Robotics at UT and a Vice President for Robotics at Sony. His team has taught little robots to cooperate and play (slow) competitive soccer, an amazing technical feat. I also wrote about that in Path and had previously given Peter an autographed copy.
August 8th, I had a call with the CEO and CTO of Tory Industries to talk about the specifics of the panel discussion in which I had agreed to participate after my keynote address on August 20 (see #18). We used Microsoft's Teams, which I don't much like. In this case, I could not get my video to work, although it had worked when I first did a call with them. They liked the notion of my talking about how the European Southern Observatory is wrestling with issues of using AI to handle proposals without violating proprietary issues, a parallel to the issue Tory faces with customers of its software who share business plans. I had another Teams call with Tory and the other panelists on August 15. In this case, I could not get Teams to work at all. It sent me from browser to app that wouldn't connect. It needed a code I didn't have. Finally, one of the Tory people suggested I download the Teams app on my phone and plug in the meeting ID and login code. Amazingly, that worked in real time, and I joined the discussion on the phone only about 10 minutes late.
During these doldrums, I have worked steadily on absorbing and rendering a thick stack of notes my dad left on our years in Idaho where I cut my teeth on school science projects and he worked on a proposed nuclear airplane. This all boiled down to three pretty much finished chapters in the biography. I am still wrestling with how much to try to capture his voice from these notes and how much to boil this material down to keep the story moving. Not easy.