ATKeiper - Slashdot User

How Does GPS Change Us?-> 0

Submitted by ATKeiper on Thursday August 11 2011, @09:45PM

ATKeiper writes "People have talked for a while about the effects of GPS on our driving ability and our sense of direction; one researcher at McGill has even been
developing an exercise regimen to compensate for our supposedly atrophying navigational ability. But is GPS reshaping our lives in a more fundamental sense? The author of this new essay draws on science, sociology, and literature to argue that GPS is transforming how we think about travel and exploration. How can we discover “the new” in an age when everything around us is mapped?"
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Gas Stations in Space?-> 0

Submitted by

ATKeiper

on Monday July 27 2009, @03:37PM

ATKeiper writes "With the help of yet another committee in a long line of committees studying space, the Obama administration is reconsidering NASA's future in light of new budgetary realities and in the wake of a series of technical problems for the Constellation architecture that the space agency developed as part of the post-Columbia Vision for Space Exploration. In a new essay, aerospace engineer and blogger Rand Simberg reviews NASA's history and argues that the agency should scrap Constellation and instead work toward a space infrastructure — featuring propellant depots in orbit and elsewhere. 'It isn't NASA's job to put humans on Mars,' he writes. 'It's NASA's job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society, or an offshoot of the Latter-Day Saints, or an adventure tourism company, to put humans on Mars.'"
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The Death of Shop Class?

Submitted by

ATKeiper

on Wednesday September 20 2006, @02:47PM

ATKeiper writes "A major essay in the latest issue of the journal The New Atlantis (which I help edit) describes the decline of manual competence — the ability to build and fix things with our own hands — in the age of prefabricated parts and hidden workings. The author, Matthew B. Crawford, writes that schools nowadays are wrong to steer young people away from the manual trades and toward 'the most ghostly kinds of work.' Manual work, he argues, is more cognitively demanding and personally fulfilling than many people would expect. Meanwhile, white-collar 'knowledge worker' jobs — the jobs that put us in front of computers all day — seem to be heading more and more toward routinized mindlessness."