2025 was a unique year. I lived in four different states and was a resident of those states. I moved across the country three times, with professional movers, packing and unpacking, registering my car, updating bank accounts, IDs, insurance, and permanent addresses. I leased apartments, sold my beloved house in Florida, and navigated multiple career …
Category Archives: Life
Socially Sanctioned Incompetence
In America, there is a funny, and revealing, version of mathematics. One popular joke is that, at a dinner party, the only socially acceptable thing to be bad at is mathematics. Someone recalls high school and says they are terrible at math, another says, me too, and everybody laughs. This is not so common in …
Note on Early Medieval Universities, the Scholastic Method, and the Formation of Critical Thought
Early medieval universities formed a distinct intellectual system built around structure, discipline, and the controlled expansion of reasoning. These institutions emerged from cathedral schools and monastic centers and evolved into formal environments where knowledge was not only preserved but interrogated. Their core mechanism was the scholastic method, a systematic approach that treated ideas as analytical …
Remembering Dennis Bushnell
I received word via the NASA Alumni Association that Dennis Bushnell passed away. Dennis Bushnell was a long-serving Chief Scientist of NASA Langley Research Center. I remember meeting him for the first time when there was internal research funding available at NASA for researchers. I wrote a proposal on fluid thrust factoring of a particular …
GE Aerospace and New York
I recently started in September a new position at General Electric Aerospace at the Research Center in Niskayuna, New York. This is a post that came a bit late because of the move to New York State and all the other details that come with starting a new job. I am working as a Technical …
Olaf O. Storaasli
Recently I lost a friend, Olaf O. Storaasli, Ph.D., due to medical complications. I first met him through the NASA Langley Alumni Association after giving a lecture titled Life After Academics. Although we did not overlap during my time at NASA, we connected through shared experiences. Later, he and his wife visited Florida, and I …
New Position
Today I started my new position as the Senior Scientific Technical Manager (SSTM) for Hypersonics at the US Navy’s Naval Air Warfare Center (NAWCAD).
Academic Odyssey to Ithaca
Today marks the conclusion of my professorship at the University of Florida. Odysseus’s journey from the Ilion Wars (Trojan Wars) back to Ithaca was an odyssey that defined much of his lifetime. Though separated from his love, it was the journey that made his love meaningful. Approximately eight and a half years ago, I began …
Madame Rousseau on d’Alembert
You will never be anything but a philosopher – and what is that but an ass who plagues himself all his life, that he may be talked about after he is dead. ~ Madame Rousseau on d’Alembert
Gödel and Time
$\mathrm{LL}$ cosmological solutions with non-vanishing density of matter known at present ${ }^1$ have the common property that, in a certain sense, they contain an “absolute” time coordinate, ${ }^2$ owing to the fact that there exists a one-parametric system of three-spaces everywhere orthogonal on the world lines of matter. It is easily seen that …