Under the Canopy

 On Christmas Eve this year, NASA will launch the James Webb space telescope.  I heard one of the interviewees say, "...we do not currently have the technology to make repairs on this telescope..."    I will spend a good deal of time this week, as I do every week convincing clients to NOT deploy technology that cannot be supported.   I simultaneously feel that launching critical, unrepairable technology into space is a brave, confident, and hopeful act and a terrible, stupid waste.  Reading through comments made by scientists who have worked on the telescope and who will depend on it for their research, I am not alone.

 Giving a manager at an HR services company advice on how to manage his direct reports is NOT the kind of irony I enjoy.  

 I've been participating in a book study on Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind (Why good people are divided by politics and religion) .  A lot of our discussion has revolved around individualistic versus community orientations.  This morning as I sipped my coffee, poured from the communal coffee urn, I pondered the moral implications of Keurig coffee.   Some of my earliest memories are of large extended family gatherings where aunts and uncles argued over coffee.  They could tell at first taste who had won the race to the coffee urn (borrowed from the church for the duration) and made the coffee.  Long before I had my first taste of coffee, I could rank my aunts and uncles in order based on how strong or weak they drank their coffee.  No matter what time we arrived, there would be a hot pot of coffee on the burner or being brewed.  Coffee was an all day drink and 'decaf' was not part of the vocabulary.  After the kids were put to bed, t...