There was a great press conference yesterday. I ate it up. Don'l has linked to the footage I described earlier, where all the various landing linked cameras took pictures of various parts of the Mars landing procedure, which went as flawlessly as possible. In the press conference, the various responsible parties gave fascinating accounts of their approaches, problems, and solutions, many of which were to get off-the-shelf parts and devices, but then configure them for cleanliness and space dust.

I believe in education, but defining education and practising good education and the issue of moral or ethical use of said education rapidly leads to -discussion-. I believe that the French have reputable and long established schools for people in government bureaucracy and presumably many of them become elected officials. Can we say that France is better off than other European countries with those establishments?

Many people are educated idiots. It doesn't save them from being idiots. And that includes technical education. Education, as in 'school' can also stifle thought. Education to my mind is not to fill a mind with current theory and understood fact, but to teach the mind to teach itself and furnish an awareness of how wrong things can go.

When Galileo wrote about rings of Saturn and moons of Jupiter, he was describing new things unknown by Archimedes. That was close to a radical act in his era. Education at his time was under strict control, as though knowledge can be 'managed'.

Watching and hearing these young and not-so-young scientists, engineers, and designers talk about the adventure of putting together their robots and rockets is incredibly inspiring and educational in the truest sense of that word.

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." - Plutarch