After much deliberation, I’ve determined that it’s more realistic to shift my blog post frequency to two posts per month due to my current schedule. I dislike changing long-term goals that I think have much to offer, but I had to weigh my prior judgment against the new data that became available after several months of writing. I hope that less frequent posts will improve the overall writing quality. Here’s a list of things I’ve learned and why I have decided to make this shift:
- Writing is time consuming and harder than it looks. I have new respect for authors of all types!
- Concise wording is a learned skill. One of my goals is to improve on this.
- I prefer writing about certain topics more than others. I really had to try different topics to figure this out.
- Making an outline is valuable and makes the writing process much easier. Starting to write without a plan can be problematic
Weekly Extreme Exception
I find the recent explosion of competitions incentivizing technology development exciting for its simple but ambitious goal. Unlike subjective awards, a competition requires a concise means of determining a winner, and when the pool of potential participants is virtually unbounded, it can allow for breakthroughs from unexpected places. The XPRIZE is the example that is foremost in my mind, primarily due to its longevity and the caliber of participating groups. Hats off to Peter Diamandis for creating the initiative (among his other intriguing work). The XPRIZE website lists the active and past prizes, but the Google Lunar XPRIZE is a recent one that garnered a fair bit of attention. This video shows the winning team from the Ansari XPRIZE, which was the first XPRIZE competition. In October 2004, the Scaled Composites team managed to achieve the goal of launching a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. Impressive!
