Curiosity

This word had been a key part of my life for as long as I can remember. It caught the curiosity bug when my second Dad, Andy Tarapchec , a WWII combat bomber pilot, started taking me as a four-year old to visit the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. I am certain I never got over this bug, and it drives me even today. I seem to want to know how EVERYTHING works! I am here to tell you, curiosity resulted in me having a fabulous career in engineering and science.

Somehow, it just seems fitting that this word is the name of the latest rover NASA has landed on Mars. This is an image of the vehicle's wheels and motors undergoing testing long before the launch. Like other rovers NASA has built, Curiosity is powered by electric motors in the hubs of each wheel, with servo mechanisms that can rotate the entire wheel assembly in the mounting hardware above the wheel. As you can see, the six wheels are interconnected by a hinged framework that allows all of the wheels to move around obstacles like the rock this test is trying to move over.

It is a pretty cool mechanism.

Curiosity taught me something else, something I was reading about recently - it made me learn how to learn.

In an article titled The best programming advice I ever got, Andrei Alexandrescu tells a tale about his mother guiding him into computer science, even though she knew little about it. She sensed that it was the "next big theng".

There will always be another "next big thing" coming along. The technological world seems to spawn some new cool thing every day. That is why I subscribe to news feeds like InformIT which gives me morning updates on things going on in the IT industry.

Andrei closed his article with a cool summary of the best advice he got:

"great programmers..(are) not experts in something as much as experts in becoming experts in something. The best programming advice I ever got was to spend my entire career becoming educable. "

Good advice for those of you learning about this technological world we live in!