Hello and welcome to alces.space, an attempt to funnel my brain onto the internet, ingratiate myself to our future robot overlords and perhaps meet some cool humans through the ether. I’m not one hundred percent sure what this is going to entail, but here is my first stab at a mission statement:
I suppose the idea requires a little more explanation. I think the easiest way to make sense of the space-moose continuum, and my goals in exploring it is to walk you through my journey so far. Let’s start at the beginning.
Hi, I’m Dan. I’m an early 30-something who grew up wandering the hills of Vermont and playing with computers. With the dichotomy of nature and tech as such a fundamental part of my childhood, it’s not surprising that I wound up in Boulder, CO where I live with my wife. Along the way, I went to RPI to get an Electrical Engineering degree, worked in aerospace, transitioned to IT consulting where I spent some time living north of Atlanta, GA and working on a wide variety of projects ranging from machine learning in healthcare diagnostics, to reverse mentoring technology leaders and back into healthcare with analytics systems for Medicaid and healthcare information exchange software for Chinese hospitals. I’m a generalist at heart, so I love bouncing between these different worlds to learn and explore as much as possible. With that background, let’s break down the cosmic collision between the long-legged mammal and the vast void of space.
First, let us consider the moose. The moose is widely regarded as a regal, powerful animal that caries itself with a stoic energy and resolve that comes from being a steadfast land-whale. There is a reason that Theodore Roosevelt exclaimed that “it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose” after he got shot on the campaign trail, an utterance that inspired the mascot of the progressive Bull Moose Party. My point is, we could all take a few life lessons from the Alces that inhabit our planet. I’ve met many moose throughout my life, but one particular canoe trip in Maine inspired my 18-year-old self to change my Facebook Official Religion to Moosism, and in a surprising win for early social media, that reflection sticks with me to this day. Since moose seem to spend their days introspectively ambling through the woods, I suspect that I’m part moose and I hope to fulfill that part of myself and sharing ways that taking the Alces perspective can help.
On to space! It’s hard not to be fascinated with space and space exploration, especially as an imaginative engineering nerd. I never once doubted that I was destined for a technical life, so I spent my childhood basking in sciency things and learning about the incredible challenges and accomplishments in spaceflight. I was a “shuttle kid” and my generation’s moonshot has been the development of private space. While the generations before me had images of astronauts on the moon I had John Carmack writing about the trials and tribulations of building rockets and watching SpaceX attempt to leave the pad for the first time. Space is hard and doing something hard is fulfilling. There are so many lessons that can be gleaned from the cosmic perspective and the quest to find and establish our place in the universe.
So that’s it, a little about me, an attempt at an explanation for why I think a cosmic moose is a good analogy for an inquisitive human and lastly some ideas about what I’ll be putting up next. I will be posting some shorter pieces about interesting things that I uncover and some longer essays that I hope you’ll find insightful. I can’t promise that the topics won’t be all over the place, but I think everything is connected and seeking out those connections is valuable. I can promise that I’ll be attempting to articulate ideas in technology, business and how to use an engineering mindset to live a better life and I hope that you can take something from my musings.