[X] My Assistant

[general]

What happened to the Cornell page with Steve Squyres's updates?
I'm forwarded to a ballet Website.

http://athena.cornell.edu/

[djellison]

Billy - if you took the time to look at all the things Steve has taken the time to do (you've done that right? you've seen the lectures he's done that are online, you've watched all the press conferences, the radio show appearences etc etc...I assume you've consumed and calculated every single iota of outreach he's done to establish that he's not doing enough) , such as the hour long interview we conducted last autumn...you would hear his comments regarding another book.

I've met him only once. He gave a lecture to the BAA in Cambridge last year that the BAA president described as the best lecture he had ever seen. Steve had crossed 15 time zones in 5 days to be there - he was Spirit SOWG chair three days before - flew to Washington for a press conference, then flew to the UK for the DPS meeting. The guy should have done the lecture and then retired to his hotel for a well deserved break before the busy DPS week thereafter. The guy had industial strength jet lag and a HUGE week of presentations and science meetings ahead of him - and he was as relaxed, friendly, interesting, exciting as anyone could possibly be. He'd cleared the entire evening to have a chat with me so that we could share as much MER info as possible via the MP3 and writeup that I did.

Just because it's a governmental operation, it does not render every member of that team your own info-slave.

Personally - your suggestion that they should somehow be banned from writing books about it, your general attitude about them stinks NO mission has had the outreach efforts of MER. NO team has worked THIS LONG and THIS HARD to get information out to the public...MER has TOTALLY REDEFINED what a mission can do in terms of outreach and education.and you STILL have complaints. I have words I'd like to use, but I'd end up banning myself for using them. You should start showing them some damn respect.

Doug

(PS - a further critical post from BillyMER, despite a suspension for an utterly disrespectful attitude in the past, combined with a clear lack of understand or acknowledgement of the work the MER team have done has resulted in him being removed from the forum. Criticism toward those who do not pull their weight is justified and welcome. A total lack of respect and unjustified criticism, despite being asked to refrain, is not)