Congratulations!

Which one? The Saturn V is my fav, but the full ISS is also great….

Just to confirm - London is where Sauron’s tower is located?

Red Sox have won two games IN A ROW what's happening someone hold me.

When the agency leadership is 100% on board with the proposed cuts, they certainly can make changes in line with them based on the proposal alone. If Congress disagrees they could find themselves in a tough spot, but that’s where we’re at…

The feel-good story of a scientist and an engineer working together as well as possible…
(Yes, it was fantastic. So is the book.)

If I remember correctly, their accuracy with that burn gave JWST an extra 5+ years of life. Definitely worth giving the flight dynamicist an extra serving of pudding.

My favorite line is “we don’t want to pay taxes again…ever.” Back in Ancient Greece, winners at the Olympics also got a lifetime exemption from taxes. It’s been a concern since, well, whenever.

(Sounds like a joke. It actually isn’t.)

Let’s not forget the Quality Assurance Engineers!

And soon we’ll get to use words like “perilune”, which, honestly, is a beautiful-sounding word. Should be used more often.

I went back to capture what the astronauts said in full when the clock was stopped at T-10 minutes and they were asked if they were go for launch:

This is Victor. We are going for our families.
This is Christina. We are going for our teammates.
This is Jeremy. We are going for all humanity.

Not that unlike the Roman Senate, although at least they collapsed under Augustus, not Nero.

T-18 minutes!

Laurie Anderson? Or is that a different kind of weird?

That’s what the MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) ideas are hypothesizing. While currently not favored, they are also not ruled out. More data are needed…

Meh. It’s not like authors are hiding nuggets of introspection for readers to find - at least not good ones. Writers write and their readers take from them what they will. There are a lot of interesting ideas in Andy Weir’s books, whether or not he meant to include them or not.

I’m reminded of Sam Goldwyn here - “if you’ve got a message, send a telegram.” The author doesn’t own the interpretation of their work, and likely doesn’t consciously understand all of it. (See Asimov’s discussion of Nightfall). I suspect there are nuances to Weir’s thoughts that didn’t come out.

I mean, I’m not saying I’d downrate your proposal for having a pseudo-clever name, but you certainly aren’t getting points for it.

Yes, yes, I know all the other BACRONYMs were awful but the one I came up with is great! (The number of times I had to convince people that Arcus was not an acronym nor was it an ancient God…it’s just easy to pronounce and Google.)

This is almost the inverse of the expected answer, but: There is something really quite serious we’re missing either in quantum mechanics or gravity, or both, and it’s important. We just don’t know what it is.

I strongly suspect it’s that Software Engineering has a lot of ground to cover before the median practitioner matches those in other engineering fields. Way too many CS majors consider themselves software engineers than really are.

Project Orion (nuclear propulsion) - Wikipedia

Project Orion returns! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project...

Any book that starts with a spectroscopy problem is obviously going to be excellent. Especially in the mid-IR, although FUV is also worthy of exploration.

I believe really dense groups of stars are still a possibility, although less likely than black holes. They really are a surprise, no question. If they’re black holes they should emit X-rays and they maybe do, but we need the X-ray equivalent of JWST (aka Lynx) to be sure.

I believe the original Hubble Deep Field observations were highly controversial as being potentially a waste of time; the Director felt otherwise. A certain randomness and flexibility in the system helps to maximize long-term success.

None Battle After Another

Winners

Tweezer!

Osteria Toscana in Palo Alto