That’s sort of what we do with our daughter. She’s 3 and starting to get picky, but we’ve ingrained in her since she could understand human speech “You gotta try new things cuz they might taste good” (H/T to Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood for making that a song for us to sing to her.) Once she tries it, she tends to like…

Yeah, but they go hand in hand. NASA gets its funding from Congress, and Congress has no real incentive to give them money when their constituents don’t care (or even say too much is given already). In order to get more funding, they need to get the public excited, and an ambitious, manned mission gets the public…

And a lot fo things people don’t even realize...like Tempurpedic beds. :-)

Neither did I, but we’re not the ones who need to be made excited about NASA, space, and science.

I agree. We could have launched much more mass and much larger pieces with the Saturn V, but I do think the shuttle made the actual construction easier, with the bay doors and things.

Strangely, public support for NASA has remained pretty stable since it was created. 20% or so want more funding, 20% want less and 40% are good with the amount of funding. However, people tend to think the amount we spend on NASA is much higher than it is. Many people think we spend 20% of the budget on NASA when it…

Yeah, everyone wants to see the first and the last, but few people bothered, or cared when it was the 23rd, or whatever. Kind of sad.

I blame parents for not fostering a love of science. Republicans are making it harder, but a parent who wants their kid to succeed in science and math can do so without a school’s help, if necessary. The problem is, most parents don’t care about science either, whether for religious reasons or just because they don’t…

The shuttle facilitated a lot of scicne, including the ISS, but it did have a couple side effects, namely, people got bored with it, and NASA is now a shell of its former self (though an incredibly resilient shell). Public interest in the ISS and in LEO science is pretty much where its always been (zero) and that is…

Exactly. You run a wire down the goal lines (and sidelines, too while you’re at it) and wrap a wire around the ball from point to point. I’m sure some engineer could figure out a way for the wire in the ground to recognize when the wire in the ball is over it.

The problem is that Republicans have done a very good job at turning the word “liberal” into a negative label. When all a candidate has to do is say “Oh, he’s a liberal,” and fully half of the electorate accepts that claim and then refuses to even listen to what that person has to say, let alone vote for them, we will…

I have to pay $12 for the HD Cable Box, but there are no charges specifically for HD service itself.

As long as I have an HDTV, I cannot get a standard def channel. Both the HDTV in my basement that is hooked up to the HD cable box, and the HDTV on my kitchen counter that is just hooked into the coax port in the wall get HD on every channel now, I don’t have to futz with channel 11.1 rather than just channel 11 on…

I love how, at the beginning of Property Brothers, they show the couple a house that matches all of their wants, but costs ten million dollars, and the couple is shocked, shocked, that they would show them such an extravagant house. They are then close to tears when shown houses they can afford and fix up but look…

Standard Definition pretty much has died. I have Time Warner, and even the regular broadcast channels, like channel 5, is HD by default now. Of course, if the feed isn’t HD, like it’s showing a 90s or 80s movie, the HD is pretty much wasted anyway.

Very possibly true, I have only a single anecdote from personal experience. But the point remains that tomatoes are not native to Italy and were believed to be poisonous for quite a while.

Maybe I’m weird, but when I watch sports, I try to figure out a way ti can be viewed as a war simulation. I’m not militaristic, and I never even considered joinging the military, but when you have two teams battling, a war analogy generally seems pretty apt.

When I was in high school in 1998, I think, our band travelled to Europe. We were excited to be getting authentic Italian pizza, but when it came, most of us found it gross. There were no tomatoes, the sauce was funny, and despite being ravenous high schoolers, the pizza ended up being ;largely untouched. The sauce,…

When I was in high school, our band got to take a trip to Europe. We were all excited to be getting authentic Italian pizza, and when it came, it was gross to me at the time, there was some weird sauce on it and no tomatoes to be seen. I learned later the sauce was pesto, and the people providing it were confused as…

You do realize, if you go to actual Italy and order a pizza, it probably won’t come with tomato sauce unless you specify that, right? You do realize that tomatoes are from the Americas and so were not even known to Italians until at least the 1500s, right?