No mention that Mirai filed an appeal of the decision for being utter bullshit?

Oh, then I know you from the "olden" days of Livejournal then too ;-)

Also, are you using this same name on Twitter? If yes, I just followed you there and my profile does actually mention the NASA center I work for ;-)

Um. . . I'm down the hall from the testbed for the SAM instrument on Curiosity. And right next to them is the lab that plays with rocks the age of the solar system. Oh and I have weekly meetings on designing a planetary mission that may never be funded. Then I can go two buildings over and see JWST being poked in the…

I think there's a difference in asking "how did we fuck up, could we have seen it, and can we stop it from happening again" which is what goes on during the inquiry on which the movie is based. It's from Challenger that we learned about communications issues and management related issues that put people's lives on the…

Actually no, since NASA is a public agency and the announcer was a NASA employee, that clip belongs to any and all members of the US public. It's the same as things like ads for GE that include the awesome Hubble and Spitzer images- because those are from a federal agency, they're in the public domain and anyone can…

Oh also the other reason this is hitting hard right now is that January is the month of anniversaries: Challenger was Jan 28th, Apollo 1 was Jan 27th (the fire on the pad where the astronauts were doing a launch pad test) and Feb 1st was the breakup of Columbia. Within NASA you'll find a bunch of us wearing Challenger…

Yep, since the families and our agency have spoken out, I think one of the classiest moves Bey could have made was a donation to the Challenger Center. Challenger Centers are set up worldwide in the memory of the astronauts who were on STS-51L and their goal is to educate and inspire the younger generation in space…

Unlike other commenters, I hate Seche Vite with the fire of 80 million suns. Too much shrinkage for my nails. I swear by the Revlon ColorStay Gel Smooth Base Coat- I used to have polish chip in about 4 hours, but now I can go about 4 days. Top coat doesn't seem as important for me, but Revlon Quick Dry and Essie All…

Pants are the basic for female formal dinner dress uniform, the skirt is optional, and only the floor length option qualifies as formal.

Actually that depends. One of my friends was a winter over for the US, and he said during the summer they had some visitors that they got liquored up. I think it's more discretionary, but this year especially I'm not surprised that they aren't coughing up liquor to visitors- they're slammed trying to get people out on…

I was expecting more rainbow colored like La Placita in downtown.

Oh we joked that our lab was where grad students could turn the most bitter but have the most success because we learned the shit work, especially the grant and telescope proposal writing very early on and bashed our heads against those for all of grad school. There were two women in our lab that I can think of who…

It was analytical mechanics that made me want to drink- when the prof says "find" the equations of motion in special relativity I'm using Lorentz transformation metric dammit, the important part is knowing what is and isn't an invariant.

Fucking qualifiers, ugh. But yeah so for astrophys we had to take analytical mechanics and Jackson E&M with the physics grad students. My entering class had 5 women- 4 in physics and me in astro. Our first one didn't drop out until spring break, she just didn't come back. I think maybe she went back to teaching middle…

Just stick to the hard stuff. I got through my astrophysics PhD with the random coffee/hot chocolate spiking thanks to the cute mini liquor bottles.

I know, when I was younger it was just laugh, tell the kiddo to try again when he could drink legally in a few years. Now it's oh hello cutie, followed by "oh shit he's how old?".

It was the back view with squared up shoulders is a sweater to show it off and then a damn fine ass. Still feel like a dirty old lady for wanting rewind to watch the view of someone who can barely legally drink.

I feel like a dirty old lady: last night we went to see Catching Fire. During the quarter quell announcement I noticed Josh Hutcherson was looking extra hot in a cowlneck sweater and well fitted pants. I don't think I should have had the thoughts of rawr about someone 11 years younger than me.

Dirt Bags were done once in the morning, then once in the evening until the last week or two. I too have been missing the evening celeb gossip.