No kidding. It’s the sort of thing only a truly stupid (and unmotivated) person says.

I see the fingerpointing is well under way; Boeing may be verbally taking responsibility (as well they should), but pointing at Spirit for not reinstalling the bolts. I haven’t heard a comment from Spirit yet; I imagine their legal department is working on it as we speak.

I was a little girl; I grew up with the Voyager mission, and it’s always been near and dear to me.  It’s going to be very bittersweet when the two spacecraft go silent.

V’ger must find the creator!

The Voyager team even thought to include a stylus with the record, so the aliens will be able to play it.

They really are just face-palmingly stupid. They’re in good company with Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, who recently said she’d rather be pretty than smart, because you can fake being smart. Three women who all think you can fake being smart, and who probably think the world is laughing with them.....

Close only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades.  And nukes.

Inert missile. It has no explody bits. It may even have been a test article (built for training or for fit checks) rather than a real missile.

And honestly, I think that’s valid, since a great many people (politicians included) rely on “just check the chromosomes” as if it’s some kind of argument-winning checkmate.

Oh. My. Goodness.

There’s another twist to that. One of the methods of abortion for a non-viable fetus is induction of labor. The anti-abortion lobby wishes heroic methods be performed to save the resulting child, even if the parents would prefer hospice be chosen. To be clear, hospice is an option if your ten year old has incurable can…

Not to mention that human gestation is wildly unusual among placental mammals for a range of reasons — most notably the extraordinarily invasive placenta and the remarkably immature state at which the child is born. The only mammals which birth a more immature baby are marsupials.

Oh, very very true.  The harder one tries to appear pious, the more they can hide.

Not necessarily. It depends on what it means to the person. I’m not Amish and I don’t know anybody who is, but everybody has some weird ideas. They don’t seem weird to you; if they did, you’d ditch those ideas. Like, I go to church every Sunday, and take communion, which supposedly is the body and blood of my lord and…

It’s a bit like how “keeping kosher” varies pretty widely across Jews, even across those who describe themselves as Orthodox Jews. I wouldn’t call any of it “cheating”. It’s just that different folks will interpret their rules a little differently.

They’re not the ones using the electricity and gas, though; it’s not really disrupting their simple life. It’s not that electricity or gas are unclean; it’s not like cheeseburgers to Jews or pork to Muslims or anything like that. It’s more about the ideal of a simple life. And there are products you just can’t make…

That was a great post, and I’m glad you shared it. I could go on and on too, and we could probably bore everybody else with it, but I’ll just add one of my favorite aphorisms on the subject (they usually attributed it to Einstein, but I don’t know if he really said it):

For the door, there’s now evidence that Boeing reinstalled the door after Spirit requested it be removed so they could do some work on the fuselage.  So looks like Boeing’s gonna be left holding the check.

Management by metrics, especially Wall Street metrics, can produce some pretty insane results.

Quality of engineering design doesn’t indicate quality of manufacturing. I mean, they often correlate because a company that doesn’t invest in one seldom invests in the other, and engineering can certainly produce a design that is difficult to manufacture reliably. But it’s still a separate thing, and you can pour all…