Thank you, you’re very kind! I used to write a blog, Fractal Wonder, and I wrote for Mental Floss for a while. Been too busy to write regularly for a long time. (Basically, my kids got older. :-D )

Well, apparently Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams. ;-)  But they have to climb out and climb back in again later -- there was an issue with a valve on the Centaur booster, so ULA decided to call a scrub.

I can’t say what MBAs are learning, but I have to point out that it isn’t all executives who think like this. It is, however, a very large and notable subset that gained a lot of power in the 1990s as a particular style of management became fashionable in business. Google “Jack Welch” to understand where this is…

The ISS EMU also has a join at the waist, as did the Apollo EMU, allowing them to be donned sort of as if they were pants and shirt. The upcoming AxEMU for Artemis will lack a waist joint, as it’s a “suitport” design. The Gemini suits also lacked a waist joint, being one-piece suits custom-fit to the astronaut and…

It infuriates me that when a person seeks an abortion so they don’t get murdered by their parent/spouse/significant other/etc, some self-righteous pro-lifer is going to call that “abortion for convenience”.

This, 1000x. I mean, it was hard enough taking any claim of his seriously after he, not as a joke, tried to pass off a dancer as a robot prototype. But now Tesla’s been caught showing their robot folding laundry revealed to be nothing more than a sophisticated waldo. Man in suit to Mechanical Turk — I have very little…

Okay, then. ;-)

Well, here’s the silver lining — it’s an article about space travel, and nobody’s making a joke about Uranus. :-P

Couldn’t take the pressure?

Yes. In addition to building the X-37 and most of the ISS, they build a lot of geosynchronous commercial and military commsats. They built most of the ViaSat spacecraft, for instance, and the Wideband Global Satellite constellation. They built a lot of older stuff too, but those are recent.

The Ars Technica piece is wrong. It’s an easy mistake to make, because it makes such intuitive sense: obviously, cost-plus would be super easy to make money with! But that isn’t actually how it works (you will absolutely lose your shirt on cost-plus if you’re thinking it’s magic money), and it’s miles and miles away…

I would venture to guess that the older formats will last longer than the newer ones, on the basis that the denser the data, the more vulnerable it will be. (Smaller tracks = less damage required to corrupt it.) So the Laserdiscs will likely last longer than the BluRays, all else being equal.

You’re mistaking a desire for journalistic integrity for sympathy with Boeing.

Wow, you’re taking this awfully personally for something that doesn’t really affect you directly. So personally you’re not able to actually read what’s being written. If you prefer arguing with strawmen, that’s your prerogative, but I won’t participate in that nonsense.

No, that is not his argument. The argument is that you should hold the right parties accountable.

I would bet the problem is just sympathetic vomiting. You’re in tight quarters in an aircraft; if someone pukes, the smell will get around, and the smell alone can trigger vomiting in a lot of people. Once a few people let loose, you can get a whole cascade effect going and it becomes a nightmare scenario very fast.

A student of the Welch school of business, no? I assume, anyway, that you are alluding to stack ranking, which he pioneered. I think it’s a terrible way to run a business. The notion that there is a mythic percentage of employees who are either objectively good or objectively bad at any given company is foolish.

University of Minnesota defused its protests the same way. Agreed to talk about it, without promising anything. It’s this authoritarian streak that leads to mindless escalation.

I would LOVE to see a properly done Neuromancer.

“Alternatively, university administrators could have followed the time-honored tradition of ignoring campus protests until they inevitably fizzle out”