Meanwhile, in Australia...

Acquired taste is universal it seems. My kids have liked coffee since they were two. Even without milk or sugar. (And before you jump all over me, we gave them decaf until they were a bit older. )

Indeed. Even a little higher launch altitude (and initial speed boost from the plane) results in a disproportionately lower booster weight for the same orbit and payload. The rocket equation is an unforgiving mistress, and both air resistance and gravity are lower at altitude.

Because Hollywood...

Note the smiley...

In Kerbal Space Program, I set myself a goal of getting three Kerbonauts to the surface of Eve and back with one vehicle. No docking or refueling permitted. After three weeks of fiddling, including one 33000 tons beast, I came this close this afternoon. Landed on Eve safely and orbited again, but once made Eve orbit I…

If memory serves it is a drogue chute system which collects airspeed data. The data is used to calibrate the airspeed indicators.

In theory it should not be a problem if the rear planes rotate first so that they stay above the wake from the front planes. Also the fighters probably don't generate enough wake to affect the big birds too much.

Sometimes it takes longer because the subtitles aren't quite finished. ;)

There's definitely better and worse tasting pasta, but for dry pasta at least quality doesn't seem to bear too much relation to the price.

When we lived in the UK, wife wasn't happy with me buying the Waitrose grocery store brand pasta. It was cheaper and compared very favourably with name brands like De Cecco and Agnesi.

That's right. They believe it because of reasons.

Came for this. Left satisfied.

In countries like the UK and Germany, or in Hong Kong, the attitude towards selling alcoholic beverages is much more "lax" than in most of the US. While these places have a legal drinking age* and they do check, there's not the same obsession with it that I found in the US. In my experience the number of teens…

It depends on what the city looks like. If you have a house in the suburbs of an American city, of course you need a car. But a city doesn't have to be like that. In HK almost everyone lives in an apartment. It's like Manhattan. For most people here (as I wager for most people on Manhattan), private cars are actually…

Agreed that it has to be viable. For public transport to work, it needs to be dense, varied, affordable and safe. All things that are missing in public transport in many American cities. If nothing else suburban sprawl makes public transport difficult.

The solution is pretty simple, at least conceptually. Aggressively invest in public transport and enact policies that encourage it. As Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, famously said, "An advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather it's where even the rich use public…

Poses inspired by images of Neil Armstrong and John Young from Apollo XI and Apollo XVI respectively, if memory serves.