Paper Planes from Outer Space

Getting into orbit these days is a rather simple proposition for those who have the means. Strap your payload into a rocket, ratchet the speed up to 17,500 mph, and suddenly (well, eventually) you find yourself in a perpetual free fall 200 miles above the Earth. Newton, you rock!

However, getting back to Earth from orbit is decidedly more complex. Whereas at the beginning of your journey you burned through tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen to accelerate you to orbital speeds, the only means to shed that speed during reentry is to turn your spacecraft into a giant air brake. Newton, you suck!

NASA has spent billions of dollars trying to get this right, and as evidenced by Columbia we still can't guarantee a safe return.

We use a fleet of shuttles covered with the most technologically advanced heat-shedding systems ever conceived, but Japan, in one of their most telling one-upmanships, is building a paper airplane to do the same thing. Crazy.

The Futility of blogging on Government computers

Government computers cannot handle Java. For some reason, every time a little bit of script tries to run on my Dell POS computer, it leaves out something vital. Or refuses to submit forms. I've lost many an entry this way. I could be the next Shakespeare or a less-cranky Norman Mailer, but you'd never know. The government censors me via IT incompetence. And on my lunch break!

My one-penny cellular phone blogs better than this computer.

I don't blame Dell, by the way. Anything we touch becomes crappy. It is part of our culture. We take commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), pay the "list price" for them, and put so many restrictions on them that they become effectively useless.

Enough of that. Maybe you'll be able to see this post. Maybe you won't. Exciting, isn't it?

Less Thinky, More Twisty

I am a firm believer that Stephen Pastis is a genius. The lawyer-turned-cartoonist is the creator of Pearls Before Swine, a cynically hilarious comic strip about a bunch crudely drawn yet adorable animals whose clashing, charicature-ish personalities set up the basis of the strip. Rat (yes, the rat's name is Rat) is the egotistic jerk who points out everyone's flaws. I identify with him the most because he shares many of my opinions, and if I had his off putting candor I think I'd be a much happier person. Being intolerable elicits pleasure. It is one of those inalienable facts of human nature. I want to be intolerable sometimes, dammit.

Rat's sycophantic friend/punchline is a pig name (yep) Pig. His childlike innocence is occasionally refreshing, but he mostly serves as the amalgam of all the ignorance and idiocy in the world that proves Rat's theories. Today, however, I found myself relating to Pig:

I'm one of those people who would obsess about the twisties. Perhaps I am falling short of my potential because I devote so much of my attention to things like twisties, toothpaste caps, clothes, etc. Perhaps I do need Less Twisty.

Oh, and I need one of Rat's thinking caps.